Kiss the Girls

Gary Fleder’s film comes from James Patterson’s 1995 novel, adapted by David Klass; that book was second in the Alex Cross series. On screen the order reversed: the 2001 sequel Along Came a Spider took up the first Cross novel, from 1993. The story is set in North Carolina, but only two weeks of the shoot happened there: Durham streets, nearby parks, the outside of a Chapel Hill house. The police station was built inside a Durham warehouse. The rest was shot around Los Angeles, using the Athenaeum at Caltech in Pasadena and the USC campus. Most sets, the underground chambers and tunnels included, went up on Paramount stages. It screened at Deauville in September 1997, then opened on 2,271 screens, and against a 27 million dollar budget it took 100 million worldwide. Some theatres in central Virginia left it off their schedules because three teenage girls in the area had been murdered and the case was still open; it was solved later. In March 2026 Ashley Judd asked of her own breakout film why sexual terror against women is packaged as entertainment. A good fit if you want one of the abducted women to get out and stay on as the investigation’s second name. Not for anyone who shares Judd’s question and refuses this violence turned into spectacle.