31 Days of Horror Reviews Day FINAL: Twilight

Day 31: Twilight (2008), dir. by Catherine Hardwicke

Streaming Availability: Rental

Happy Halloween!!! We conclude Spooky Month with the SCARY, most SPINECHILLING, most OUTRAGIOUSLY HORRIFYING chaste young adult romance movie, Twilight. After a month of vampires as a metaphor for desire, queerness, feminism, religious agony, class consciousness, and escapism, we find ourselves with the Nosferatu standing in for… abstinence? The vampires do play baseball, so somebody is getting to second base, just not Edward. He doesn't drink... wine, because he's still in high school and follows the rules.

Today all that remains are the scars in the Earth from where the shells exploded and the trench lines were dug. But we can easily remember that not long ago, Twilight was a Very Big Deal, big in a way that movies almost never are anymore. This was enormously important as a culture touchstone, launching a decade of YA romance in theaters. Not just more vampire love triangle, but Twilight sets the stage for things like Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey. It was also something you Needed to Have an Opinion About.

Twilight was incredibly popular, but also drew just as huge of an Anti-Fandom. This was an era where mass culture instinctively despised any media marketed to girls, be that sparkly vampires or Justin Bieber. The backlash is retrospect is utterly ridiculous. In 2008, the height of internet discourse around film was an obsession with Trash. It was a leftover of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 run, which had continued into RiffTrax (they did indeed riff on Twilight). Beyond the professionals, there was a real hunger to find the worst movies and tear them to pieces. Films like The Room became massive memes. Twilight had the bad luck of being a popular Girls Thing, while also considered hysterically bad, and it also annoyed horror fans because it made vampires Not Scary Enough.

Where did this author stand? Well, you can look back and see that some of my very first pieces of writing about movies were trashing the Twilight sequels and their imitators. I was as bad as anybody in what was terrible overreaction, which let's be honest, was deeply sexist and probably also homophobic. Even without serious labels it was all deeply shitty and being shitty is a bad place to start analytically if you’re going to review movies, no matter the reason. (But I’ll give myself some credit: I did enjoy the fourth and fifth Twilight Saga movies and I still think Beautiful Creatures is an underrated gem.)

So now, in 2022, I’ll just come out and say it. Stephenie Meyer, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Catherine Hardwicke and all the other directors, and all the fans: I am sorry.

Anyway, considering all that baggage, is Twilight 1 any good?

Well… no. As an experience, I cannot say I recommend it. But let us remember I’m the kind of guy that goes to the movies to see horny tragedies like Thirst or stylish mood pieces like The Hunger or incredible tableaus of artistic horror like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m not sitting around here waiting for a boy to whisk me off my feet (ignore how much that makes me sound like a stock romantic comedy protagonist). Once Twilight is no longer the Greatest Thing of All Time or the Worst Thing of All Time, once the tempers are cooled, the movie is just… kinda boring. I thought I was an hour into this movie and it turns out I was only twenty-four minutes in.

You know the story by now. Twilight is about Bella Swan (Stewart), a quiet, guarded teenage girl who has moved to a small town in the foggy Pacific Northeast to live with her father, Charlie (Billy Burke). Everybody in her new school is very welcoming, but none are interesting to Bella except for Edward Cullen (Pattinson), a pale boy with perfectly quaffed hair. Upon first seeing Bella, Edward does a double-take and his paper on his desk shoots upward in a hysterical erection gag, however, later he seems to be incapable of handling her presence without gagging. Turns out Edward is a friendly vegetarian vampire with psychic powers, and Bella is uniquely special because 1) her blood smells so damn good she’s Edward’s "own personal brand of heroin", and 2) uniquely amongst all people, he cannot read her mind.

It is amazing to me how those last two bullet points were the subject of so much acrimony as to whether Bella was a "Mary Sue" back in 2008. Do people even care about the Mary Sue discourse anymore? We were all so worried about that shit, whether fictional characters were breaking some kind of narratorial metagame, and now with, turns out, none of that matters at all. Let people enjoy their harmless fantasies. Let people enjoy harmless, basically edgeless vampires too if that's what they want, who cares?

Gundam Wing proved this back in 1995, the best way into a young girl’s heart is to promise to kill her, thus Edwards’s creepy undead affections are irresistible. Soon enough, Edward and Bella are sharing moments like a hysterically cheesy sequence with Edward playing the piano in a sweeping camera pan like a soft rock music video. Then they're flying through the trees, or sleeping next to each other with no hanky panky – leave room for the Holy Spirit, kids. This does lead to more exciting moments like superpowered vampire baseball with Edward’s coven family, which is actually a lot of fun. However, all events leads to a thoroughly mid action climax where an evil vampire, James (Cam Gigandet) is a thoroughly unimpressive Movie 1 villain.

Twilight 1 does not introduce any of the baroque vampire politics of the later movies. The great love triangle that would define the franchise is barely here, since Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is barely in this. We get a tease of wolves but no Werewolf vs Vampire conflicts yet. No Michael Sheen as an incredibly hammy Italian vampire king. Plenty of awkward teenage pauses in conversations to fill up the running time though, which I do not think is unauthentic. It does not stop the movie from being disappointing. At two hours, there's very little movie in this movie.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson do not lack chemistry here, yet it is all this chilly, pained courting. High school romance sucks even in the movies, turns out. How did anybody survive those years without dying of awkwardness, I'll never know. The attraction is there, even if they have to sell it with Bella biting her lip constantly. Most movie romances are slick and effortless. Twilight is instead about young people who could not be more insecure with their bodies. Maybe that’s actually what this vampirism metaphor is for. I guessed in the first paragraph this had a  Christian edge, but I think I’m wrong now. Maybe it is more a fear of sex itself, being terrified of your urges and sharing them with other people.

A few line reads come off as wooden, yet I wouldn’t call either performance "bad". I'll admit I'm biased now since both of these actors went on to have fascinating, diverse careers showing a ton of range. I never would have guessed in 2008 when I was ragging on this movie that one day Edward would be a really great Batman and that Bella would be the best part of a David Cronenberg movie. Sure, some line reads are wooden, but looking at the movie as two little Shinjis young people trying to reach out, they're selling it well.

And whether I like it or not, The Twilight Saga are still the biggest vampire movies of this current millennium. It meant a lot to a lot of people who were not me, and therefore it is bigger than me. What else has been this successful? There was no Summer of Morb, Dracula Untold did not lead us to a Dark Universe, and as much fun as What We Do in the Shadows was and is, it still pales in comparison. I would love to be on the vanguard of some Twilight reappraisals, those takes are definitely coming. But while I can apologize, I cannot really lead that charge.

If anybody wants to admit that Beautiful Creatures was a secret masterpiece, however, please call me.

Next Time: Well, sadly there won’t be one. I’ll see you next year for another Spooky Month, about something other than vampires. Will it be aliens? Zombies? Scooby-Doo? I have no idea. Enjoy your boring, non-spooky year to come.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 30: Thirst

Day 30: Thirst (2009), dir. by Park Chan-wook

Streaming Availability: Peacock

(Small note: Park Chan-wook has a new mystery thriller movie in theaters right now called Decision to Leave, it's really great. Check it out if you can.)

We are going to conclude Spooky Month with a double feature of vampire romances. One was made by one of our greatest living directors, a master of the modern twisty sex thriller, and thus was immensely acclaimed. The other is Twilight. I do not need to further qualify Twilight, that name tons of weighty baggage in your mind already. Somehow despite having very different ideas on vampires, having opposite views on eroticism, and being made on opposite sides of the Pacific, they both have the “Hold on tight, spider monkey” scene. For some reason, all of us, YA or not, just wanted a gravity-defying vampire to carry us through the air in the late 2000s.

Putting Twilight away, the movie I was most reminded of while watching Thirst was Ganja & Hess, a movie I covered three weeks ago. Park Chan-wook and Bill Gunn have extremely different concerns and styles. There is almost nothing similar between a South Korean director in 2009 and an experimental Black filmmaker in 1972. I have no reason to believe Ganja & Hess was an influence on Thirst, though these two plots rhyme  in remarkable way. They both find an African origin to their vampire. They’re both capital-A ‘Adult’ takes on Nosferatus, too serious to let their monsters have silly fangs. Both films treat the undead as a tool through which they attack themes of sexuality, addiction, and faith. They’re even both doomed romances where a vampire man murders a friend, and turns his lusty wife into an insatiable creature of the night.

Thirst is over two hours long but even for that running time has a ton of plot. It is at times horror, at times a twisty thriller, at times melodrama. There’s a lot of movie in this movie. It is partially an adaptation of an 1868 Emile Zola novel, Thérèse Raquin (which I have not read), which has nothing to do with vampires. Park Chan-wook adds a Catholic vampire superstructure on top of that tragic romance plot.

Despite the complexity, Thirst is a linear, lucid experience, until guilt and fear overtake the characters in the middle of the film and things become increasingly hallucinatory. A lot of visions of a drowned man suddenly, which then disappear. We go back to pure realism. There are two, maybe even three distinct dramatic climaxes. The central love triangle ends in a watery end, with the two survivors then coming to their own bloody conclusion. However, Thirst continues on for an extra act, to finally end not in water or blood, but flame.

