Monday, August 17, 2015

God May Give Us Grace but the Devil Gave Us Grace Jones

Whatever you imagined a vampire stripper would look like, you probably couldn't imagine Grace Jones. In just a few scenes she single handedly elevates 1986's Vamp from mildly amusing After Hours clone to something beautifully weird.

Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler play Keith and AJ, a couple college kids trying to show off to their fraternity by going to the bad part of town to hire a stripper. Unfortunately, they end up at the strip club run by vampires.

Whether the staff is undead or not the more remarkable thing to me is how good the main attraction is, Queen Katrina (Jones), whose stylish routine suggests to me the club's clientèle must be at least partly art patrons.

I'm pretty sure this is not the stripper any actual fraternity would be looking for. But it's most certainly their loss.

I suspect Jones had her own costume and makeup people, nothing else in the film is half as visually striking.

Particularly not the cinematography which makes beyond excessive use of magenta and green colour gels, even in the sewer, giving the film a Super Mario Brothers: The Movie quality that dampens the menace of vampires considerably.

But at some point the college kids stopped annoying me and I actually got a little caught up in seeing whether Keith and the innocent waitress, Allison (Deedee Pfeiffer), would make it through the night. Also a bit entertaining is a wannabe Vegas lounge lizard working as M.C. played by Sandy Baron.

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