Queen of the Damned, directed by Michael Rymer, is not a movie anybody much loved or loves. It was doomed to failure from the start, really. Nobody believed in it, and performed about as expected. This is best-remembered now as the last movie Aaliyah worked on before her too-young tragic death. But maybe in its bold tastelessness, Queen of the Damned has more to offer than its reputation? (Spoiler: Kinda yes, but mostly no.)
Queen of the Damned is an adaptation of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles book series. That makes it a sorta-sequel to 1994's beloved Interview with the Vampire, only with none of the cast returning and key characters missing. Brad Pitt's Louie? Gone. Anne Rice hated this movie, accusing Queen of the Damned of only being made to hold onto the film rights to her IP. Anne Rice's fans hated this movie more. I have not read her novels, but I bet if I had, I'd probably hate this movie much more.
Worse, the filmmakers decided to latch onto the hottest music trend of the time: Nu Metal. MTV, in their last gasp of musical relevance before becoming an all-reality show channel, was all about this stuff in the early 2000s. They told us that America's youth really wanted to listen to Staind and Alien Ant Farm. Sadly, even today, Nu Metal is still widely considered a total embarrassing disaster by critics. Maybe one day it will have a disco-like revival and become respectable again.
In Queen of the Damned, Rice's main character, Lestat (Stuart Townsend), the ultimate sexy vampire fantasy until Edward Cullen, is now a Nu Metal-ish rock star. The musical genre is a bit unclear since sometimes his music sounds like Marilyn Manson, sometimes it sounds like Disturbed. Jonathan Davis of Korn actually wrote and produced the movie's soundtrack. There's an "OOOO WAH-AH-AH-AH!!" in Queen of the Damned. Guess it could be worse, Lestat could sing like Chad Kroeger.
To show my hand, I don't like Korn, I don't like the music in this movie. I really wish Aaliyah got to sing at some point. Her 90s R&B songs are some timeless classic groves. Those tracks are still smoking hot. Maybe Are You That Somebody? isn't what vampires are into. Their loss. We lost you too young, Aaliyah.
Meanwhile the guy from Staind is fine, he's old now, and these days he makes whiny country songs about cancel culture.
That said, taste aside, I do love how ridiculous Queen of the Damned is. The first hour of the movie is all about Lestat reawakening from a century of slumber in a bit of an emo mall goth phase. Since the world is also having an emo phase in 2002, he fits right in. We're told he is a bigger rock star than Elvis. (Excuse me, what??) But really what Lestat wants is companionship. That could be his long-lost vampire boyfriend, Marius (Vincent Perez). Or it could be a human love interest in Jesse Reeves (Marguerite Moreau). Or it could be the ancient Egypt vampire Goddess, Akasha (Aaliyah), who wants to take over the world.
Much like most vampire fiction, Queen of the Damned is dancing around a difficult line between the empowerment fantasy of vampires and a toothless half-hearted claim that vanilla humanity has value. The humans suck in this movie, pun not-intended. Jesse is the least exciting character in the movie, but she wins Lestat's heart for some reason. Meanwhile Akasha is promising this glorious future of rose petal sex in steamy bathtubs and double-sided tape bikinis.
The other issue Queen of the Damned has to skirt is the one around queer subtext. This is an issue Anne Rice herself struggled with, so I'm told. Rice's characters bounce between openly bisexual to being suspiciously way too hetero, depending on the book. Nothing outright gay happens in this movie or Interview with the Vampire. The studios at this time seemingly wanted to keep up some level of plausible deniability. If you know, you know, but do not let the Straights in on the secret. We're still a bit too early and too PG-13 for something so openly queer as True Blood. But let's face it, theses are extremely, achingly gay movies. In Queen of the Damned Lestat and Marius have a conversation in front of a giant billboard of Lestat's crotch. This isn't subtle.
I could have loved Queen of the Damned. Stuart Townsend is not Tom Cruise, but he's not bad as Lestat. He's hot enough, cocky enough, he sells it. The problem is the movie's title is "Queen of the Damned", and the title Queen is barely in the movie! Akasha appears, seduces Lestat to her side, has a big silly CG fight against other weaker vampires at a rock concert, and you think the movie is really only getting started. Then twenty minutes later, the credits are rolling. We jump from end of first act to climax in one scene.
It's a massive let-down. The movie is building and building, then it's over. Characters we've barely met, most of whom do not have names, all gang together to defeat Akasha. And then they do. It's just over, somehow. There's no character work, there's no theme. Jesse appears at the final location with no explanation how she got there. It's so disappointing.
I can only speculate as to what happened. Queen of the Damned feels a movie that was not finished. Aaliyah's death happened after filming, so did not affect anything. But it still feels like an entire hour of footage was shot and left on the floor. Nobody cares about this movie, so I'll never know.
It's such a shame. Queen of the Damned was this wonderfully bold rejection of all good-taste. It's halfway to being a musical. You have to respect something so committed to a fashion statement that it can be utterly embarrassing only a few years later. Then it just stopped. Go home, movie's cancelled, folks. Oh well.
Next time we travel to 2003, the year of the United States launching the stupidest invasion in our entire history, Neo dying for our sins in The Matrix Revolutions, and our next movie, Dreamcatcher.
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