Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #95 Judas Kiss (1998)

Truly, an image that screams “these actors are in this movie”

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’m deep into a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.

Now I have been writing about movies and popular culture for about twenty-three years, eighteen for the A.V Club alone. I have written about thousands of movies at this point and it is not at all unusual for me to see or hear about some weird, obscure movie that I’d never even heard of before and Google it, only to find that the first review that comes up is from The A.V Club and the reviewer is Nathan Rabin. 

I’ve written about so many movies that many of them have disappeared from my mind and my memory as completely as if I had never seen them in the first place. Other films that I’ve seen and reviewed have blurred together with so many other similar films that my recollections of them are fuzzy and indistinct.

That is true of today’s Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry, 1998’s Judas Kiss, which I reviewed roughly two decades ago in my capacity as the A.V Club’s direct to video specialist. As one of the site and newspaper’s main video reviewers, I gravitated towards Quentin Tarantino knockoffs because they were colorful (too colorful, most of the time, in fact) and star-studded and felt soothingly familiar even if most of them fucking sucked. 

Yet despite my vague memories of Judas Kiss being terrible in pretty much the exact same way all the other Tarantino knockoffs I wrote about were horrible I was nevertheless eager to revisit it, hoping against hope that it might be better than I remembered or at least a warm bath of pop culture nostalgia guaranteed to soothe my frazzled nerves. 

Not their finest work.

I experienced a shiver of excitement and anticipation during the opening credits. Why would the auspicious likes of Carla Gugino, Hal Holbrook, Philip Baker Hall, Roscoe Lee Browne, Alan Rickman and Emma fucking Thompson waste their time and squander their talent on another grubby, self-satisfied crime comedy in the Pulp Fiction? 

After finishing the movie about three hours later thanks to constant buffering on the dodgy illegal site I watched Judas Kiss on , I still have no idea. I suppose actors looked at the script and hoped that if everything came together they might find themselves in the hands of the next Tarantino. Instead, they generally found themselves at the mercy of a poor man’s Troy Duffy. 

Idiots regrettably still watch The Boondock Saints, and quote The Boondock Saints, and get Boondock Saints tattoos, and write The Boondock Saints fan fiction, and get angry at people who dare besmirch the good name of Troy Duffy. That is a hell of a lot more than can be said of Judas Kiss and its attitude-poisoned ilk. 

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez was still in his mid-twenties when Judas Kiss was released, and boy does it ever show. Judas Kiss is a brazenly juvenile boys movie way too impressed with its own naughtiness and wildly inflated sense of transgression. 

It’s the work of bad little boys built around a bad-ass female in Coco Chavez (Carla Gugino, the writer-director’s offscreen wife and longtime professional muse and leading lady). Coco, who narrates the film to Jesus for maximum outrageousness, attitude and transgression, spends her days luring married men into compromising positions so her longtime boyfriend and partner in crime Junior Armstrong (Simon Baker) can swoop in with a camera for blackmail purposes. 

Junior is Coco’s boyfriend and partner but more importantly he is her lover. Just as people never introduce partners as lovers unless they really want people to think about them and their lover making sweet love, Coco and Junior are all about fucking and rubbing their scalding hot Southern sexuality in our faces. 

Junior’s exquisite Southern wang perpetually has his lover hotter than Georgia asphalt. In a flashback we learn that they met sexy when they ended up locked in a meat locker together and passed the time by having mind-blowing sex in a variety of acrobatic, improbable and flat-out dangerous positions. 

Coco shares that she experienced her first orgasm while Junior performed oral sex on her while she swung from a meat hook to the dreamy accompaniment of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” This is so supposed to be scorchingly hot, not to mention spank bank fodder for men and women alike, but all I could think about was how they were going to throw out their backs twisting and contorting and writhing in sensual ecstasy, and how the poor woman will seriously injure her tuchus if she falls from that precautious hook. 

The bad girl with a good heart decides that she and the man who fucks her good and on the regular need to be more ambitious in their criminal endeavors. So they decide to kidnap a rich computer genius they do not realize is having an affair with the young trophy wife of a powerful Senator played by Hal Holbrook. 

