The Vamps Around These Parts

In the hot, dusty landscape of New Mexico, James Woods hunts vampires in John Carpenter's 1998 film, Vampires. There are plenty of good ideas behind the film, particularly combining a vampire film with a western, but the whole production is too cheap and too many points in the film weren't adequately thought through. When one recalls that From Dusk till Dawn was released two years before Vampires, Vampires seems even more of an embarrassment.

The film opens with a team of experienced vampire hunters, led by a man named Jack Crow (Woods), raiding a vampire nest in New Mexico.

And right away we're introduced to two problems that will persist throughout the film--James Woods is terribly miscast and every interior looks conspicuously like a sound stage. I mean, every god damned room is practically a high school gym. Just look at this room at a supposedly dive hotel:

I do want that couch and loveseat.

James Woods, the arch-nebbish, is so wrong for the role of the hard-bitten tough guy. Apparently he was last in a long list of people Carpenter tried to cast first--according to Wikipedia, "Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and R. Lee Ermey." Any one of those would have made more sense and R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, would've been an inspired choice. Can you just imagine? "Are you a vampire, maggot? Let me see your vampire face. You don't scare me, you worthless piece of scum!" That would sure make sense of all the movie's random lines about dicks.

Apparently one of Carpenter's influences for the film was The Wild Bunch and there is something William Holden-ish about James Woods. But the character of Jack Crow is a calloused brute in the way Holden just wasn't in The Wild Bunch.

The team has a whole system set up for yanking vampires into the sunlight with a winch attached to a car. They drive big, specially modified armoured cars, too. I thought, "These guys know their shit so they must hole up in some kind of fortress at night." But, no, the night after the raid they party in a motel with a bunch of strangers, complete with liquor and prostitutes.

And, yeah, that's a cheap motel room and not the living room from Family Ties.

Sheryl Lee plays one of the prostitutes named Katrina and she's the whole reason I watched this movie. Sadly, she's kind of wasted on it. I actually kind of like how Carpenter doesn't flesh out all his supporting characters. Jack Crow is the only one we get some backstory on. And that's realistic--we don't get backstories on most of the people we meet in life, we have to take our measure of them from what we see. It would've been nice if she'd had more lines, though. After a master vampire ambushes the crew, she gets bit between the thighs and gains a mental connexion with him, like Mina and Dracula. So Jack and Tony (Daniel Baldwin) unceremoniously drag her along.

They treat her like shit for no real good reason. Maybe that's to establish that these guys have been turned into sons of bitches by their vocations, an impression that would have been helped a lot with R. Lee Ermey in the Jack Crow role. But some of it just feels odd, like when Tony decides to tie Katrina naked to a bed.

There's a kind of half-hearted romantic subplot between the two but the best part about it is that Sheryl Lee seems to be confounded by the whole thing. I love the look on her face when Tony kisses her in the climax.

She seems just to be thinking, "What the fuck is going on?" Like I said, she doesn't get many lines but Lee shows how excellently she can deliver with just facial expressions and screams.

It really is a crime she didn't get more roles after Twin Peaks.

Crossing the Old Bridge

In light of the frighteningly polarised political landscape in the U.S. to-day, it's strange to think there's a movie from 1984 called Once Upon a Time in America that starred Robert De Niro and James Woods as best friends. In 2018, De Niro has been targeted by a mail bomber for publicly denouncing President Trump and Woods' support of Trump has seen him reposting right wing conspiracy theories on Twitter, including a claim that the bombs were hoaxes. But that's not all that makes the film a freshly compelling commentary on America. Director Sergio Leone made a beautiful picture, visually and thematically; it's a subtle tragedy about the American love for independence gone wrong.

The story of a group of poor kids in New York who become gangsters feels in some ways like an extended version of the flashbacks in The Godfather Part II. Instead of Vito Corleone, Robert De Niro plays David "Noodles" Aaronson--Noodles is played by an intense kid named Scott Tiler when he's younger. Tiler looks a bit more like Al Pacino, if you ask me.

The film is surprisingly frank about the formative sexual experiences of Noodles and his friends. There's a girl named Peggy (Julie Cohen) who trades sexual favours with the boys for pastries. The scene where she's introduced, when Noodles leaves the door unlocked on purpose while he's on the toilet and she walks in, effectively establishes the curiosity and insecurity of both kids. A later scene, where Noodles and Max catch a cop in a compromising situation with a prostitute, shows neither boy can perform sexually in a way that matches up with his bragging.

Max is the character played by Woods in the scenes where he's older--young Max is played by Rusty Jacobs with visible acne; a nice touch, I thought, to establish Woods' pock marks. In any case, with the uniform perfect skin in movies to-day, it's always nice to check in with the reality in 70s and early 80s films.

Max is slightly older, or at any rate taller, and more ambitious than Noodles. Woods has banner art from Once Upon a Time in America on his Twitter page now making me wonder if he feels Max's involvement with unions and eventual success in politics fits the model of a modern Democrat. One could as easily compare him to Trump, though--really, more easily, as Trump's real estate schemes and courting of blue collar votes combine to make him look especially like a gangster--his tacky personal style sealing the deal.

Noodles is accused by Max of having too much of the street in him--Noodles is happy to stay out of politics. Since most of the movie is from his point of view, he's relatively quiet, and he wants to stay small time, the viewer feels naturally compelled to see him as a moral centre but Leone's telling a more complicated story than that. Noodles assaults men and women to get his way. We understand why he is the way he is well enough to empathise with him--when he goes too far, it's saddening more than repulsive. We understand what motivates him, we see how his simple understanding of the world came together on the streets, learning from petty crimes and peep holes to get what he wants quick. The only question is if he really has any choice and this question is generally posed in scenes between Noodles and Deborah.

Played by Jennifer Connelly as a kid and Elizabeth McGovern as an adult, she seems to present an ideal in contrast to the childish operations of the kid gangsters. He watches her through a peep hole but it's to watch her dance ballet. Not that she's a prude--when she invites him to study the bible with her it turns out she wants to read from "Song of Solomon" with him. But she's no Peggy and when Max calls him away she makes it clear he's choosing between two worlds. Will he choose a path that forces him to consider others or a path where he forces everyone to defer to him?

I love all the apples and pears behind her in the scene.

Leone rather brilliantly evokes old New York in his shots, exploiting locations well.

Ennio Morricone's beautiful score has some of the grand wistfulness of the one he composed for Once Upon a Time in the West, his main theme playing at times that at first seem inappropriate. But the big, sweeping melody playing over a kid compulsively eating the éclair he'd bought for Peggy and that same melody playing over the aftermath of a rape scene later in the film unify the commonplace with the horrific. There are all these stupid, silly, terrible, beautiful, and ugly pieces under this same melody. The exact same recording in one scene that seems to celebrate what is will in another scene lament what has been lost. The story’s not linear—we get shots of older Noodles in the 70s at the beginning of the film and scenes from the 20s and 30s mixed with the 10s and 70s throughout. What’s lost becomes suddenly present again and then lost again in a moment with a closeup of De Nero’s eyes.