If you've grown up watching Who's the Boss or Charmed and always wanted to see Alyssa Milano kiss another girl--one who isn't a vampire, as Milano's girlfriend turns out to be in the 1994 straight-to-video flick Embrace of the Vampire--then Vanessa Parise's 2002 independent film Kiss the Bride, released this week on DVD, is the movie you've been waiting for.

A sort-of Big Fat Dysfunctional Italian Wedding, the plot of Kiss the Bride revolves around a weekend reunion of four estranged sisters and their parents and grandparents for the wedding of middle sister Danni (Amanda Detmer), the only one of the four who stayed in their small Rhode Island town. Oldest sister Niki (Brooke Langton)--the "smart one" who went to Harvard--is now an unhappy actress in LA with a role on a lowbrow Baywatch-type show, in an unhappy relationship with her manager, Marty (Johnny Whitworth), whom she brings along with her for the weekend. Next oldest sister Chrissy (played by Parise) is a former bad girl who has found wealth and success as a fund manager on Wall Street, but she's struggling with long-buried resentment towards Niki and her own career unhappiness. Rounding out the sisterhood is the youngest, Toni (Monet Mazur)--a struggling musician who has made pissing off her family a full-time occupation--and her girlfriend Amy (played by Alyssa Milano).

Besides their strained relationships with one another, most of the sisters have issues with their father, as well. The movie explores the family's interactions over the three days leading up to the wedding, as old issues resurface, conflict ensues, romantic relationships begin and end, and nothing really gets resolved.

The film's primary flaws are that it tries too hard to hit you over head with the family's Italian ancestry (enough already with the cooking scenes and the rants in Italian with lots of gesticulation!) and it introduces too many different characters and storylines. Parise would have been better off paring the four sisters down to three, as there simply isn't enough time in the film to do all four characters justice.

Parise focuses most of the film on Niki and Danni's storylines, while only brushing the surface of Chrissy's issues, and dropping Toni's storyline altogether halfway through the film. (Niki and Danni's characters turn out to be the most interesting, so at least she focused on the right ones.)

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