I’ve seen Vampires three or four times over the
years, always eager to give it a chance to improve my opinion of it. John
Carpenter is one of my favorite directors, and he’s made a handful of
masterpieces and a handful of near-masterpieces. Vampires, though, never
manages to escape my classification of it as second or third tier Carpenter. It
rests at the critical nadir of his career, sandwiched between two of his most
despised works – Escape from L.A. (1996) and Ghosts of Mars (2001).
But while I’ve always believed that the critics missed the boat on those two
films, missed the fact that they are incredibly entertaining expressions of
Carpenter’s style and interests, Vampires remains one of his least
satisfying films, just a step above the unwatchable Memoirs of an Invisible
Man (1992). Like its surrounding films, Vampires is essentially a
western, this time set in modern-day New Mexico and accentuated by Carpenter’s
own blues-tinged score. Even by 1998, there were far too many vampire movies in
existence, and unfortunately Carpenter added little of interest that hadn’t
been done before. It’s hard not to think of Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent 1987
thriller Near Dark as a superior take on the more-or-less identical
premise; ageless vampires stalking the American southwest. There’s a cheapness
to both the visuals and the performances in this film and the others of this
period. It’s not amateurish; it’s certainly part of Carpenter’s aesthetic at
the time, brought to life by his longtime cinematographer Gary Kibbe. Carpenter
was after a comic-like vividness, with the lurid E.C. Comics of the 50s a major
influence on his work, and it feels appropriate in films like They Live (1988),
In the Mouth of Madness (1995) and Escape from L.A. In Vampires,
it hurts, leaving every sequence hanging with a sense of intended camp that
doesn’t quite gel. Gothic and camp don’t really mix. To make matters worse, you
never get a feeling from the film that Carpenter had any particular interest in
vampires, nor anything new to say about them. Compounding this trouble about conflicting
or unclear agendas is the casting. Seemingly on the same page with Carpenter,
James Woods and Daniel Baldwin turn in superficial, smart-assed performances as
the vampire-hunters. Thomas Ian Griffith, as the master vampire they’re after,
Valek, is completely uninteresting and one-dimensional. The character is so
dull and aimless that he even takes a back seat to a new villain introduced in
the finale. But the actor who is truly let down by Carpenter is poor Sheryl Lee
playing Katrina, a prostitute who is bitten by Valek and spends the rest of the
story slowly succumbing to his infectious influence. While Woods and Baldwin
are busy trying to out-ham each other, Lee – apparently of her own volition and
unaided by her director and co-stars – turns in a harrowingly sober and
fully-invested performance as a woman experiencing horrific visions, mental anguish
and withdrawal-like physical pain. In a thankless role in a mediocre movie, Lee
gives the same 100% that she gave in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk
with Me (1992), the same forceful passion that should have made her a
bigger star were it not for the facts that she was always drawn to independent
fare and that substantive roles for women in mainstream films are few and far
between. The actors, extras and stunt-people all have this look on their faces
like they’re either embarrassed or just doing their jobs in a cheesy horror
film, and Carpenter did nothing to correct them, but Sheryl Lee is operating
entirely on a different plane from the rest of the crew. She gives much more
than the film deserves.
No comments:
Post a Comment