 Father Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho, who is almost unrecognizable due to how little comedy this role asks of him) is a disillusioned priest working his ministry in a South Korean hospital. He hopes for a greater contribution, so volunteers for a near-suicidal drug trial in Africa to find a cure for a local disease, the Emmanuel Virus. EV is considered fatal, causing hideous blistering on the hands and face, until it targets the organs, resulting in nasty body horror, puking buckets of blood. None of the fifty volunteers survive, including Sang-hyun, who is pronounced dead on the table. Until, suddenly, a final blood infusion brings him back to life. He’s thought to be a miracle, maybe even a saint, his legend grows to being the “one in 500” with holy disease curing powers. What his cult does not know is that Sang-hyun has actually become a vampire, and needs blood to hold off the next round of blistering, the boils returning to his face over and over through the film.

Sang-hyun reconnects with his friend, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), the child-like son of Mrs. Ra (Kim Hae-sook). Mrs. Ra has fixed things up for her worthless son by giving him her adopted daughter, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin). Tae-ju is treated as little more than a Cinderella mixed with a sex slave, having been married to Kang-woo, and serving her "mother" in their dress shop. Sang-hyun’s new monstrous form starts to awaken his hungers that he had repressed in the service of God, so soon enough, he is having an affair with Tae-ju. And from there, murder plots abound.

You cannot discuss Thirst without discussing its centerpiece sex scene, so let’s go. Sex scenes are controversial, there’s always some #discourse happening on Film Twitter. People are mad about there being too many, whether there’s not enough, whether its porn, exploitation, art, whatever - it is all exhausting. Thirst should settle that argument entirely as far as I am concerned. The first full sex scene between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju unleashes feelings in both of them neither have ever experienced. This is extraordinary filmmaking of intense intimacy the highlight of the movie. It is also something that is important in the lives of adults, and their relationship, as an audience we need to understand this pleasure and what it means for Kang-woo and Tae-ju (who is into a few bites to the shoulder). Between Thirst and The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook is a master of cinema eroticism.

Another conflict here is that of faith. It is interesting that Park Chan-wook is a lapsed Catholic, considering his two leads here are a vampire priest and a woman with no faith at all. Sang-hyun in the story grows increasing detached from God, and increasingly drawn into the plots of his atheist lover. The power of the spiritual is feeble in Thirst, to the point I'm not God exists in this film. That's a rarity for vampire fiction, where crosses and holy water are usually powerful tools. Not here. 

The other issue is that while physical pleasure is liberating, it is merely fulfilling an urge, like that of sucking blood. Sang-hyun is trying hard to not hurt anybody, to acquire blood secretly and safely. But all his inhibitions are broken by Tae-ju, who leads him down a murderous path. First, they drown Kang-woo, then they’re feeding on innocent people. However, he has not replaced the meaning he had or desired with anything. Worse, Tae-ju is very much not the young woman she appeared to be. She was not in need of a savior in God or a man.

Tae-ju, once transformed herself into a vampire, has no philosophical concerns. She sees herself as a predator, the humans around her as prey. She does continue to care for Mrs. Ra, who becomes an invalid after suffering a stroke from grief. But otherwise, she is liberated from all illusion and all fictions of morality. When we first meet Tae-ju, she wanders her town barefoot, maybe playing up her fairy tale entrapment. By the end of the film, when red blood is smeared all over her pearl white skin, she acquires a taste for high heels.

While Sang-hyun and Tae-ju work out their issues, a lot of people around them are going to die horribly.

Thirst might just be the single best vampire film of the current century. The only real competition I would give it is Let the Right One In, the 2008 Swedish film. (I covered it lastyear, in fact.) These are both beautiful movies with a cold, measured tone, they’re not thrills-a-minute crowd pleasers. You will not find many jump scares or quips here. Yet all that patience is rewarded when they open up to horrible scenes of graphic violence and incredible acting and gorgeous cinematography. Thirst is as good as any other movie we've covered this month... which does make me sad that we are coming to the end.

Next Time! The grand finale. I promised at the beginning we were going from Bela Lugosi to Bella Swan. At last, Twilight.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 29: 30 Days of Night

Day 29: 30 Days of Night (2007), dir. by David Slade

Streaming Availability: Pluto TV

A lot of the reason I do these Spooky Months is because it allows me to swing back around to movies I fairly or unfairly skipped. In 2007, I was sixteen, a horrible little brat, and loved being too good for things. 30 Days of Night did not look like the classic Eighties or Nineties vampire movies I loved, so I decided it was trash. It is a very digital, then-"modern" take on the undead, basically a Fast Zombie movie but the zombies can talk (a bit). So now, being twice as old as I was back then, do I have enough gray hairs and wisdom to appreciate this movie as something special?

Well, Space Monkeys, I can conclude that 30 Days of Night is… fine. It is okay. It was better than the trailers made it look, but also, it was that movie from the trailers. Maybe I’m still the same asshole from high school. Or maybe 30 Days of Night is not enough fun for what it is.

Now the premise is great. 30 Days of Night is set in the town of Barrow, Alaska (since renamed "Utqiagvik"), the northernmost town in the United States. Since this municipality is well into the Arctic Circle, one of the few places in the US where you can buy Arctic Ocean beachfront property, it has long periods of long nights, usually around 66 days with the Sun below the horizon. I’m to understand that this is not quite 100% blackness, with plenty of twilight coming over during the “day” hours, giving plenty of light. However, for simplicity’s sake, the movie depicts this as thirty days of full darkness and the town fully cut-off from the outside world. This means Barrow is the perfect setting for an endless vampire attack.

Deep winter isolation is creepy. Some of the greatest horror movies of all time have been set in spooky cabin fever locations such as The Thing or The Shining or more recent greats like The Lodge or Krampus. I expected a slow build into the vampire attacks, maybe full weeks passing before anybody realizes how fucked they are. Instead, Barrow is fully under vampire assault a half hour into the movie. They barely make it a day before all Hell breaks loose. Most of the few hundred residents of the town that have not left for winter are massacred immediately

That leaves only a small band of survivors, led by Sheriff Eban (Josh Hartnett) and his estranged wife, Stella (Melissa George). They spend most of the movie held up in various attics or make-shift fortresses, joined by a cast of six or eight or maybe even ten minor characters, few of which have enough personality to be worthy of discussion. I kept losing count of how many survivors there were. It felt like people kept showing up who were not there before.

On the positive side, Josh Hartnett is a more than capable lead for 30 Days of Night. He’s got a great tan despite living up in the frozen asshole of the world, and he’s game for the movie’s bigger dramatic swings.

I always thought of 30 Days of Night as a zombie film that called itself vampiric. This is nothing that new, The Last Man on Earth in the Fifties anticipated all the zombie tropes to come. And this is the mid-2000s, when zombies were the hottest thing in horror cinema, vampires were extremely yesterday's news. The surviving band has to follow the usual zombie survivor rules. You know somebody will get bit and not tell anybody. You know one person will lose their composure and blow up everybody's spot. The movie says it is taking place over the course of a month, but it also feels like only a few days are passing, maybe even hours. Again, I wish the movie had been more willing to invest in the monotony of isolation, or making the character conflicts more distinct. I never found out why Eban and Stella were separated, and that's your central relationship in this movie!

But monotony requires pauses in the action, and 30 Days of Night does not want to be anything other than action-packed. Its vampires are doing huge Wuxia-style leaps and tearing through flesh like deep sea creatures. If the movie is going to pause, it will be so characters are stuck together hiding in extreme tension. Nobody really has a moment to talk. There's no time for paranoia.

You cannot be paranoid when you're constantly in danger from vampires all over the place. Everything about the 30 Days of Night Nosferatu is shark-like, from their slanted eyes to gaping mouths full of rows of razor-sharp teeth to their vacant dilated pupils. They're the least sexy vampires we've seen this month. The vampires even have a guttural language created for the movie, a conlang that sounds like the Black Speech of Mordor with added click consonants to sound more unpleasant. A few of them have pretty recognizable looks, like the big bald one or the skinny guy, but they're not characters. Really the only vampire you’ll remember is the vampire leader played by Danny Huston (the credits tell me he’s named “Marlow”). Huston has a proper Lugosi widow’s peak, but is no Dracula. He’s just the chief monster in the end.

One really spooky guy is Ben Foster’s unnamed Renfield character, who sabotages the town before the vampires attack. He’s a nasty little man, which is what Ben Foster does best as an actor. His teeth are all black and disgusting. Sadly, he has a lot more personality than most of the vampires.

I mean, there’s plenty of cool violence at least. A poor dude gets impaled to the wall while the Vampire Chief plays a record with his talons. At one point Beau (Mark Boone Junior) drives a massive tractor to slice a few vamps in half whiling blowing their brains out with his shotgun. We’re introduced to a big metal grinder at the beginning of the movie and you know somebody is getting thrown into the teeth of that monster. A fully vampired Eban rips out Marlow’s brains at the end, and I'm not too good for that.

