Kiss of Death

Reg’d © Library of Congress
A romantic thriller and a black comedy about a mother's sin, 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.

In English for the world market.  Set in Athens—
—it begins on Hydra:
When Otto brings his mistress Anita to an island 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?"

 (Click on a name for a résumé, and on a picture for a show reel:)

Albert de Jongh (Felix)
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 Athens he doesn't dare kiss Dorothy, the girl he's in love with, which is not something she can accept or understand.

Fiona Georgiadi (Dorothy)
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.

Mule driver Manolis seduces Anita, or she seduces him, and he assumes that Felix is his son. What else could he be? He doesn’t know why Felix should have the evil eye, but he believes it.

Michalis Anthis (Manolis)
Felix is a bright student at the American College, and a successful young financial adviser, but without Dorothy, without any love life, he's suicidal. And temptation is all around him. 

Petroula Christou (Elie)
Elie, a receptionist at the brokerage where Felix works, is determined to seduce him and, oh, is she hard to resist!

Then he meets a terminal patient who wants out—and helps her out—and has his first sex with another human being.

Themis Bazaka
Now he has found his niche: financial advisor by day, mercy seducer by night:

Sophie Papadopoulos

Rea Karayanidou
His psychiatrist doesn't believe it, and puts it to the test: Pepi Moschovakou
Even his high school teacher needs out: Eleni Tsefala
And the police are taking an interest, but what can they prove? 

Tom Alexopoulos (Inspector Liatis)
Only with Bald Woman does Felix decline to follow through.

Louiza Zouzias (Bald Woman)
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.

Duncan Skinner (Otto)
Felix’s father, like Hamlet’s, tries to make his son a sword of vengeance. He 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
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Pretentious Pictures Presents:

ME AND MY DAEMON
A London Gangster Thriller
with a Metaphysical Touch

Up here without a chute?  Having a bad day?
When the guy in the mirror starts talking back, you know you're in trouble.

Mase's reflection assumes a life of its own and bosses him around.  That's his daemon acting up.  Your "daemon" is your guardian spirit, your better self—you, and not you.  Mase didn't know he had a daemon—
—he was bluffing Dabney's New Age grandmother so he could get closer to Dabney.  Dabney's a girl he fell in love with on the plane.

Proposed: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Dabney)
An awkward seat arrangement and a bump caused them to kiss accidentally and she tried to have him arrested.

Then in customs he put her bag on his cart as if they were "together" and the officers found a strap-on dildo in his for smuggling ecstasy.  They didn't even touch it.

Proposed: Nick Frost (Fat Guy)
Fat Guy (that's his name) was on the plane with them and now follows them as they exit arrivals—a narc, no question—so since Dabney and Mase are "together" they have to take the same cab, and in front of her place her mother Lois tries to flirt with him.

Proposed: Silvana Maimone
Lois brings him inside where he meets Dabney's grandmother Sally.  Sally is refined, more like Dabney, but she's hooked on mysticism—

Proposed: Brenda Blethyn (Sally)
—and Mase, to get rid of Lois, flirts with her.  His daemon tells him things, he says, just stringing her along, but she buys it.

She takes him to a casino and, guided by his tips, wins so much—he's as shocked as she is—that she has a heart attack and dies; which upsets his boss the casino-owner, to say nothing of Dabney.

Proposed: Tim Roth ("Boss" Bart Blakeney)
Bart's sadistic temper is aggravated by hemorrhoids that keep him screaming and glued to the toilet, and make him hard for his thugs to talk to, let alone Mase.  When Lois comes to pick up her mother's winnings she "falls in love" with Bart (she likes falling in love), and he can't think of enough mean things to do to her.
Now Mase's actual daemon does appear and starts talking to him from the mirror—from every reflective surface he passes, following him around nagging him, arguing with him, warning him—and yes, things get worse.

Bart’s thugs are after him, and when Fat Guy dies chasing him, though Mase does his best to save him, the cops get interested.  And Mase’s X-rays—his doctor doesn't know how to tell him.  All he needs now is a falling lift, and that happens too.

Then Dabney is kidnapped.

And Mase is thrown out of a plane without a chute.
How's he going to get out of this?
Pretentious pictures presents
ME AND MY DAEMON
A London Gangster Thriller
with a Metaphysical Touch
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Nifty quotes from Total Moisture

I’ve always regarded Europe as more or less of a restaurant.

"Still trying to wrestle reality down and have your way with it, Toad?"

But he was OK in small doses, and was one of the three or four hundred people I could really be myself with.

"So what’s that you’re digging, a hole?" I says. We pulled our chairs closer.

It’s not easy having to start over at my age. When you get to my time of life what you want is a little dignity. I’m just going to sit here and think about all the women I’ve treated badly.

But there was solace to be found neither in the achievements of culture nor the amusements of the mob. This was fun!

I don’t know, I’m of eighty-five minds about everything. I just try to lie still and not think.

Some kind of music came on with furrows in its forehead.

The problem as I see it is to embrace life without gutting yourself on an altar.

Self-condemnation is its own reward.

Of course my frivolity about it is a mask but it does convince me.

He came from a long line of get-out-there-and-get-that-money types and was I think inclined to question my seriousness. Considered me a mere fun-haver, which I think is a legitimate goal in life, though I regard the word mere as value-laden.

I had almost died of grief myself when it hadn’t worked out but, when I investigated the size of her dowry I found little choice.

I-could-not-love-thee-dear-so-much-loved-I-not-moi-même-more sort of thing.

It was after dawn. Not really my country, after dawn. I don’t like to see after dawn unless I sneak up on it from behind.

I needed sleep. Sleep is I guess you might say my passion. The ideal state. Be good to sleep and sleep will be good to you, is how I see it.

For goblins loom up at us from all sides, do they not? The average person needs enormous courage just to make it through the day. I spend most of it in bed.

Unless the child is there. The child is the Anti-Sleep. It enters the room and stands silently by the night table directing thought waves at me. For it is malign, the child. A thing of evil disguised as a small girl.

"Oh, I know, I know," said Count Clarence, "she's much the best part of me. I really can't stand her anymore."

Your-vulgarity-varies-as-the-power-of-your-music-system-and-the-visibility-of-your-shoes sort of thing.

All right, I hadn’t been the best possible person, I can admit that. I hadn’t always put the other guy first. I had chosen perhaps to cultivate some sensations over others, that’s true. I wasn’t even going out with a fully integrated personality.

No, I had forsaken the project of self-improvement to be borne along on a tide of whatever. Delinquent even to the discipline of accumulating income. Adrift, in the ultimate sense. No anchor. Thirty-eight years of trying to work my wang into life and what did I have to show for it? Waist-high in water and about to achieve total moisture.

"Well," I said, putting my hands behind my head, "I’ve sure learned my lesson. I’m not going to be so conceited any more!"

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