Themes: Haunted By the Past, Social Injustice, Vampires
Main Cast: Elina Löwensohn, Suzy Amis, Galaxy Craze, Martin Donovan, Peter Fonda, Karl Geary
Release Year: 1994
Country: US
Run Time: 105 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
This stylish combination of expressionistic horror and deadpan black comedy centers on the activities of a beautiful female vampire on the streets of New York City. Playing fast and loose with the Dracula legend, the film examines the legendary count's children, particularly the alluring and mysterious Nadja (Elina Lowensohn). At the film's beginning, Nadja is celebrating her father's demise and hoping to begin a new life. She hopes that this life will include Lucy (Galaxy Craze), a spunky young woman that she seduces after an encounter in a New York bar. Unfortunately, Lucy is already married, to the nephew of eccentric vampire hunter Van Helsing (Peter Fonda), who disposed of Nadja's father and has now set his sights on capturing the daughter. Matters are further complicated when Nadja's brother Edgar (Jared Harris), a vampire who wishes to give up his blood-sucking nature, also becomes involved. Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Jim Denault in a mixture of 35mm black-and-white and low-budget Pixelvision video, the film resembles a combination of the surrealist visions of co-producer David Lynch and the quirky humor and stylized sensibility of Hal Hartley. The convoluted narrative sometimes fails to gel, and the self-conscious, arty approach will not appeal to audiences looking for conventional thrills, but those with a taste for the unusual may find the film an appealing contemporary spin on a familiar legend. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
Review
An exercise in deadpan irony, Michael Almereyda's vampire film begins intriguingly but runs out of ideas before it's half over. The strikingly beautiful Elina Lowensohn stars as a vampire roaming New York's downtown scene in search of a new life. The cryptic, black-garbed wraith, whose conversation runs to low-key philosophical non sequiturs, has little difficulty in blending into the landscape. Also in town is vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda), an eccentric figure who's just been bailed out of jail by his nephew (Martin Donovan) after being arrested for driving a stake through the heart of Dracula. Almereyda tries to establish a tone somewhere between the dry irony of Hal Hartley and the more ominous deadpan wit of David Lynch, and for the film's first half-hour or so he carefully maintains this idiosyncratic style. But as it becomes clear that the film is going nowhere, the director slackens his control of the taut mise-en-scène, and the project degenerates into a kind of amusing goofiness. The film's most compelling quality is its hypnotic visual texture, layered with allusions to vampires that are nearly subliminal in their brevity, and alternating between a gorgeous black-and-white and the vampire's honeycombed Pixelvision point-of-view. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Jared Harris - Edgar; David Lynch - Morgue Security Guard; Isabel Gillies - Waitress; Bernadette Jurkowski - Dracula's Bride; Jack Lotz - Boxing Coach; Nic Ratner - Bar Victim; Bob Gosse - Garage Mechanic; Rome Neal - Garage Mechanic
Credit
Andrew Fierberg - Associate Producer, Kerry Barden - Casting, Billy Hopkins - Casting, Suzanne Smith - Casting, Prudence Moriarty - Costume Designer, Michael Almereyda - Director, David Leonard - Editor, David Lynch - Executive Producer, Simon Fisher Turner - Composer (Music Score), William Kozy - Musical Direction/Supervision, Kurt Ossenfort - Production Designer, Jim Denault - Cinematographer, Ed Talavera - Cinematographer, Amy Hobby - Producer, Mary Sweeney - Producer, Stuart Levy - Sound/Sound Designer, Michael Almereyda - Screenwriter
The deadpan acting, episodic nature of the plot, and the presence of Martin Donovan and Löwensohn are suggestive of a Hal Hartley film though he was not involved in the production. The Chicago Review called it "Hal Hartley meets David Lynch". The style of the film changes from dramatic horror to horror comedy by the end as evidenced by the laughing vampire toy during a trip to Romania.