However, for my money, 30 Days of Night just isn’t fun enough. Why are there so few laughs? You have this school of shark-people leaping around like Edward Cullen, feasting on people with full gluttony. That sounds fun. But then everybody is so swallow and dramatic and sad. You have ridiculous rock drumming during the action scenes. I just think 30 Days of Night needs to embrace its trashiness more. It wants to be an austere melodrama too often. One character is revealed to have murdered his entire family. I could use a lot less of that and more of the cute little vampire girl happily gnawing on a dead guy in the supermarket.

Next Time! We cannot have a Spooky Month without a Korean horror movie. Park Chan-wook’s Thirst.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 28: Dracula 2000

Day 28: Dracula 2000 (2000), dir. by Patrick Lussier

Streaming Availability: AMC+

Fun fact: in some territories this movie was not released until 2001. So Dracula 2000 is also Dracula 2001.

Dimension Films put Wes Craven’s name all over Dracula 2000. “Wes Craven Presents” says the trailer. The poster renames the movie '-Wes Craven Presents- Dracula 2000'. The DVD cover has an obtrusive bold text quote in the middle comparing the movie to “Wes Craven’s Scream Trilogy”. However, this is not a Wes Craven movie. I’m not actually sure what “presenting” a movie actually means, since Craven is only credited as an executive producer. The director is instead Patrick Lussier, who also has a Story By credit, and was the co-editor, and went on to direct the two straight-to-video sequels. Nightmare on Elm Street fans, sorry for the disappointment. Drive Angry fans, get hype.

Dracula 2000 is doing the same thing that Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 was doing – bringing that stodgy old Victorian vampire into the, per the DVD cover quote, “hip and happening” Current Year. Instead of Seventies Chelsea and hippies, Dracula will now be going to Nu Metal raves. There’s a lot of long flowing coats, wire-fu action scenes, and oh so much product placement. Just like Dracula A.D. 1972, Dracula 2000 was initially mocked as being a lame pandering movie, and now, twenty-two years later, poser or not, it has become an interesting period piece. 

Nobody has to be embarrassed about enjoying System of a Down or Disturbed anymore. Staind sucks more than it did twenty years ago, however.

Like the Hammer film, Dracula’s nemesis is a Van Helsing descendant, Matthew (the great Christopher Plummer), who claims to be the grandson of the figure from the Stoker novel. That novel apparently exists in this universe. Matthew is running an antique business with military grade security in London, built right over the ruins of Carfax Abbey, with his assistant, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller). Unfortunately, all this security attracts the wrong kind of attention, as a gang of sleek super thieves break into the vault, expecting to find wild riches. Instead, they find a coffin, and a Dracula inside played by a distressingly young and hot Gerard Butler. Soon he's on the loose in New Orleans with a growing harem of vampire babes played by Jennifer Esposito and Jeri Ryan (my dude can pick ‘em, holy shit), and again, as in the Hammer movie, he wants a Van Helsing daughter to complete his crew.

Turns out that “Matthew” Van Helsing is actually Abraham Van Helsing posing as his grandson. Having used Dracula’s blood and leeches to remain functionally immortal for a century. Since Van Helsing’s DNA is has become percentage Dracula, his young daughter, Mary (Justine Waddell), has a genetic and psychic link to the Count. Mary must resist the temptation to become a vaguely incestuous vampire wife. In the meantime, Dracula bites her roommate, the ever-doomed Lucy (Colleen Ann Fitzpatrick, Vitamin C! Wtf!?), “named after the Peanuts character”. Matthew/Abraham and Simon rush over to America to stop Dracula and uncover his dark secret of immortality.

I should also introduce the most important character of Dracula 2000: the Virgin Megastore at 620 Decatur St. New Orleans, LA 70130. This place shows up more often in this movie than IHOP does in Man of Steel, I am not kidding. Mary and Lucy work there, but also wear Virgin T-shirts around their house. Dracula takes a moment to admire the hard rock edge of the place before walking in. The camera lovingly lingers on the Virgin logo. When Dracula arrives, we see that the store is full of cute single chicks, who of course, are all visibly horny for Gerard Butler – can’t blame them. So, if you need some Slayer CDs, you know where to go.

Or maybe not, since all the Virgin Megastores closed down like ten years ago. Oh well. I hope Dracula didn't fall in love with the Suncoast too while he was here.

Luckily for our heroes, Simon is surprisingly good at killing people with Van Helsing’s wacky arsenal weapons, especially a cool needle gun that fires silver. Unluckily for our heroes and for the audience, Van Helsing is killed by Dracula off-camera. The removes Christopher Plummer, who is the most dignified part of this production.

Simon and Mary hit the local library to figure out why Dracula cannot die. Sure, beheadings and stakings and sunlight all work on Dracula’s minions, but not Dracula. Also, why should Dracula be weak to silver? Well, turns out, Dracula is not just Vlad the Impaler. No, he’s much bigger than that. The Count is none other than Judas, the traitor Apostle of Jesus Christ, having been cursed to walk the Earth for thousands of years. See, he’s weak to silver because of the thirty silver coins. (Very neat, but how does this explain garlic?) In our grand climax, Dracula confronts the Son of God as seen on a neon billboard in the French Quarter, interspersed with Ken Russell-esque artsy flashbacks to ancient Jerusalem.

Which is certainly a tone shift for Dracula 2000, let me tell you. This movie is not utterly slapstick but it is pretty ridiculous top to bottom. A dude gets a leech in his eye. Dracula bangs a topless Vitamin C upside-down on the ceiling. Unlike Dracula A.D. 1972, this version is not trying to keep a classic Dracula that just so happens to be in modern times. No, he’s dressed in flowing Matrix clothes and looks ready to go to the club. All of Dracula’s minions are quip machines, and the film is full of extra bodies for them to eat. “I can even see the outline of your cock through your pants…” says a vampire Jennifer Esposito to the detective that has her locked up. Crosses do not work on vampire Mike Tomlin Omar Epps because he’s an atheist.

If Dracula 2000 was going to be suddenly be a movie about the pain of faith and a sense of abandonment by your God, maybe they shouldn’t have cast Nathan Fillon as Mary’s priest? I can’t stop laughing at that.

Here’s the thing, Dracula 2000 is not a great movie by any means. However, it is never not entertaining. Confession: this was the very first Dracula movie I saw as a kid, and I loved it when I was nine. I laughed a lot rewatching it, and I enjoy laughing for any reason. Sure, it is going hard for an aesthetic that would be utterly embarrassing within just a few years. But don’t assume that your favorite MCU films of today won’t be subject to mockery soon. Dracula 2000 is not a Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the new millennium,, but it is a lot better than a Y2K Mobius.

Next Time! I really wish this was the movie for the thirtieth of the month, not the twenty-ninth. It hurts me that Day 29 will be 30 Days of Night.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 27: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

Day 27: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000), dir. by Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Streaming Availability: I'm done - just watch it illegally on Youtube. Capitalism has failed, stealing is good actually.

Anime loves a vampire and I had the choice of the litter for Spooky Month. There's Alucard from Hellsing, Saya from the Blood franchise, Dio from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and dozens and dozens of other options. That also is not counting many anime franchises that basically operate on vampire rules. Demon Slayer is about monsters that cannot go out in sunlight with fantastic magical powers that must feast on humans and will turn you into them if they bite you - just called "demons" not "vampires". However, when it came time to picking what to cover, most of those things are long TV shows and I got a lot of work to do, so here's a 102 minute movie instead. Enjoy.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is an adaptation of the long-running vampire novel series by Hideyuki Kikuchi. As of this year, he has written forty volumes in this series starting in 1983 and probably has no intention of stopping. I know several of these novels were translated into English in the mid-2000s, but I would not be surprised if most of the series is unavailable outside its native language. There have been many adaptations including a 1985 anime film, a manga, at least one video game, and probably a coloring book or something. Famed artist Yoshitaka Amano (who you probably know as the original Final Fantasy artist) has been the main illustrator since the beginning.

17 million copies sold says Wikipedia. I didn't buy even one of them. So, as usual, I can't speak to the adaptation work.

Since Bloodlust is a two-hour slice of a decades-old franchise, it is obviously not going to cover everything. There's tons of lore and if you want the full story, find a wiki, not a movie. This is not an origin story for its vampire hunter superhero, it assumes you're familiar enough with the tropes of this kind of story that you can be nimble and follow along. You better be flexible with genre too, since Vampire Hunter D is a complex stew flavored mainly with vampires, sure, but also it's an action-packed SciFi post-apocalypse western. For some reason space westerns were very popular in anime at this time with Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star - frankly anime has been worse ever since they stopped having cowboys with ray guns. Also, there's an ancient class of Vampire Nobles with huge gothic medieval castles. Also, our hero's hand talks to him. And there's wacky minibosses with weird magical powers. You just need to accept all these things.

The only thing this movie doesn't have is Bollywood musical numbers, and frankly, it could have used some.

