Prelude to a Kiss(1992)- User Reviews

I have to hand it to the spinmeister who gave this film its title. That itself sounds intriguing. The only problem is that it has nothing to do with the story. Outside of both main actors looking gorgeous, this is a zero of a movie. It is palatable in the early portion, when our likeable characters meet and fall in love in charmingly enviable fashion. Just as we begin to root for their long term relationship, just minutes after marrying the story gets turned on its head, and never gets back on its feet. The ruse is this--a mysterious, unknown old man wanders into the wedding reception, asks to kiss the bride, but instead of a peck on the cheek, he plants a passionate kiss on her mouth. Something seems to happen immediately, but we don't find out what this is until her new husband notices that she isn't behaving like herself. After the not too pleasant honeymoon, she leaves him to live back her parents until they sort things out. The 'thing' is this: During that old man's kiss, the souls of these two people were swapped. Now the big thing that irritated me in this fanciful event is that the old man is quite aware that he is, in fact, the person of the bride. But the bride has no idea she is the old man, instead behaving simply as though she was the same woman she had been and that it is her husband who is whacked out. So the rest of the film is an unbelievable and unpleasant series of events in which the husband tries to find both the old man AND his bride in order to set things right. Somewhere in there he has figured out what happened, even though precedents for such a crazy thing have never happened before. There are uncomfortable scenes in which the husband and the old man converse as the husband and his bride (is this supposed to be some 'message' that looks don't matter)? And that leads to the next main point that makes this movie a dismal failure. The writer and director can't decide whether they are making a comedy or a drama with a moral. By failing to make a decision, just as in the famous example of a person speeding towards a brick wall who cannot make a decision whether to go left or right, freezes and plows directly into the wall. This movie crashes right into that wall, and it's a place you don't want to go. Of course at the end everything works out, the souls are reswapped, they learn some kind of nefarious lesson (which both escaped and failed to interest me), and they can now begin their married life. So we never learn if this couple is indeed the real thing. For all we know their 6 week courting and impulsive decision to marry may not lead to 'happily ever after' afterall. By this time, I'm no longer interested. And I thoroughly doubt whether you would be either.