The Devil's Pleasure Garden

Kiss of Death, a romantic thriller about a boy with a fatal kiss, and the women who need it

A boy whose kiss kills doesn't dare have sex—until he starts sleeping with terminal patients who need a way out. But he can't have the woman he loves.

Set in London—

—it begins on a Greek island:

When Otto brings his mistress Anita to Greece, she betrays him in the woods with a mule-driver, while Otto climbs toward a monastery and dies of a heart attack.

After dark she finds the body, and he comes briefly back to life and forces her to have sex—or was it a dream? "Oh, Otto, I hope you didn’t make me pregnant! What would come out?"

What comes out is Felix. When he kisses someone, she dies. That's how it happens when he's a kid. The islanders think he has the evil eye, and run them out.

At high school in London he doesn't dare kiss Dorothy, the girl he's in love with, which is not something she can accept or understand.

His mother Anita can't understand or accept it either, and urges him to get a girl. So he gets a girl—

—and she dies in his arms.

He's a bright student at the London School of Economics, but without Dorothy, without any love life, he's suicidal. Then he meets a terminal patient who wants out—and helps her out—and has his first sex with another human being.

Now he has found his niche: financial advisor by day, mercy seducer by night. The police are taking an interest but what can they prove?

We'll have rending and funny performances by older and middle-aged actresses.

Only with Bald Woman does he decline to follow through.

Motorcycle tough, she has made her chemo baldness part of her butch style, and falls for Felix. He evades her because she’s too full of life to kill, but in pursuit of the kiss of death she finds him and wreaks havoc on his day job—

—not to say on his chaste relationship with Dorothy. Like Tristan and Isolde, they sleep with a sword between them.

His mother Anita watches in pain while he lives out Otto's curse, agonizes over the career of dangerous judgements he's embarked on, and does what she can to interfere.

When she sees how in love and how frustrated he and Dorothy are, she knows she has to do something.

Otto, like Hamlet’s father, is a vengeful ghost. His son can’t have sex without inflicting death, and Otto sees to it that Anita will pay that price.

Pretentious Pictures presents a romantic thriller.

Reg’d © Library of Congress

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

linda

a highly successful

lady of intimacy

and an even-handed comedy

Reg’d © Library of Congress

What do these people have in common?

Linda—

—an irresistable lady of the evening with dignity, business sense and—what shall we call it?—class. Superior to every possible circimstance. For sale but out of reach.

She's so beautiful, so refined, so aloof that her clients fall in love with her. Who can blame them?

She's making a pile with American businessmen—who introduce her to presidents and global celebrities—who fall for her too.

Her passion for independence only inflames them—the former president wants to divorce his wife and marry her!—but she is resolutely herself.

Professional cool is the secret of her success, and the allure that enslaves powerful men. One of them wants to—"experiment" with her. All part of the job.