Our protagonist, a vampire hunter only known as D (Hideyuki Tanaka), is to be reductive, the Japanese version of Blade. He's an impossibly cool dhamphir (or "dunpeal" in the bad English dub), a half-vampire with a great big floppy hat, an impossibly cool cape, beautiful hair, and a big-ass sword. If this sounds like the character Alucard from Castlevania, then you're correct, D was a huge influence on him. In Bloodlust, D functions more like a wandering samurai or Man with No Name cowboy figure. He's the impossible to beat badass who rides off into the sunset for another adventure. The big drama of love and death happens around him, D is just too cool for the plot of this movie to really be about him.

The actual dramatic leads are a noble human young woman, Charlotte (Emi Shinohara) and her vampiric kidnapper, Meier Link (Kōichi Yamadera). To rescue the girl before she's transformed, her father hired the best vampire hunting mercenaries money can buy. One of these is D, of course going solo on huge cool horse. The other is a crew called the Marcus Brothers, four dudes with very cool weapons and their gunslinger sister, Leila (Megumi Hayashibara). Leila gets close to D during the movie, but D is just too cool for a relationship right now. She is the only character that gets much of an arc, since frankly most people in this film are more power sets than characters.

In this simple chase of good versus evil, there is a twist. Meier is incredibly handsome, so therefore, he cannot be purely the villain of this tale. In fact, Charlotte and Meier are in love and are trying to elope to the City of the Night, a possibly-abandoned vampire city floating in space. Much like a future Edward Cullen, Meier is holding back his bloodlust out of love. On their way to space they come to the castle of Carmilla (Bibari Maeda), a vampire countless who has one of the last working rocket ships. Only can you trust a woman who has inherited her cathedral-like doom fortress from Elizabeth Báthory? Turns out no.

A lot of the problem with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is that while a ton happens that's amazing with lush Madhouse visuals and cool action, also nothing is happening. The first hour is a non-stop chase racing after Meier's carriage and fighting off his squad of ghouls. Scene after scene of incredible stuff starts to wear off when basically there's no tension, the only enemy in this movie who could hope to challenge D is Meier, so his flunkies become tedious. Charlotte and Meier are barely in focus until the end, when events start becoming more and more surreal as Carmilla unleashes her evil mind control powers. That's the movie finds a majestic and tragic energy that's more than "this might make a cool segment in a Heavy Metal movie".

I will say that the production is very impressive. Twenty years ago, Madhouse were one of the top of the line anime studios, and so Vampire Hunter D has plenty of gorgeous visuals. Unfortunately, not a lot of the movie looks very Yoshitaka Amano to me. D and Meier both are spindly beautiful men with unique silhouettes, but the rest of the cast feel more generic. The animation is mostly  traditional anime, not the watercolor Ukiyo-e meets comic books-style that is so iconic of Amano's work. Also, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is much better enjoyed in its original Japanese, since the early 2000s English dub is quite bad with an awful script, even with a few characters voiced by John DiMaggio.

Really though, I think I'm watching this in the wrong format entirely. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is the kind of adolescent fantasy that you should discover on TV at 2 AM while when you're fifteen. I guess kids today never need to go channel surfing anymore, and that's a shame. There are certain movies that work better when you're juiced up on soda and hormones, this is one of them. So put this in a conversation with stuff like Ninja Scroll, which was also made by Madhouse, basically very well-made exploitation-y trash. Vampire Hunger D: Bloodlust is not worthy of being remembered as fondly as Akira or even Redline, but it is better than X: The Movie at least.

Next Time! Do not worry if you missed Dracula 2 through Dracula 1999. Dracula 2000.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 26: Shadow of the Vampire

Day 26: Shadow of the Vampire (2000), dir. by E. Elias Merhige

Streaming Availability: N/A (Think "Movies" then count to three - use an adblocker)

The opening text of Shadow of the Vampire is presented in an elegant rectangular frame, with art deco adornments on the sides. It reads: “Brilliant German filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau is refused permission by Bram Stoker’s estate to film his novel Dracula . . . F. W. Murnau then creates the most realistic vampire film ever made and establishes himself amongst the greatest directors of all time”. Now as beloved and acclaimed as 1922's Nosferatu is, it has never been called "realistic". Realism was impossible to achieve during the silent movie era; the lack of spoken dialog demanded a very theatrical and stark performance. Those films look strange to modern eyes. Nosferatu's special effects are remarkable – for their day. 

Plus, realism is impossible anyway, since - and I hate to disappoint anybody reading - vampires do not exist.

Except, well, what if there were?

In Shadow of the Vampire, there is a vampire, and he’s a star, baby. In this fictional account of the filming of Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau (John Malkovich) is a perfectionist demanding an impossible level of verisimilitude. The German crew must go to a real castle to shoot, find real peasants as extras, and of course, cast a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) to be Count Orlok. We never learn the name of the creature Murnau casts, he is only called "Max Schreck" as a pretense of humanity. Dafoe is playing a horrible grubby monster man in Schreck/Orlok, disgusting the cast and crew, yet the director insists this is all merely an extreme case of going Method. Maybe the cover story would even work, if it were not for Schreck hungrily feasting on Murnau’s director of photography. "I’ll eat the script girl later."

I guess I do not need to tell you this, but Shadow of the Vampire is not historically accurate. As far as I know, nobody was killed during the production of Nosferatu. Every named person in this film who gets eaten by Schreck lived on for decades. Max Schreck, who was as far as I know, fully human, appeared in dozens of films until his death in 1936. Also, Shadow depicts Murnau filming his vampire at night, which would have been an immense technical challenge for the time. I’m not sure that was possible at all with 1922 film technology. The actual Nosferatu was shot Day for Night, and is barely disguising the fact that Count Orlok is strolling out in the Sun.

Shadow of the Vampire is a more of a comedy than I thought it would be. I imagined a movie about obsession for art and the promise of an immortality entirely distinct from that of vampirism. And yes, those themes are here, but this is also a ridiculous story about a tough film shoot featuring a grotesque inhuman star. It is a lot of in-jokes about filmmaking, like when Murnau begrudgingly admits that he needs the movie's writer and Orlok can't eat him. Willem Dafoe is going so gross all the time, there's none of the unnatural grace of the original Max Schreck here, he's just a foul thing. This version is less speaking his lines than vomiting out his dialog. It looks like it was a lot of fun to play. So a lot of the movie is reaction shots and awkward pauses. In his first appearance, the Nosferatu is truly terrifying, stunning the crew to silence. But soon enough, he's just another kind of unruly actor to be managed by an exasperated director.

There is some excellent scenes that speaks profoundly to the nature of the vampire. One night, Schreck/Orlok is out getting drunk with the film’s producer, Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and the screenwriter, Henrik Galeen (John Aden Gillet). They ask him casually if he’s read Dracula and what he thinks of it. At first, this is played for laughs, when the vampire grunts how sad he is that “Dracula had no servants.” But he explains further, mentioning the scene where the Count is trying to serve Jonathan Harker dinner. “Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And he remembers the rest of it, how to prepare a meal, how to make a bed. He remembers his past glory his armies, his retainers, and what he is reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes when the man [Harker] accidentally sees Dracula setting his table.” None of the Dracula movies I've covered have quite captured that point of this scene.

Then Orlok rips a bat out of the sky and bites the head off of it like he’s Ozzy Osborne.

A lot of the plot of Shadow of the Vampire is a metafictional replay of the original Nosferatu. We start in the Berlin studios shooting the opening scenes of peaceful tranquility as the “Mina”, Ellen Hutter (Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack)) blissfully tends to her gardens/imagines a happy career as an actress. Then we go off to a dank Carpathian castle where the film crew plays the oblivious role of Jonathan Harker, ignoring all the red flags of increasing horror. By the third act, they’ve traveled to the island of Heligoland, where they are trapped with the monster, who now openly devours them one by one, while an obsessed Murnau keeps filming in spite of everything. The unnamed vampire lusts after Greta just the fictional Orlok lusts after Ellen. By the end, all fiction has been left aside. It is just Murnau filming a murder for his grand climax.

Shadow of the Vampire is definitely an interesting movie. It is another recreation of classic gothic horror with a then-modern gloss. It is less impressive than Bram Stoker’s Dracula but then again what isn’t? The cast is really solid, including a wacky Cary Elwes as the gun-toting libertine replacement cinematographer, Fritz Wagner. I wish there was more of the glamorous transgressive world of 1920s Cabaret Berlin, we only get one scene of it, and it is some delicious delirious queer montage. Still, I cannot say I loved this one.

I’m less impressed ultimately by Shadow of the Vampire’s tension with the obsession and sacrifice of creating art. That process is never as sexy or as interesting as any movie depicts it. Making a movie is work, usually tedious effort. Even if you get a vampire, you’re going to need dozens of takes, this is a job after all. There’s something creepy about F. W. Murnau, totally lost in his camera lens, barking orders to crew members who have been dead for hours, still creating his “masterpiece”. It wants to leave you with the disturbing question of whether art is worth it. I’m left thinking that really the crew needed a union to speak out against a terrible boss.

