Kiss the Girls 

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Okay, so let's begin with why this movie doesn't make any sense at all. First off, they meld together the campuses of Carolina and Duke—students walk around the Bell Tower at UNC and hit the Gothic Chapel in Durham. This is a cinematic transgression of epic proportion, as anyone who lives in the Triangle would know—akin to making the Hatfields and McCoys share an elevator with a litter of angry pumas.

Secondly, as most of you know, the plot revolves around a serial killer who has taken away eight women from the local campuses. As it did in Florida a couple of years ago, this would create the kind of national, freakish hysteria that would have parents yanking their kids back to Kannapolis quicker than sheet lightning. Campuses would be vacant, tumbleweeds would be blowing across the Pit, the Bryan center a ghost building. Instead, the cutest walk-ons Paramount could hire walk blissfully across the Southern Part of Heaven without a care in the world.

And if you get through to the end of this mess, the identity of the actual killer is such an illogical plot choice that it puts the rest of the film into stupefying perspective. If Ashley Judd, the only woman to escape the clutches of the bad guy, is really all that smart and perceptive, she should have figured out who it was after about 15 minutes of screen time.

Featuring Cary Elwes as the police chief with a drawl that sounds more like the Tri-Delt housemother at Georgia State rather than the head of the Durham police, the movie succumbs to the usual cliches about folks in the South—slow, homespun, a little dimwitted—the kind of folk a northern (D.C.—okay, not THAT northern) toughie like Morgan Freeman could teach a few lessons to. And Judd provides a nice comeback from her horrible acting in "A Time to Kill" just in time to make the flick bearable, but this film just isn't smart enough to bear any kind of analysis. It's a poor man's "Seven"; an absolutely starving man's "Silence of the Lambs."

—Ian Williams

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