Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Kiss of death

a boy with a fatal kiss—

and the women who need it.

A high-class low-budget thriller

that will pay forever, 

with delicious parts for older actresses 

and blissful coverage by 

my favorite financier

Felix can’t kiss anyone, or do anything else, without killing her. Although he’s a successful financial adviser he considers suicide, till he meets a terminal patient who wants out, and helps her out. Now he’s found his niche, stockbroker by day, mercy seducer by night. The police are watching—what can they prove? But he can't have the girl he loves.

When Otto brings his young wife Anita on a day trip to an island, she wants to go to the beach. It’s hot! But he wants to climb to the monastery.

She gives in. Mule-driver Manos watches them pass, and yearns after her.

Half-way up, she rebels, takes off her clothes and runs in among the trees, daring him, teasing him. He calls to her but she’s gone, and he gets on with his uphill trudge. Manolis happens by with his mules, spots her, and follows her to a spring she’s bathing in.

“I know who you are,” she says. “I read about you in the guide book. You’re a satyr. And I am a nymph. I do have cuture.” Otto comes back for her and sees them, recoils from the sight and, climbing the monastery steps, heart thumping, dies.

After dark she finds his body and sits with it, waiting for help, for dawn. Otto grabs her ankle. No he didn’t. He looks at her. She screams. No, he’s just lying there. He pulls her down to him and rapes her. No wait—this is not real. No wait—yes it is. No wait—

Dawn. Has this happened? “Oh, Otto, I hope you didn't make me pregnant. What would come out?” But she is pregnant, and stays on with Manos. What comes out is Felix.

In high school a girl corners him. And dies. The islanders believe he has the evil eye, and run them off. Manolis half-blieves it himself, and Anita angrily abandons him and takes Felix back to her home city—

—where she works as a waitress. "Get a girl," she says. "Don't believe all that guff." So he gets a girl. And she dies in his arms. Her parents are distraught, Anita is distraught, and a police inspector comes around wanting to know what happened.

So does Felix, who wrings the truth out of his mother. Now he has nightmares about Otto who, like Hamlet’s father, wants to make his son a sword of vengeance. 

At high school the other kids have heard, and won’t go near him. He doesn’t dare even touch Caprice, the girl he's in love with. Which is not something she can accept or understand.

"What is it, a kiss?" 

"A kiss. A caress. An intention." 

"An intention to what?" She reaches her hand across the table for his. 

"Careful." 

"It would be romantic, to die together." 

"What makes you think I’d die?"

He's a bright student at university, but without Caprice, without any love life, it isn’t much. At graduation, his embarrassing guilt-ridden mother. On the stock exchange he’s a wunderkind, climbing fast. So what? Come night, he gets drunk and stands on his building roof, daring himself to jump. 

At the stock market he’s a wunderkind, very successful, and climbing fast. So what? Come night, he gets real real drunk and stands on the roof of his building daring himself to jump. But he can't.

 

Goes to a bar. A woman, also drunk, says, "Ever tried to kill yourself? Couldn’t do it, huh? Neither could I." She’s dying and wants out, and takes him home—and he has his first sex with another human being. In the morning, she’s dead.

But he is alive! He goes straight to a chemo clinic looking for his next lover. And finds her. And finds another. And another.

Now he has his niche, financial adviser by day, mercy seducer by night.  

The inspector is on his trail, the morgue is filling up with mysteriously dead women, but what can he prove? In Felix’s dreams his father coaches him. “I like the way you’re handling this.”

When his mother visits him in his fancy office he introduces his boss Jack, who immediately flirts. “This is a mother?”

She is miserable about what she’s done to Felix’s life, so over lunch he tells her his secret. She is horrified. “Do they know they’re going to die? Talking about it isn’t the same as wanting it!”

“Each case is different.”

“You’re making the decisions for them!” But she’s curious. “How long does it take?”

He puts cash by his plate, and counts more out for her. “Ten minutes, half an hour. It varies.”

“Is it when you kiss them?”

“Kiss, touch—anything that’s warm with desire.”

With an accusing whisper, “Do you make love to them after they’re dead?”

He gives her the money and gets up. “Got to go.”

But life isn’t perfect. Caprice, who has never married, is still out of his reach. She doesn’t know about his night job and, passionate that they sleep together, puts a sword between them à la Tristan and Isolde.

Only with Bald Woman does he decline to follow through. Motorcycle tough, she has made her chemo baldness part of her butch style. But close to death as she is, she’s just too alive to kill. Word is out, though, and she wants that kiss. She finds him and wreaks havoc on his day job—and on his chaste relationship with Caprice.

In a dream Anita finds herself back on the island, begging Otto to lift the curse. "Lift it yourself," he says. "Otto, please! You don't want me to do that!" He laughs.

So when Felix has lost everything and shows up dead drunk, she puts him to bed, and gets in with him. And he wakes up with his mother’s corpse.

But the curse is lifted—for the moment.

Kiss of death

A thriller about a boy with a fatal kiss—

and the women who need it.

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.”—Oscar Wilde
Film reviews
The Light Touch on Amazon Prime
The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

My Husband Suspects

A short romantic comedy without much dialogue

A woman in love, frustrated by every circumstance, stops at nothing to achieve her desire. 