Also, back to the realism claim, if Shadow of the Vampire was realistic, they would know the movie was doomed because vampires have no reflection. They do not show up on camera. Blacula showed us this in 1972. So it was all for nothing.

Next Time: Live action bores me. Enough of it. We need anime in here. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 25: From Dusk Till Dawn

Day 25: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), dir. by Robert Rodriguez

Availability: Rental

From Dusk Till Dawn is half Tarantino, half Rodriguez, half cool guy crime movie, half ridiculous gore action. That is a strange combination of flavors that I do not believe has ever been mixed together before or since. Certainly not in the way From Dusk Till Dawn does it, where it pulls the rug right out from under its audience and becomes a different movie altogether. Imagine if the crooks from Reservoir Dogs accidentally solved the Lament Configuration and now have to do with Cenobite hooks along with the long arm of the long. It is that random of a swerve. 

If that is not for everybody, it is extremely for me. I've seen From Dusk Till Dawn about 100 times, more than any other vampire film - or crime film for that matter. At one point in my life I thought of legendary gore wizard Tom Savini as just "that guy with the penis gun". After a couple rum and cokes, I'll tell you my theory as to why this is George Clooney's greatest performance, this is Clooney at his Clooney-iest. Please stop me.

I really wish the swerve in From Dusk Till Dawn was a better-kept secret. Dimension should have advertised this as a completely straight Quentin Tarantino crime film. Do not put a single vampire in the trailer. Maybe even gloss it up, really sell the prestige of a follow up to Pulp Fiction. Then boom, smash the audience in face at Cannes or something with a full-throttle B-movie. Nobody would see the band playing a guitar made out of a dude's torso coming. 

Sadly, marketing is a terrible, artless, joyless business, so the trailers gave everything away. Reminds me of how nobody was surprised this year when Fresh turned from romantic comedy to cannibalism. 

While the marketing spoiled the surprise, From Dusk Till Dawn plays itself fully straight as a crime movie. You do not see a single fang until roughly an hour in. Until then, the movie is just about the Gecko Brothers, two completely human outlaws on the run, causing havoc and mayhem and killing many cops during their run for the border. Seth (George Clooney) is a handsome professional thief, imagine Danny Ocean but things have gone horribly wrong with his life, and one of those things is his awful sexual predator brother, Richie (Tarantino). While Seth hopes to keep a low profile, Richie is fully committed to the Five Star Wanted lifestyle, and murders anybody he can for any reason. Thus we open on a fantastic shoot-out in a liquor store, all completely unnecessary bloodshed.

Tarantino fans, by the way, your boy is not a very good actor. Best he can do here is be kinda slimy. However, there are a lot of call-backs to the greater Tarantino 'verse which you can add to the Wiki pages: Big Kahuna Burgers, the first appearance of recurring Texas Ranger character Earl McGraw (Michael Parks), and Seth quotes Reservoir Dogs "Okay, ramblers, let's get rambling!" You also get references to a lot of obscure B-movies, so obscure even I haven't heard of them, because Tarantino is the biggest movie nerd who has ever lived. 

The Gecko Brothers kidnap a family on an RV vacation, the Fullers. Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is a widower pastor who has lost his faith, his daughter is Kate (Juliette Lewis), and his son is Scott (Ernest Liu). The tensions between the Geckos and the Fullers continue to simmer as they sneak into Mexico. Richie stares at Kate in a way nobody in the movie likes. Jacob and Seth take measure of each other in the front seats. 

But then, none of this story matters/. The issues of faith, family, whatever, all get thrown out the window, because they check into a sleazy Mexican strip joint called the Titty Twister and get attacked by an army of vampires. The attacks happens just after Selma Hayek as a stripper named Santánico Pandemonium sticks her naked foot into Tarantino's mouth - I'm sure that was a terrible burden for him.

Pandemonium is right. The rest is this movie is nonsense trash. Just wave after wave of increasingly goopy and gross vampires coming after our heroes - now joined by badass truckers Sex Machine (Savini) and Frost (Fred Williamson). The party begins to rapidly dwindle as more and more members of the crew get bitten but keep that a secret. From Dusk Till Dawn is one those examples of a vampire movie following zombie movie tropes. This is especially ture by the end, when they're fighting hordes and hordes of shambling naked ghouls. These vampires are even said to be disgustingly soft, like their flesh is already cooked.

This all gets very silly very quickly.

But why would I ever complain? Richie is the first to go and I'm not mourning that guy. Once his serious drama is removed the movie can turn full Robert Rodriguez ridiculous. Fred Williamson is just stacking bodies, four corpses on four legs of an overturned table. Selma Hayek turns into a snake monster. Tom Savini transforms into a horrible slimy hairless rat monster and it does not matter how little sense that makes. It's 1996, we do see our first usage of CGI effects with the face morphs, but most of the monsters are practical effects and still look awesome. You gotta love all the demonic make-up prosthetics on everybody after they turn into vampires. They're using Super Soakers full of holy water. Every random character gets a hero moment, even the kids. This is a party! So much of a party that Cheech Marin is playing three different roles for some reason.

I can listen to George Clooney make big speeches about how vampires are real all day, personally. "I don't want to hear anything about 'I don't believe in vampires' because I don't believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what I saw is fucking vampires!" Dude makes a lot of speeches in this movie. He seems more than a little annoyed to have ended up in this B-movie genre where his character never belonged.

From Dusk Till Dawn is a much better mash-up for Rodriguez and Tarantino than their future collaboration, Grindhouse. The 1996 movie is at least mostly playing it straight, even managing to be 50% a completely solid crime film. Only then does it go full gonzo. Meanwhile, both Grindhouse films were winking so hard and so frequently they appeared to be having some kind of stroke. I do not care for them personally. I think these filmmakers found perfect balance between action and comedy in 1996 and lost it by 2007. Also, if you're making a Seventies pastiche, why shoot it on digital?

But, if you want more From Dusk Till Dawn, there were two straight-to-video sequels made in 1999 and 2000. They're not great, but they are better than you would expect considering what they are. In 2014 there was a surprisingly good TV adaptation of the first movie that ran for three seasons on Rodriguez's now-defunct El Ray network. It's streaming on Netflix only until November 1st, so you have your work cut out for you.

Next Time! A vampire tries to make it in that wacky business called show business. Shadow of the Vampire.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 24: Interview with the Vampire

Day 24: Interview with the Vampire (1994), dir. by Neil Jordan

Streaming Availability: Tubi

Most writers are humans. Regrettably, even the person writing this review is an entirely mortal non-magical bog-standard human. Therefore, while a lot of the horror movies we’ve covered this month greatly admires vampires, or are aroused by vampires, or even are sympathetic to vampires, they’re usually anti-vampire. Humanity triumphs, the Nosferatus are punished for their crimes, and those tempted by the undead return to normality. Mina might get really horny about Dracula, but she goes home with Jonathan in the end. Vampires are the aberration in a human world, and aberrations no matter how beautiful, cannot be allowed to exist.

Interview with the Vampire is unique in that while it is still set in a world ruled by humans, it is fully about vampires. Human are not the protagonists, not the even antagonists, they’re just incidental. This movie only barely passes vampiric version of Bechdel Test: two humans do have a conversation on camera that is not about vampires, but its only brief flavor, and one of those humans will be transformed a minute later anyway. The most important human in the story who is not food is Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), a then-present day San Francisco reporter who only exists in a frame story. And by the end, Daniel is begging to be made a vampire too.

Since humans are basically irrelevant, Interview with the Vampire is not a horror movie. This is a tragic period romance that just so happens to be about dead people who eat living people. The moments of scares are few and far between, instead replaced by handsome elegance and bitchy boys in big costumes. The filmmakers ignore the mirror rule of vampires seemingly just so that they can decorate drawing rooms with looking glass and candles. Interview with the Vampire wants to be about beautiful men having feelings. They all have piercing contacts in their eyes, doll-like white skin decorated by veins, and enormous wigs. (Louis' wig is awful and tragic and I hate it.) Maybe they'll get some blood on their chins, but they never have a grotesque form. They must always be gorgeous babes.

The cast is a who’s-who of Nineties hunks. Think of the meme of an increasingly bug-eyed Vince McMahon as I read off these names. As mentioned, the interviewer is Christian Slater. The interviewee vampire is Louis (Brad Pitt), who originally was a genteel plantation owner in 1791 Louisiana before being "given the Dark Gift" by the wicked libertine, Lestat (Tom Cruise). Louis is miserable and depressed as a human, and he is miserable and depressed as a vampire. (I get the sense that Louis would have been depressed as a werewolf, zombie, or even a Creature from the Black Lagoon, depending on what kind of monster hottie had come knocking.) Later in the film we’ll meet Armand (Antonio Banderas), who tries to get Louis on the rebound. Even Stephen Rea is looking hot with long flowing hair.

I should mention the whole slavery aspect because it is a strange idea in this movie and presumably the novel as well. I am not sure why it is here at all. There’s no comparison to the parasitic life of the undead to the parasitic life of slaveowner. That would be an easy metaphor and it never happens. Since humans are never characters, the slaves are not characters either, and that comes off as icky. We get some troubling scenes of slaves performing ritualistic “voodoo” dances to ward off the evil that’s come to their colony. I would have just not done any of this.

