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.
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