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A Kiss Before Dying, written and directed by James Dearden, based on Ira Levin’s 1953 debut novel, opens nationally. Matt Dillon stars as a mendacious, upwardly mobile executive who facillitates his relentless climb up the corporate ladder by cold-bloodedly murdering his inconveniently pregnant girlfriend (the bosses daughter) then taking up with her twin sister. A schematic, would-be neo-noir thriller whose wrong-footed deviations from the novel's core narrative (not to mention a miscast Sean Young) render it far inferior to Gerd Oswald’s dark and disturbing original from 1957.