Fleeing from that topic: Louis and Lestat are locked together in centuries of a vampiric marriage. This family grows to include their “daughter”, Claudia (a very young Kirsten Dunst). Louis, who has been reluctant to feed on humans despite Lestat’s prompting, finally bites a little girl in a plague-infected corner of New Orleans. Lestat is so pleased he dances with her mother’s corpse. Unfortunately, while Claudia saves their marriage for a time, babies never fix fundamentally broken love affairs. Eventually, Claudia is in her thirties, trapped forever as a child, and growing increasingly unsettled by her twisted existence. It leads Claudia to poison Lestat with corpse blood, turning him into a ghoulish swamp monster, who is so gross they set him on fire. For this crime of undead violence, the vampires of Paris force Claudia to die horribly, left exposed to the Sun to burn away, never finding a place in this world.

Louis never really finds one either. Interview with the Vampire has something of an action climax where Brad Pitt murders vampires with a scythe, but it has no traditional third act. It is more about a family declining over the long torturous length of immortality. Louis finds no answer to his grief and no great meaning to undead life. But he does gain enough maturity to say no to older men who would use him to fill up their own emptiness.

Speaking of that, Interview with the Vampire is extremely gay but never directly gay. It is an unavoidable thematic read that these boys are in love with each other. But no dude on dude kisses - even if they tease the fuck out of Brad Pitt maybe kissing Antonio Banderas. Oh man, do their faces ever get close, yet no cigar.

I have not read the original novel or any of the books by Anne Rice, so I can't speak to the adaptation work. Rice did write the screenplay herself so I would expect it is mostly accurate to her vision. She was furious over the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat over her preferred Rutger Hauer, but eventually admitted Cruise was perfect.

However, I should not end this review without mentioning what a huge influence Anne Rice has been in the world of vampires. Her vision of unapologetically queer, emotionally vulnerable men was enormous for setting up fifty years of vampire romances. It’s also an interesting new creative vision on the creature. These are not lone monsters outside of time threatening the modern world. They’re an entire secret society living an underground life of dark pleasures (queer metaphor again) who have found a kind of stable existence with the human world. It is hard to imagine works like Vampire: The Masquerade or the Blade or Twilight without Anne Rice. (We also would not have gotten the very imperfect Queen of the Damned movie, which I covered last year.)

Now how good is Interview with the Vampire? It is an compelling drama that executes well all of its fetishes and emotions. Tom Cruise is really the whole movie as Lestat, without him you’d be left with only Louis, the wettest of blankets. "Louis... Louis... Always whining, Louis! . . . I’ve had to listen to that for centuries!" Brad Pitt’s role does not give him many fun moments since Louis has one mood: dour, but he is playing it well. Kirsten Dunst is remarkably good as Claudia. She gives exactly the performance that Near Dark needed for its immortal child, Homer, but did not get. There’s certainly enough here in this movie I understand why teenagers saw this and made it their entire personality.

There are worse personalities to choose from. Those kids could have become Final Fantasy freaks, a fate worse than undead immortality. If you’re a teenager now, there’s a new Interview with the Vampire series airing on AMC right now, and I hear it’s even gayer than the original. No chattel slavery in that one either.

Next Time! Tarantino and Rodriguez team up - and unlike Grindhouse, it doesn't suck. From Dusk Till Dawn.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 23: Bram Stoker's Dracula

Day 23: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), dir. by Francis Ford Coppola

Streaming Availability: Rental

This not merely another Dracula movie. This is BRAM STOKER’S Dracula, motherfucker. Francis Ford Coppola is promising the definitive story, the truest adaptation from the text. And I believe he has earned that swag because Bram Stoker's Dracula may very well may be the greatest Dracula movie ever made. This movie brings all the power of practical movie effects at their very zenith (no CG, no compositing) to tell a classic gothic tale.  

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a rare thing. It’s a full-on AAA prestige film in the horror genre. It had a budget of $40 million, a fortune even now for this genre, starred the hottest actors of time, and was directed by one of the greats of the New Hollywood era. It won three Academy Awards, all technical, yet should have been nominated for more. I had seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula once in high school and I am amazed how much better it looks in my Thirties. I knew this was going to be one of the high points of what has been a great Spooky Month. It vastly exceeded my expectations.

I could write 5,000 words about the opening ten minutes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula alone. However, I do need to reach Halloween with my body and mind still intact, so I will not do that. There's eight other reviews to write, I’ll keep this (relatively) brief. Just know that this movie opens with what can only be described as a feast of cinema. It is astounding how many tricks, how many effects, how many creative shots, how many ideas are going on even before the full vampire form of Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) walks on screen. Coppola had made great films before, including some gangster movies that I hear are very nice. But I’ve never seen a movie directed by him this dense with imagination and technique before.

The movie opens on this backstory for Count Dracula, tying him in to his historical inspiration, Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia. It is the only vampire film to open on the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans that I know of. The art design is already top-notch, wonders upon wonders. We see the human Dracula wearing this red sinewy suit and holding a matching cat-like helm. There’s a battle scene against the Ottomans shot all in silhouette against a bleeding red sky.  When his beloved dies tragically, Vlacula declares himself an enemy of God. He stabs a cross with his sword, causing the stone monument to gush out a waterfall of blood.

Cutting to 1897, Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is en-route to Castle Dracula, choosing the enticements of petty capitalist gain over the screaming warning signs all over the place. There are so many fun effects in this journey. The sky outside of the train is impossibly deep colors of orange and red. Out in the twisted landscape, all miniature of course, we see Dracula’s eyes fill up the sky. An awful, Nazgul-like creature drives Dracula’s stagecoach. The camera's angle makes it seems like the driver's bladed fingers lift Keanu Reeves weightlessly into the carriage. Once Dracula is on camera, there’s a dozen fun tricks with his shadow, which is out of sync behind his body. Coppola has seen Vampyr, I gather.

One of the greatest effects though is a shot where Harker’s journal is superimposed with the train passing over the top. This was all done with miniature, so that the train’s smoke actually passes a shadow over the cursive handwriting in the foreground. It is a needlessly elaborate and time-consuming project for an effect that’s in the movie for like mere seconds. It would have been far easier to just composite the two images any number of ways. However, it looks amazing. Movies are a ton of hard work, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula is fighting so hard to impress.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula there is this wonderful mixture of reverence for Old Hollywood filmmaking and also practical cutting-edge monster effects. Coppola is willing to employ obvious matte paintings and fantastic miniatures to create a gothic reality. Some places look like a grounded recreation of Victorian London, some are so arch and twisted they belong in Bloodborne. I’m thinking of the Asylum guarded by men wearing iron cages around their heads. Coppola is not rushing out to the jungles of the Philippines again for realism. The mountains and castles are clearly a soundstage. But so much of this movie is theater, it does matter, the staginess is perhaps a positive.

Dracula has a dozen faces in this film, none of which look like the Bela Lugosi classic. Sometimes he’s a hairy wolf monster, sometimes an ancient powdered man, sometimes a gargoyle-like bat creature, sometimes a distressingly hot Gary Oldman with an incredible wig and blue sunglasses. Oldman’s performance varies from awful cackling crone to grounded romance to the operatic gestures of a silent movie monster. He's really playing six different characters here. Sometimes Bram Stoker’s Dracula is going full Evil Dead with a zooming low POV shot. Sometimes it is all formalism, with a dinner date full of a collage of images and dancing shadows through a window. When Dracula finally kills the ever-doomed Lucy (Sadie Frost), we get an entirely metaphorical scene of buckets of blood filling her bedchamber.

As an adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is largely faithful to the novel, but still goes off in its own direction multiple times. Stoker gives no human backstory for Dracula, and he has no lost star-crossed romance between his vampire and Mina (Winona Ryder), who is not a reincarnation of Vlad's lost love. (Did they steal that idea from Blacula, by the way?) In the novel, the vampire was purely a creature of evil, not a tragic antihero. Mina definitely did not love him back. Also, I’m pretty sure Stoker never had Mina and Lucy kiss during a delirious thunderstorm sequence, and that's where ol' Stokey went wrong, I say.

The film does however feature many characters we almost never see in Dracula films. It’s a stacked cast, maybe too stacked as many actors have little to do. All of Lucy’s paramours, Dr. Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant), the Texan, Quincy Morris (Billy Campbell), and Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes) are featured in this movie. All them are overshadowed by a very hammy Professor Van Helsing, played by one of the great lords of ham, Anthony Hopkins. Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker got a ton of shit at the time for his English accent, and yeah, he his Ted Theodore Logan surfer dude creeps in too often, but I’ve heard worse. (Remember in the 1931 movie, they did not even try to do the accent.) Tom Waits as Renfield is out-hamming them all, which is an achievement. Renfield is always fun.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a feverish erotic nightmare of a movie. It’s so stuffed with beautiful things, beautiful ideas, I could not hope to cover everything. Dracula is wearing a golden robe based on Gustav Klimt's painting, The Kiss. There’s a fair full of classic silent film clips and puppetry which were clearly a beloved inspiration for this film’s production staff. Dracula fucks a chick on a bench while a werewolf. An evil vampire bitch bites Keanu Reeves’ dick. 