To help with the kidnapping, Coco visits her Poppy Malavero (Philip Baker Hall). In her intermittent narration, Coco explains to Jesus that Poppy totally used to work for him when he was a preacher, a naughty preacher who did things like hit on altar girls like herself but who now works for the other side. 

Coco tries to dazzle us, as well as Jesus, by selling Poppy as the most exciting, outrageous and extreme character ever, an “ex-preacher turned gangster who knew the underworld like he knew the Bible and no offense, Jesus, but no one knew the Bible like him.” 

Poppy, in turn then goes about recommending an underworld figure even more exciting, outrageous and extreme than himself: Ruben Rubenbauer (Til Schweiger, who eventually got to be in an actual Tarantino film when he appeared in Inglorious Basterds). In a typically clumsy, ham-fisted bit of lazy mythologizing, Coco tells Ruben how bonkers yet amazing he is, informing him, “Poppy says you’re a crazy fuck, but you never slipped on nothing.”

I was hoping that Ruben would then describe an even crazier, even wilder motherfucker and that the rest of the film would just consist of self-consciously badass characters introducing us to even more badass motherfuckers in a Russian doll type situation, and at the end of the film nothing would have happened beyond the introduction of seventeen progressively cooler, deadlier and hipper characters. 

Instead, Coco ends up panicking and killing the Senator’s wife. “She’da made me in a lineup quicksville!” Our heroine explains in dialogue that calls attention to itself in the worst possible way, like so much of the rest of the film. 

The kidnapping and murder attract the attention of the law in the form of dogged investigators played by Alan Rickman and DAME Emma Thompson, who had already won her SECOND Academy Award when she inexplicably signed on to play a thankless supporting role in a low-budget crime film from a first-time director. 

Rickman’s Detective David Friedman is a hard-drinking, dry-witted, darkly sardonic smartass and all-around smart guy. He’s a tough but caring cop like every other. Yet behind the veteran lawman’s world-weary facade and performative cynicism and apathy it turns out he doesn’t just care about his cases: he cares way too much about them, to the point that he is willing to put it all on the line to get bad guy, also like every movie cop ever. 

The rakish N’awlins detective with the curiously British air forms an instant bond with FBI agent Sadie Hawkins (Emma Thompson). That’s partially because they both love the hard-boiled fiction of Jim Thompson, something they talk about incessantly. But mostly the characters played by these two slumming titans of British Cinema get along because they’re the exact same well-worn crime movie cliché. 

True, Thompson has unflattering helmet hair and normcore outfits that make her rollerblading FBI agent look like a Blockbuster manager with a sassy streak. But behind her unassuming facade, she’s also a dry-witted, darkly sardonic smartass and all-around genius. She’s ALSO a tough but caring cop like every other. Behind this veteran lawman’s world-weary facade and performative cynicism and apathy it similarly turns out that she doesn’t just care about her cases: she cares way too much about them, to the point that she is willing to put it all on the line to get bad guy. 

As the title betrays, Judas Kiss is a muddled and self-satisfied Neo-noir focussing on betrayal. But since Gutierrez only cares about his characters as vessels to express his hipness, dark wit and all-around coolness it is impossible to be emotionally invested in their lives. Judas Kiss features the kind of thuddingly arbitrary betrayal that will have audiences slouching in their chairs and muttering apathetically, “Whatever” and “Who cares?”

Now, a lot has happened to me since I encountered Judas Kiss for the first time on the new release wall at Madison’s Four Star Video Heaven or Blockbuster Video and thought, “Eh, this might be worth writing about.” 

I became a full-time film critic and staff writer for my all time favorite publication. I fell in love and got married and sired multiple children. I’ve written or co-written six books. I left the A.V Club for the Dissolve and then got fired from The Dissolve and re-invented myself as a small businessman, self-published author and website proprietor. I’m older and wiser and more compassionate, in my writing and in my life. 

Yet I had the exact same reaction to Judas Kiss that I did as a twenty-three year old kid just starting out, burning with ambition and willing to see and write about anything in order to realize my dream of making my living as a writer. 

Judas Kiss wants to be Quentin Tarantino and Wild at Heart-era David Lynch and Jim Thompson all at the same yet has no personality of its own. It shares the fatal flaw of so many Tarantino wannabes: it does not understand that nothing in the world is less cool than trying desperately to impress the world with your coolness and failing. 

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