A restaurant.  The patrons are in evening clothes, the waiters formal.  There is no music, only the soft sound of voices in conversation.  Michaela, elegant in a black dress, participates in one such conversation.

We can't hear what's being said but the atmosphere is happy, polite.  Her husband presides with an easy charm.  Over her shoulder we see the couple they are dining with, Philip and his wife.  Philip's eyes are toward the other two, perhaps carefully so.  

Michaela is absorbed in the general conversation, self-forgetful, but she too is restraining her gaze.  When it does rest on him it is with a gaiety that seems a touch contrived.

She gets up and walks away, pausing to greet friends at another table.  As her husband and the younger woman continue chatting Philip permits himself a discreet but lingering glance at Michaela.  She is several yards away in profile, smiling, nodding.

Suddenly, absurdly, she is naked.  She stands there talking with someone, in heels and necklace, tiny purse in hand, oblivious to her nudity, as are those around her.  This is Philip's fantasy.  

But now, even more absurdly, she does notice!  She looks down at herself, shocked. The others don't see.

She does not convulse and cover herself but stands her ground, purse lifted in her hand, and glances at Philip—too briefly to be eloquent, but sharply: he looks away mortified.

Instantly she is dressed again and, taking leave of her friends, she proceeds to the bathroom....

Michaela has reached a certain age, and worries about her beauty—but Philip, her husband’s business associate, is mad about her. And she about him: lightening has struck. 

They do everything they can to meet but are constantly frustrated—each episode an assault on her dignity.

He's not a bad husband; she loves him. And his passion for her is keen, so keen that he can tell something, or someone, is on her mind, and watches even as the lovers try to elude his eye.

So does Philip's wife. He's starting to disappear at odd times. In fact she's sure there was a stranger in their bedroom while she was asleep. Did someone reach the balcony from the street outside and—?

As Michaela climbs a steep street past Philip's apartment, where the balconies hover near the steps, her friend hails her from up high—from where she spies down at the other couple. That night she steals down and steps over onto the balcony—

And the co-star is Athens, the only place this story could happen.

Every opportunity, every chance meeting, every frustration is a piece of Athenian realty.

Always elegant, always in a little black dress and heels, she hangs from balconies, climbs cliffs, crosses deserts, clings between moving taxis—but her dignity prevails, and the sound of her steps as she threads the Athens labyrinth is the music of the film.

Pretentious Pictures presents a short romantic comedy without much dialogue.

Gimps

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html.  A new one every so often.)

    A man is in love with a woman.
    She is beautiful beyond his reach and he doesn't tell her anything about it.
    Then he does.  He stutters, and when he stutters his dentures pop against his palate.  The more nervous he is the more laborious his stutter.  He is conscious of a strawberry mark that stains his face, and cannot meet her eyes.
    She listens, but she has been told the same thing many times--in many ways perhaps daily--and is not particularly moved.
    He nods understandingly and manages to convey that he won't give up.  He'll talk to her again.
    A doctor tells him his eye has to come out.  He doesn't know what that will do to his chances but there's nothing to be done.  He has the operation.  He wears a patch for a while and then acquires a glass eye which he studies in the mirror.  It glints artificially and he can't control its direction.  People look at him funny.  He improvises compensations, develops a squint, a leer, a way of looking at them with his head sideways like a pigeon.
    The woman, distant and in monocular vision, goes about her life of semiconscious grace.  He thinks of nothing but her.  It is not that he wants to achieve her, it is that he needs to give himself to his love for her.
    She notices nothing.  He does not present himself.
    There are complications in his condition and his leg is amputated.  He learns to walk on a sophisticated prosthesis until he hardly limps.  Chemotherapy makes his hair fall out and he has to wear a toupée but the treatment keeps him going.
    He stands naked before the mirror on the flesh-colored prosthesis, a long way from his dream.  He practices walking noiselessly.  He doesn't give up.
    She doesn't marry.  She hangs around with men who are bad for her and, by turn, loves them.  He knows her pain.  He sees it hiding.
    The doctor tells him his colon has to come out, but he will survive.  He can lick this but he has to have the operation.  There will be a colostomy bag for voiding mounted on his side, a considerable cramp to the style.
    He has the operation, and is some time getting his strength back.  His sense of possibility has been shattered.  He reassembles it.  Rebuilds himself.  Learns.
    She is on the beach playing three-to-a-side volleyball with the wrong men.  She is splendid, modest, deceived.  A little vulgar perhaps, but in the way suppressed nobility is vulgar.  Unthinking rather than insensitive.  Unambitious rather than complacent.  Horse-like.
    He walks toward her in a bathing suit, sand grinding in the joints of the false foot.  His skin is pale but red-splotched, his silhouette compromised by the undisguised bag and the leg strap.  He pats the toupée.
    The ball bounces past him--he cannot pivot to catch it, though he tries--and she gallops after it with unrestrained heaviness, almost passes him and then stops, recognizing him.
    He is still finding his balance from his attempt to catch the ball.  He smiles shyly, turns his head sideways, squints.  The more acute his urgency the more agonizing his stutter, so he says nothing.
    She passes from recognition through confusion--she looks around--to comprehension.  He has been striding toward no one but her.  There is an ecstatic certainty about him.  Can she see him as anything but a stripped-down and naked hero?