I rarely have my classy film snob needs met at the same time as my dirty horror exploitation needs, but here you go. Bram Stoker's Dracula is damned amazing. Top to bottom, amazing. Nobody has tried to make a prestige Dracula film since, and I think they're afraid. This movie scares off the competition.

Next Time: Well, I pity the movie that has to follow this one up. Luckily, next movie is no lightweight either. Go go into Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 22: Sleepwalkers

Day 22: Sleepwalkers (1992), dir. by Mick Garris

Streaming Availability: Pluto TV

When it comes novels, Stephen King has a solid quality floor. He will not always write a masterpiece, but he usually writes something very readable and interesting. In movies, that floor becomes a trap door leading to a pit that descends miles into the Earth. This man has lent his name to some serious trash - usually fun trash, sometimes things that simply belong in the garbage, like The Stand miniseries from 2020.

The problem is translating the medium, what works on the page does not necessarily work on the screen. The more accurate the adaptation, generally the worse it comes across. King’s sense of humor is peculiar, his dialog is unnatural, and his greatest power as a writer is the inner thoughts of his character, which the film medium must do more subtly. When you adapt King faithfully, his words come off as bizarre, awkward, and often tone deaf. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was its own take on the novel (which King hated), and was a horror masterpiece. The more faithful 1997 miniseries version was inferior in nearly every way. That later version was made exactly to King’s specifications by his most faithful servant, director Mick Garris, who also directed today’s movie, Sleepwalkers.

Interestingly, Sleepwalkers is not an adaptation. Rather it is a completely original script Stephen King wrote specifically for the screen. Unfortunately, while King is one of our greatest living novelists, he is not as talented when it comes to writing screenplays. Sleepwalkers is fascinating movie with a lot of positives. It is also fascinatingly strange with utterly inexplicable batshit decisions. It confused critics at the time, and thirty years later I still am not sure what he was going for.

First of all, Steve, why is this movie called Sleepwalkers? This movie is about a kind of energy vampire with magic powers, who also can turn into rubbery cat monsters. An opening title card from a fictional “Chillicoathe Encyclopaedia of Arcane Knowledge, 1884” calls these creatures ‘Sleepwalkers’ and claims they inspired our vampire legends. Much like Imhotep in the 1999 The Mummy, they’re weak to regular old domesticated cats, who will burn them like the old-fashioned bat-based vampire is burnt by sunlight. Nothing about this movie has anything to do with sleeping, dreaming, walking in your sleep, or uses any of those ideas as a metaphor that I can decipher. ...I suppose cats love to nap? Is that it?

Sleepwalkers is a strange movie made stranger by how it never quite decides on what position it is taking with these feline demons. In the first thirty minutes they are the protagonist, and the movie is trying for a kind of sympathetic view of the isolated and dangerous life of an endangered species of monster. But then, they turn full slasher villain, killing people in absurd ways like a corn cob stabbed into a deputy’s spine, but not before punctuating the scene with a cheesy quip. “No vegetables, no dessert - that's the rules.” I suppose we do not need a rigid adherence to a single tone, you can have a tragic monster but also huge splatter gore slapstick in one film. But do those things work together in telling a coherent narrative?

Our initial lead is Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mother Mary (Alice Krige). Charles is falling in love with a beautiful girl from his English class, Tanya (Mädchen Amick, Shelly from Twin Picks). Unfortunately, Charles is a Sleepwalker, so he has to suck out Tanya’s soul through her throat and feed his mother with it. Also, since Charles and Mary appear to be the last of the kitty vampires, mother and son are having an incestuous relationship. It is a huge choice, Sleepwalkers reveals it in ten minutes, and I can imagine it creeping out audiences in 1992 - not the way they wanted to be scared. Again, there's a lot of vibes in this stew: tragedy, disturbing transgressive sexual relationship, teen romance. I do not think the hammy quips do anything but confuse it all.

Speaking of quips and ham, Charles goes full Jokerfied movie monster when he tries to kill Tanya. It is joke after joke, which is incongruous with how Charles seemed to actually like Tanya and was distressed by his species’ feeding habits. So where did all this come from??

Now, it is time I introduce the greatest vampire hunter in film history. That would be the glorious, heroic, devilishly handsome little Clovis (played by a cat named Sparks), whose tag calls him “The Attack Cat”. Clovis is having none of this vampire shit in his town, and he saves the day multiple times. First, he saves Tanya from Charles, and fatally wounds the boy. Eventually he’ll be leading an entire army to the Sleepwalkers’ door, ready to throw down. Van Helsing is shit compared to Clovis.

While Charles is dying on his couch, we get a lot great acting from Alice Krige. It is a heartbreaking moment a character's only love in the world suffering. The thing is, I do not think any part of Sleepwalkers is poorly performed or poorly shot. Alice Krige can be a beautiful older woman, she can be a desperate ailing mother, and she can deliver ridiculous quips to the camera. This is the best performance from her I’ve ever seen. Mark Hamill is in on camera for only a cameo, reading these stern cop cliches, and he’s great. Mädchen Amick and Brian Krause have a lot of chemistry. The weird mix of tragedy and comedy even can work together, such as a brutally sad scene where Mary makes Tanya dance with the animated corpse of her son. Mick Garris could have easily phoned in this material and just shot a ninety-minute episode of Tales from the Crypt. Instead, he’s pouring everything he can to keep this dynamic and interesting: lots of camera moves, lots of crane shots, long takes.

However, as much as I admire the attempt here, the effects just look terrible. I love old Eighties prosthetics but these rubber cat monsters look awful. I wish I could be on the side of the ludicrous face morph, instead they're laughable. The final battle is a bunch of nonsense on screen. I know Sleepwalkers wants you to laugh with it, I’m sorry, but I’m this gets hysterical in the wrong ways. In sixty years of vampire reviews now, I never wanted to be so negative towards the craft. On the other hand, we get some good gore gags like when Mary Brady eats Ron Perlman’s fingers or impales the sheriff through her white picket fence.

Ultimately, the problem is Stephen King. His tone just does not work this unfiltered. He was lucky to find in Mick Garris a director who understood the material. I'm glad for them, wish I could be on that wavelength too. Instead I have just a bizarre curiosity, and I'm glad it exists at least. These ideas are screaming for a more serious remake.

Next Time! I miss Dracula. I miss his old joke about how he doesn't drink... wine. It’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 21: Vampire's Kiss

Day 21: Vampire's Kiss (1989), dir. Robert Bierman

Streaming Availability: Rental

Vampire’s Kiss is the funny meme movie! Look at all those silly faces Nic Cage is making. What even is that accent? Check out these wacky scenes spliced together in Youtube compilations of Cage freak-outs. Easily Top 3 Cagiest Cage movie that has ever Caged, up there with Face/Off and the remake of The Wicker Man.

Only is that all Vampire's Kiss is?

We’re in the middle of something of a Cage-aissance. Cage has been an ironic guilty pleasure for years, but ironic joy turns quickly to real joy. Lately there been quite a few truly great Cage movies that make use of his talents, like Mandy or Pig. We have also seen less legitimate movies just throwing Cage in as cheap hipster cred, basically asking him to play a parody of himself. It recently hit a kind of unfortunate crescendo with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a movie I do not like at all. It felt like beating a dead horse, and the horse in question was a real person turned into a punchline in a thoroughly mid action comedy anyway. I do not think of Nicolas Cage as a joke. He’s a truly great performer with a vast skillset, one of those skills being nearly unmatchable levels of ham.

I did not pick Vampire’s Kiss for Spooky Month because it was a comedy. I picked Vampire’s Kiss because it is a legitimately disturbing picture of a man in the process of disintegrating. Nicolas Cage is not “so bad he’s good” in this movie. He's fantastic. It is funny, there are scenes played for laughs. It is also horrible and sad. You have to remember, in 1989, Cage did not need to make Vampire’s Kiss. He was a red hot A-lister having just made a series of heartthrob movies in Peggy Sue Got Married and Moonstruck. Then he makes this gruesome, nasty horror movie full of humiliating moments for his character. It is such a bold, interesting career decision and he is fully committed to pulling it off.

In Vampire’s Kiss we again have the serial killer craze intersecting with vampire fiction, just like in Romero’s Martin. Where I thought Martin was a great match for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Vampire’s Kiss is a perfect pairing with American Psycho. They’re both stories about Manhattan Yuppies, Patrick Bateman and Cage’s Peter Loew, who are as disturbed as they are handsome. They’re both operating in a complex reality, they're our main POV but lost in dark fantasies. Both films are discussing how the power of class, gender, and body type can be a protection in of itself, allowing dangerous people to remain dangerous for far too long, as every lever of society that should stop them looks the other way. And they’re both films that have been meme’d to ridiculous levels.

