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YMMV / Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

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  • Adaptation Displacement: Loosely based on Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday; while the movie is somewhat obscure, the book is incredibly more so.
  • Complete Monster: Harlan Dexter is a corrupt Hollywood executive who schemes to rid himself of his daughter Veronica so as to keep his late wife's insurance all to himself. Forcibly committing Veronica to a mental institution and hiring a doppelgänger to portray her in public so as to hand all of the insurance off to Dexter, the criminal later murders Veronica and her doppelgänger Mia as well, even though Dexter had taken her on as a lover. Seeking to silence any other loose ends, Dexter subjects Harry Lockhart to genital torture via electricity while planning the same for his partner Perry, after which Dexter intends to have both them and their friend Harmony killed to get away with his heinous actions.
  • Designated Monkey: Harry Lockhart. He's berated by almost everybody, kidnapped, tortured, he has commitment issues that caused him to sleep with Harmony's friend and has even gotten his fingers cut off (unintentionally, but still...).
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • An in-movie example. The prologue featuring the young Harmony play-acting during Harry's magic trick ends with who we can only assume is her father about to smack her, then credits roll. Framed humorously, it foreshadows the fact that Harmony's father was a tad physically abusive, to say the least.
    • Harry discussing how screwed up it is that Harmony has become so used to people groping her since she moved west that she doesn't consider it a big deal any more is a lot harsher in light of the recent revelations of how endemic sexual harassment was in Hollywood at the time (and arguably still is).
    • Harmony growing with an abusive father can be a bit difficult to watch since Ariel Winter, who plays the younger Harmony, had to emancipate herself from her abusive mother years later.
    • The dark jokes about sexual abuse in Hollywood and the revelation that Harmony's father sexually abused her and her sister are a bit harder to take after learning that Shane Black was friends with and regularly cast Steve Wilder, a sex offender who had been convicted for preying on underage girls.
  • Ho Yay - Perry/Harry, complete with a fake kiss between the two. Plus, the ending sees Perry and Harry working together, while Harmony is noticeably absent. In an earlier draft the film ended on a scene and end-credits voiceover between Harry and Harmony; in the final film, both of those have been excised in favor of not just one but two scenes between Harry and Perry.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Harry is kind of a jerk and a total moron, but it's hard not to feel bad for him with the disproportionate amount of indignities and trauma he's subject to.
  • Memetic Mutation: "I shot him with a tiny revolver I keep near my balls."
  • Pandering to the Base: The ending has Perry finding Harmony's elderly father, before he strikes him twice for being a monster. Those who don't find it satisfying even get a comment from Harry, who comments on how brutal it is.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
  • Squick: The scene where Harry loses his finger a second time, puts it on ice, and then watches a dog eat it.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A thief unintentionally nailing an audition and getting a second chance at life as an actor would make for a pretty good movie on its own.

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