Interview with the Vampire is the “Harry Potter” of vampire movies. It’s based on a novel (by Anne Rice) that was very popular, and there was tremendous speculation amongst its fan-base over how close the film would stick to the novel. As in the Potter stories, every fan of the books had an image in [...]
On December 7, 1941, Heinrich Himmler, head of Nazi Germany’s SS, issued a decree. It said that those arrested in their own countries for resisting the Third Reich would be deported so that they would disappear, without a trace, into the “night and fog.” Fourteen years later, Alain Resnais took that as the title of [...]
At the end of Vampire’s Kiss, just as we’ve come to the conclusion everything was a delusion of its protagonist Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage), we’re given just a little hint that it may have all been real after all. That’s the conceit of this film: is Loew’s conviction that he’s turning into a vampire a [...]
I always thought Willem Dafoe was a vampire. That whip-thin figure, that rictus grin, those bloodless lips stretched tight over big ol’ teeth. Everything about him just screams “Creature of the Night,” and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire proves it: he was born to be a vampire.
He plays Max Schreck, star of F.W. [...]
I first saw Dracula as a kid; my father loved the Universal monsters, and he passed it on to me. We thrilled together at the Wolfman and the Mummy, commiserated with Frankenstein’s monster — if only he hadn’t thrown that little girl in the pond! — and gasped at the Creature from the Black Lagoon. [...]
The problem with Danny Boyle’s Sunshine: it doesn’t know quite what it is. It begins as a fairly straightforward SciFi epic, then veers into monster-land in the last third.
As Appaloosa opens, Marshall Jack Bell (Bobby Jauregui) and two deputies confront rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) about a couple of his hands. Seems they’ve killed a man and raped and killed his wife. Bragg refuses to hand them over — he says he can’t spare them — and when Bell insists, the rancher kills [...]
The Lost Boys is one of those movies that plays better in memory than in fact. I remember it being a dangerous, not-your-parents vampire movie, with cool music and even more cool vampires. Even though I was hardly a kid when I saw it — it was released in 1987 — it seemed at the [...]
John Badham’s Dracula opens on the ship bringing Count Dracula (Frank Langella) to English shores, and as I watched it, two words popped into my head: production values. The film has that slick Hollywood look of a certain period, as if it had been over-produced on a massive budget. There is meticulous detail, obviously by [...]
When I saw the pretentious, 80s-techno opening — cut to Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugos is Dead,” for God’s sake — I thought: “Ah, hell. This is going to be a long and bumpy ride.” After all, it was directed by Tony Scott, that master of empty sizzle — see Spy Game, Deja Vu and Enemy of [...]
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