The difference is that American Psycho, which only released ten years later, was by then already a period piece. It is a satire laughing at those goofy Eighties. Vampire’s Kiss is shooting on the streets of the real Manhattan in the real 1988, no Simpsons or Seinfeld on TV yet. Nicolas Cage is running down the actual East Village of the time going to actual hip bars and restaurants of the era like Mondo Cane. Not every person in the background is an extra as Cage screams "I'm a vampire, I'm a vampire, I'm a vampire!!!" American Psycho is a cartoon world, it never stops being an exaggeration of the time. Vampire’s Kiss has authenticity the other lacks.

We also get a clearer idea of the real world outside our vampire’s POV. Loew’s poor, abused Cuban assistant, Alva (María Conchita Alonso) is our other lead, and she gives a lucid view of the nightmare that is Loew’s life. But even outside those scenes, Vampire’s Kiss alternates between Peter’s imagined vampire world and the real world. We see him whispering sweet nothings to an empty bed. A moment where Peter is in hysterics that he cannot see himself in his office bathroom’s mirror is framed so that we see Nicolas Cage in no less than four different mirrors. This is one of those scenes played for the biggest laugh, as an unseen man on the toilet yells back “I'm trying to take a dump, so will you shut up??”

Unlike in Martin, which still tried to keep some ambiguity, in Vampire’s Kiss there are no vampires. Peter is in the middle of a catastrophic break-down, already losing grasp on reality several times. Speaking with his psychiatrist (Elizabeth Ashley), it's clear even from the start that he's had troubles separating reality from fiction. He tortures Alva with finding a decades-old Der Spiegel contract in a giant mess of files their literary office needs. However, we clearly hear on the other end of the phone that his client is understanding and in no rush. Still, Alva is harassed, and eventually assaulted as Peter relishes inflicting pain on her. 

As for Peter's vampirism: his teeth are plastic that he bought from a store, his coffin is an upturned couch, sunlight does not harm him, and he cannot swallow blood from a woman he murders without retching pathetically. He takes on an exaggerated high-shoulders posture after seeing Nosferatu on TV. We do see Loew survive shooting himself in the mouth, but we know the gun was full of blanks. That effect looked dangerous as all Hell too, Cage actually had a prop gun in his mouth which shoots sparks out the back. Goddamn, that was a terrifying stunt.

The closest thing to maybe a real vampire is a woman Peter believes he is in love with, Rachel (Jennifer Beals) bites him on the neck multiple times and transformed him into a monster. Peter is craving domination and humiliation in his fantasies, while being the inflictor of pain in real life. Whatever Rachel we see in vampiric form is probably imagined. In his mind, she's a cruel sexual demon. The one time we see Rachel from outside Peter’s perspective, she is as confused by Peter’s behavior as anybody else. Or maybe that’s part of the act. (OOooooooooooooooooooo…)

By the end of the film, Peter is wandering Manhattan as little more than a homeless streetwalker talking to nobody. His perfectly quaffed hair has now turned into a New Wave mess (it goes full Flock of Seagulls at one point). He’s been degraded into nothing, incapable of living either as a human or a vampire. Even the newest fantasy woman he conjures for himself cannot stand him. This is punishment, sure, for the awful things he’s done. A more direct punishment comes when Alva’s brother murders him in his apartment in revenge, appropriately stabbing him through the heart with a wooden stake. This is as pathetic as any existence as we’ve seen so far in Spooky Month. Vampire’s Kiss has taken everything from its protagonist, even his fantasies.

Next Time! We have had tons of bat-themed vampires. How about cat-themed ones? And they’re incest energy vampires from the mind of Stephen King? Sleepwalkers.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 20: Near Dark

Day 20: Near Dark (1987), dir. by  Kathryn Bigelow

Streaming Availability: MovieSphere, whatever the heck that is

Vampires are the upper class of movie monsters. The Nosferatus are members of the nobility, old money, so elegant and refined as to be anachronistic in any era. They love big castles and tailored suits and real leather. But let's toss all that away. No cape, no veil, no art collection, and no haunted houses. In Near Dark we have a gang of dirty homeless vampires. They're scumbags barely scraping by.

And are still incredibly cool. Upper class, lower class, a vampire is always in style.

I do need to complain right now about how difficult Near Dark is to find. The DVD and Blu-Ray options on Jeff Bezos' evil website are all PAL format and Region 2. It's not available on streaming except on Jeff Bezos's evil website through a $4.99 upgrade service called MovieSphere, that I have never heard of and am not risking my credit card number for. It was on Shudder - briefly. This also means the absolutely legal, completely legitimate way I watched this movie was a terrible 480p rip. 

What is going on with Near Dark that it has been so poorly treated? This is a pretty beloved movie. Meanwhile, garbage (lovable trash, mind you) like The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is up on Tubi and has great a Blu-Ray with a ton of special features! Near Dark is often on lists of the greatest vampire movies ever made, and the march of time has made it more obscure than a so-bad-its-good B-movie with a lot of nudity. This is a scandal.

So I do need to caveat this review by noting I did get the best viewing experience possible. The "dark" part of the title is not lying, Near Dark is a very dim movie and so a low-quality stream makes the night scenes very hard to see. I'd have enjoyed the film a lot more if the lights and shadows could have popped properly and the gloomier scenes were not reduced to a pixelated haze. I should be deep in the vibes of a Tangerine Dream score, feeling the sweaty humidity of a night where anything is possible, and instead it just looks... purple. I'm mad.

Near Dark opens with our young red-blooded truck-driving cowboy-hatted youth, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) seeing a young woman in the distance, sucking on an ice cream cone. Leaving his two dumbass friends behind, Caleb shoots his shot and takes this girl, Mae (Jenny Wright) out to a secluded patch of nowhere in the American Southwest. Mae, staring up at the night sky, becomes philosophical. "The light that's leaving that star right now will take a billion years to get down here. You want to know why you've never met a girl like me before? . . . Because I'll still be here when the light from that star gets down here to earth in a billion years."

Caleb is not exactly against a billion years with a short-haired blonde with fair skin, so before long, he is a vampire. And he's joined Mae's crew of vampire outlaws, populated mostly by the Space Marines from Aliens. (Speaking of Aliens, eagle-eyed viewers will spot it on the marquee of a movie theater.) We have Bill Paxton as the wacky Severen, we have the great Lance Henriksen as the leader, Jesse, and his mate is Jenette Goldstein as Diamondback. Also in the crew is a little boy named Homer (Joshua John Miller), who is the oldest vampire of them all, and referred to as "the old man". These bloodsuckers are full of danger and charisma, especially Paxton who is pure chaos in this movie, he's so much fun. But they're also deeply vulnerable.

Sunlight has always been the vampire's greatest weakness. Usually they have coffins in mountain lairs, guarded by human familiars, so daily rest is not a problem. That's not the case in Near Dark. These vampires are hiding out in abandoned shit holes, spray-painting the windows of the various old cars they're stealing. They're a fun gang of hardass immortal gunslingers, but they're also constantly losing track of time and getting caught out in the sun. There's a lot of great effects work done in Near Dark to show the vampires' bodies smoking, then burning. It looks great. They fucking explode if overcooked. I love the dark burn make-up and sooty after-effects from sunlight. The vampires look like striking comic book characters, but I gather they do not smell all that great.

Also, no fangs. Why not? Nobody says the word "vampire" at any point, like they're ashamed of it. I believe this is our first movie to not mention or reference Dracula in anyway.

Near Dark is more often an action movie than a horror film. The best sequences are in the second act, especially the scene where the whole crew terrorizes a bar in middle of nowhere. They're invincible fuckers out to ruin some days and slice throats. Bill Paxton gets all the best looks, he's got a face covered in some poor bastard's blood and sunglasses, or later half-burnt while trying to kill a truck. There's a moment when this nomad vampire lifestyle looks so cool, you're indestructible, you got a found family, and the world is nothing to you. That is until the Sun comes up.

If Near Dark has a flaw, it is Caleb himself. I'm sorry, all humans reading this, but I was rooting for the vampires. Cabel cannot bring himself to kill people, and it is a constant problem. His love affair with Mae is little under sold. I get why he's down bad for her, I don't get the why she's wants him. Worse, Caleb's father and little sister return to the story, rescue him from the bad crowd he's fallen into, and magically return him to humanity thanks to a blood infusion. (How does that make any sense, really? Vampires are always drinking blood!) So the conclusion of the film is an action spectacular which is legitimately cool, but Caleb wins and turns Mae back to humanity and they all live happily ever after.

Boo. What happened to all that stuff about starlight and billions of years?

Hey, I'm unhappy with the plot choices, but Near Dark is still a special movie. All the vampires are great - save Homer, they just do not get the performance they need out of the child actor there. Lance Hendrickson and Jenette Goldstein go out in an Armageddon of fire in one last ride for glory, that's way more romantic than Caleb and Mae having to get a job or something tomorrow. There's too much cool stuff in Near Dark to not recommend it. Also this movie is too amazing for it not to have the best possible 4K restoration available everywhere, if not even a whole Criterion release. Somebody fix that.

Next Time! From homeless vampires to Yuppie vampires and back to homeless again. Vampire's Kiss.