1987 action horror, dir. Kathryn Bigelow, Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright:
IMDb /
allmovie. Normal folks, they
don't spit out bullets when you shoot 'em, no sir
Kathryn Bigelow's directorial début shows significant influence
from James Cameron—not least, three of the cast of Aliens (Jenette
Goldstein, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, all clearly having a great
time).
Bigelow had originally intended to make a western, but couldn't get
backing until she added the vampire element; so if it sometimes seems
like a film about the gang of rakehells travelling from town to town,
well, it is.
But before any of that we have to meet our protagonist Caleb, who is
mostly bored and horny to the extent that the presence of a woman he
hasn't seen before is enough to impel him to pick her up. Danger
signs? What are those, I'm a man, I have nothing to worry about. Well,
now you have something.
Of course it's a metaphor for drugs and falling in with the Wrong
Crowd. And then an extended middle act of causing some trouble and
moving on, repeatedly; I found myself surprised that, given that some
of these vampires are meant to be hundreds of years old, they haven't
got bored with that yet. The film could make a point of it, of how set
in their ways they have become, but nobody ever seems in character to
regard the lifestyle as anything other than attractive but costly.
A great deal of the emotional weight of the film rests on Caleb's
emotional portrayal, especially at the point where he's just been
resurrected thanks to miraculous blood transfusion, and Adrian Pasdar
just doesn't do this as well as he carries off Sexy Smoulder. (His
film début had been the year before in Top Gun.) Here, alas, he
reminds me most of Horst Buchholz in The Magnificent Seven.
Still, Bigelow is clearly having more fun during the action sequences,
especially when Bill Paxton gets to have his Terminator moment,
getting up after being flattened by a truck. That's what I enjoyed
from this film, honestly: not the bad boy vampires playing dominance
games, but the practical action and especially the fire.
Again, like Near Dark, it's conveniently possible to de-vamp the
Sexy Babe so that the hero never has a hard choice to make. Hey ho.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.