In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, a decent-enough film—Vampire’s Kiss—is first and foremost a momentous acting showcase. Happy Halloween season, Nicolas Cage scholars.
Is Vampire’s Kiss even a bad movie? Is it trash, worthy of inclusion in this series? It’s got a lukewarm 64% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and an even weaker 54% audience score. The plotting can be clumsy and uneven, commercial director Robert Bierman sometimes suffocates his jokes, and the film was a box office flop upon release, failing to make back its budget.
But, because Vampire’s Kiss stars Nicolas Cage, it is a tremendous success by at least one, all-important metric: Luke Buckmaster’s comprehensive Cage Gauge, in which this movie takes out the top spot. Ranked against every other Cage performance for quality, originality and the overall effectiveness of the film in question, Vampire’s Kiss is a 10 out of 10 to Buckmaster, offering “the laboratory in which the most original actor of his generation first started seriously experimenting”.
Related reading:
* S is for: Sex and the City 2 + Space Jam
* T is for Troll 2
* U is for United Passions
I don’t think this is a bad movie. At its best, it’s hilarious, shocking, absurd, weirdly poignant and ahead of its time. But if deranged literary agent Peter Loew were played by anyone but Cage, this movie would be entirely unremarkable and unremembered, consigned to the upturned couch-coffin of history long ago. Dennis Quaid was originally cast in the part, and that just sounds pointless. We can call Cage’s Peter a masterpiece of Kabuki theatre, of the silent era’s German Expressionism, of prophetic meme material; the man himself prefers the term ‘nouveau shamanic’ when it comes to his acting style. Whatever you call it, it’s the kind of performance that makes you think about acting as an art in itself.
The story follows New York bachelor Peter as his yuppie life unravels. The catalyst of this descent is either a) a bite from a cute mechanical bat, that ruins a date between Peter and good girl Jackie (Kasi Lemmons), or b) a bite from Jennifer Beals’ fanged succubus Rachel. Is he truly transforming into a vampire, or just losing his shit in spectacular fashion – whites of his eyes blazing out at us, nostrils flared, eyebrows arched lunatic high? Well, the problem is that it’s impossible to tell.
As with Jack Nicholson’s bad dad in The Shining, the performance is so outsized and terribly intense that it feels pointless to signpost a before-and-after of their mental breakdown. From day dot and pre-bite, Peter is awful to his secretary Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso), terrorising her for his own amusement by leaping onto her desk, or mumbling her name in a Cartman voice for half a minute before ratcheting up to a scream.
It can be difficult to look beyond Cage’s work here: the Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula-esque brogue, a hybrid of Eton and Malibu…that alphabet recitation. But his dominating style causes interesting ripple effects amongst the other cast members. Their acting can feel jarringly traditional when held up closely against his, making us identify (against all odds) more closely with Peter’s alienation and arrogance: perhaps he is a special, powerful creature in a world of bloodbag NPCs. There’s something odd going on through the film’s depiction of women of colour, too, as Beals, Lemmons and Alonso tempt, torture and punish the moneyed, white anti-hero. (Worth noting that screenwriter Joseph Minion also penned Scorsese’s paranoid, woman-fearing urban odyssey After Hours.)
Another important point of comparison which I am certainly not the first to note is American Psycho. Bret Easton Ellis began writing his novel in the mid-1980s, but it would only be released two years after Vampire’s Kiss, and it would be another 11 years later that Christian Bale was cast as Patrick Bateman. Both actors are renowned for their artistic commitment, Bale packing on muscle in pre-production and Cage eating an actual cockroach on set, for their respective New York yuppie murderer roles.
Bale is chillingly blank and impenetrable, only combusting at the bitter end of his story when his crimes are brushed off as some dreamlike misunderstanding. Cage is crashing out from minute one to 103, but he’s no cool and collected supervillain: he’s a doofus, his charisma with vixens and victims juvenile and laughable, his plastic vampire fangs making babes at the club laugh. His supernatural sickness pushes him to hideous acts of physical and sexual violence, but it’s never scary.
American Psycho
Vampire’s Kiss
Some horror fans will claim we’re living in a world run by Patrick Batemans—or at the very least, incels and narcissists who’ve adopted him as a legit role model. Not to be lame and neo-lib or anything, but I think we’re trapped under a system of Peter Loews, and it’s very embarrassing and sad. There’s a boardroom scene in Vampire’s Kiss, where managers and agents joke callously about Peter’s ongoing abuse of Alva, and he’s reduced to sickening, sycophantic giggles.
I think our institutions may be made up of this kind of guy, all the way down—an empty yes man, who hates everybody only a teeny bit less than he hates himself. A pathetic Nosferatu instead of a suave Dracula. I think Vampire’s Kiss is neat in how it shares that terror and self-loathing evenly across its setting and characters.
Something about living in a system—an office, a city, the patriarchy—turns us all into undead creatures of the night, with even the sympathetic Alva taking on some vampiric traits. After Peter violates her, she cocoons herself in her bed all day, afraid of light and the human world outside—a far sadder incarnation of a monster’s infectious bite. Another coworker, in a laughably flat line reading, complains that after a long week at the agency, she can’t wait to stay in and sleep all weekend. By the time Peter is racing about declaring himself a vampire and begging passersby to stake him in the heart, the world really is a vampire, sent to drain. And Cage is its ambassador, visiting from another dimension to teach us our ABCs.
