Starring: Uma Thurman, Paul Dillon, and Paul Richards
Director: Peter Ily Huemer
Rating: Three of Ten Stars
Laura (Thurman) is a teenaged model who augments her meager earnings by picking up wealthy men at gigs and art galleries, drugging them, and then stealing and selling valuable art objects from their homes. It's a nice living until she becomes the love object of a crazy old man (Richards) who will stop at nothing to make her his and his alone.
"Kiss Daddy Goodnight" is one of the dullest movies I've ever sat through. While the characters and acting are appropriate for the film-noir movie the filmmakers were trying to make, the glacial pace and unfocused story is not. It's not until about the halway point that any sort of menace or threat to Laura starts to develope, but what little tension and excietment this generates in the film quickly evaporates when the attention is shifted to the go-nowhere storyline of Laura's small-time thief, wanna-be musician friend's efforts to start a new band. The film would have been slow-moving enough without that pointless, plot, amd it becomes downright glacial in pace when it gets added to the mix.
By the time the film gets focused and gets interesting--in the last 15 or so minutes--most viewers will already have noddded off.
"Kiss Daddy Goodnight" is a film that can safely be ignored by everyone but Uma Thurman fans on the magnitude of the stalker who persues her character in the film; it marks Thurman's first film appearance. I promise you, watching the shadows creep across the sidewalk as the sun moves in the sky is more interesting than this film. It's obscurity is well deserved.