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The real truth about their mysterious adversary--a vampire--would "rip your mind's fragile hinges," the death's-head CEO of a secret society (Christopher Adamson) warns a human henchman. Your mind's fragile hinges have little to fear from this vampire-action-sexploitation hybrid. Director-writer-editor Jake West desperately tricks up his one-man opus in tech glam: sexpot Lilith Silver evolves from 19th-century vampire victim to modern-day hitwoman in black-and-white, color, freeze-frame, fast and slow motion, cartoon FX, overblown Freudian dreams. There are moments: in the James Bond-style credit sequence, Lilith's fanged mouth yawns wide, disgorging a veritable blizzard of razor blades. And in the black-and-white prelude, West's camera looks down on his voluptuous vampire, sprawled on a bed, the only color the scarlet drenching her dress, bloodying her mouth. But "artsy" razzle-dazzle can't distract from Razor Blade Smile's overall failure to arouse horror, lust, humor, or any other redeeming response. First-timer Eileen Daley makes Lilith so soignee and hip it hurts; her femme fatale's couture runs to multizippered, skintight black leather, shades, fur hats; the picture's completed by ebony mane, cheekbones to die for, and an extraordinarily mobile mouth with alarming overbite. Lilith kills time at a vampire/goth bar, shagging lesbian or stud, but what she really lives for are century-long power games played with the love of her life--er, death. This cynical horror flick punctures the very conventions that are the genre's lifeblood: encouraging egregious mugging and milking portentousness from every remark, Smile reduces the primal sex-death themes of authentic vampire fiction to kiss kiss/bang bang/bite bite. --Kathleen Murphy
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