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.

The Unsettled Interview

It'd been at least sixteen or seventeen years since I last watched 1994's Interview with the Vampire. I used to watch it over and over again in high school, in the late 90s. Nowadays if I feel like watching a Neil Jordan movie I'm more likely to watch The Butcher Boy, the movie he made three years after Interview with the Vampire. Though with murderous little Claudia in Interview with the Vampire it's easy to trace a path of ideas from one film to the other. Both films are fantastically beautiful, as Jordan's films tend to be, and this is one of the things I loved and hated about Interview with the Vampire. In itself, it's great, but its more appropriate for the books Anne Rice wrote after the first book in her long running series than for the first one. The 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire had a kind of bleakness, a sense of terrible nihilism, that Rice's later novels lacked. A proper film version of the novel may have been served better by Lars von Trier or David Cronenberg. It's been almost as long now since I read any Anne Rice novel as it's been since I've seen this movie but I feel basically the same way. Still, the movie is terrific in so many ways.

Tom Cruise as Lestat is the same kind of inspired casting that put Heath Ledger in the role of the Joker. Before actually seeing him in the movie, he seems absolutely wrong; seeing him in the movie, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. And of course, given the relatively small emotional breadth covered by the character in this story, star quality and charisma are the most important things, things you only get with a star like Cruise. Though he's almost upstaged by the brief appearance of the deflating Tom Cruise puppet created by Stan Winston.

There is cgi in this movie but relatively little, not much more than the kinds of transformation shots already seen in Willow and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One is used to change Kirsten Dunst as Claudia from a Linda Blair-ish dying kid into a perfect porcelain doll vampire girl.

I don't find Dunst's performance as impressive now as I did back then; her delivery and on-beat head tilts seem like the product of obvious coaching. But finding a decent child actor is hard enough, finding one for this material even harder, probably impossible in the U.S. to-day. Even in the 90s they had to age up the character six years from her age in the novel.

In addition to the practical effects, there's a magic in the deliberate artificiality of the sound stage locations which often look like they came straight from a Hammer film. I found myself thinking of 1970's The Vampire Lovers and Ingrid Pitt's (perhaps unintentionally) sympathetic portrayal as the vampire Mircalla. Interview with the Vampire came from a period in which books like Grendel or Wide Sargasso Sea took villainous or monstrous characters from classic literature to recast them as protagonists of their own stories, not necessarily changing the facts but asking the reader to consider an alternate perspective. Rice's work brilliantly reveals the implications inherent in extending this project to vampires. Instead of their typical role in stories representing ideas about heathens and the wealthy as near caricatures, Rice's book and Jordan's film is about people trapped in a physical state with physical needs that they feel varying levels of guilt about. As Louis seeks answers for what vampires are, he asks, as Armand tells him, the wrong questions. They can intellectually rationalise their nature, they can even find aesthetic or moral justifications, but then something happens that reveals a contradiction and they're back to square one. It's always an itch that can never be scratched.

This is why newer vampire stories don't work as well--when that guilt is just a metaphor for forbidden love, like in Twilight, it's too easy for the audience to say, oh, the poor, handsome, misguided soul. In Interview with the Vampire, these are people who are naturally compelled to live off murder. It's a much more interesting question with broader applications to human experience. It's not about thinking you might be wrong and then finding out you're not in the happy ending of the story; it's about never knowing, always having good reason to fear you're wrong, but still needing anyway.

I love the makeup. This is one of the few movies where they really get around the cakey look of pale makeup--all the vampires have visible veins drawn on their faces. It has the perfect effect of making them look eerie and vulnerable.

Twitter Sonnet #1165

The glasses fell for lighters clogged with rain.
A working bike emerged from soggy sand.
The dog removed his leash aboard the train.
A case of dollars showed upon demand.
The sep'rate thoughts create a feeling sight.
Determined sleeves create a proper shirt.
Remembered loops complete a yearly night.
A focused fork preserves the knife from hurt.
A waiting straw consumes a canvas face.
The light upon the stage was even dark.
A trick of moving eyes was pulled with grace.
A big fatigue invites the sleeping shark.
The liquid decks degrade the wooden hulls.
Divided brains create united skulls.