Interview with the Vampire
The first horror movie I ever saw was Fright Night, and it scared the ever-living shit out of me- I was 5, mind you, and no 5 year old should have to watch Prince Humperdinck seduce Marcie from Married with Children. The fright that movie put in me can only be compared to the unforgivable horror I experienced from Gremlins later that year. Add to that a kidney stone and a bout of phenomena all before I was six years old, and you can maybe see why I am the way I am.
Despite that, Fright Night, however campy and unintentionally hilarious it is now, was the only time in my life I’ve ever been afraid of vampires. It wasn’t until Bram Stoker’s Dracula that I saw another vampire movie, and had an altogether different sensation. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the only movie that had me aroused with vampires- but come on- it has Sadie Frost and Winona Ryder.
Black Swan got nothin' on that shit
Then, in the glorious year of 1994, we were given the penultimate soft-core vampire porn Interview with the Vampire which, as Maven of the Eventide proudly claims, “brought sexy back” (Penultimate, because if you think Twilight is anything but a Harlequin porn-on-paper romance you need to get out more). Whether or not Bram Stoker’s Dracula left sexy out in the cold is a debate I’ll leave to Vampire: The Masqueerade round tables to dissolve. Maven is right: Interview with the Vampire brought sexy back, but back with a vengeance, a Bruno fabulous, Brokeback vengeance.
It’s gay. Indisputably, fantastically gay.
Gayer than that.
I’m not a homophobe nor do I have anything particularly against vampires: to each his own. But one must be willfully deluded to see anything other than some serious hanky panky going on with these mostly male vampires. I really like this movie, lachrymose melodrama aside. I’ve seen it close to twenty times- I don’t know why- more than some of my favorite movies, and I actually own a copy- I don’t know why. Also, I haven’t seen the Rifftrax on this movie- not all of it- so if any jokes coincide it’s a pure coincidence of genius.
Now that I’ve gotten my disclaimers out of the way, let’s sink our proverbial fangs into this fairy tale and see how sweet it tastes.
After a sweeping camera pan with orchestral Goth music sung in phonetic Latin nonsense (Oh la see di ro blah blah) we’re introduced to Christian Slater, the man conducting the interview that will narrate the movie. The vampire, Louis- played by Brad Pitt still sporting his magnificent mane from Legends of the Fall- was initially going to eat Slater but changed his mind, deciding instead to tell him the story of his unlife. Or he might have had something else in mind...
“I saw you in the alley, watching me watching you. And then you started to speak...”
“I guess that makes me pretty lucky...”
Oh, lucky indeed Slater. There wasn’t a woman alive that wouldn’t sell her soul to Satan for an interview with Brad Pitt in 1994. It’s too bad Pitt’s character, as Lestat remarks, whines like he has an achy-breaky stake up his ass throughout the movie. But before Slater can set fire to the rain with his own sexiness, Pitt upstages him by turning on the lights faster than Slater can see, with a “series of simple gestures”. Ah, Slater. I think Louis had been hitting on you this whole time: illustrious tosses of his gorgeous hair, “simple gestures” of air humps and crotch grabs. It was just too fast for you to see, you poor bastard. Impressed nonetheless, Slater pops in a tape and begins the interview, the long-winded interview that will leave him wishing he hadn’t brought so much tape after all.
“But everywhere I went, I only saw her face. It was reflected in the statues at the Louvre, her smell the perfume of the-“
“Ooops, sorry Louis. Out of tape. Dag Nabit.”
Now that I’ve gotten my disclaimers out of the way, let’s sink our proverbial fangs into this fairy tale and see how sweet it tastes.
After a sweeping camera pan with orchestral Goth music sung in phonetic Latin nonsense (Oh la see di ro blah blah) we’re introduced to Christian Slater, the man conducting the interview that will narrate the movie. The vampire, Louis- played by Brad Pitt still sporting his magnificent mane from Legends of the Fall- was initially going to eat Slater but changed his mind, deciding instead to tell him the story of his unlife. Or he might have had something else in mind...
“I saw you in the alley, watching me watching you. And then you started to speak...”
“I guess that makes me pretty lucky...”
Oh, lucky indeed Slater. There wasn’t a woman alive that wouldn’t sell her soul to Satan for an interview with Brad Pitt in 1994. It’s too bad Pitt’s character, as Lestat remarks, whines like he has an achy-breaky stake up his ass throughout the movie. But before Slater can set fire to the rain with his own sexiness, Pitt upstages him by turning on the lights faster than Slater can see, with a “series of simple gestures”. Ah, Slater. I think Louis had been hitting on you this whole time: illustrious tosses of his gorgeous hair, “simple gestures” of air humps and crotch grabs. It was just too fast for you to see, you poor bastard. Impressed nonetheless, Slater pops in a tape and begins the interview, the long-winded interview that will leave him wishing he hadn’t brought so much tape after all.
“But everywhere I went, I only saw her face. It was reflected in the statues at the Louvre, her smell the perfume of the-“
“Ooops, sorry Louis. Out of tape. Dag Nabit.”
Instead of starting when he was born, and presumably less morose, Louis begins his tale when he was “born into darkness”. Slater merely adapted to dark, whereas Louis was molded by it, caressed by it, loved up and pillow talked by it. Losing his “wife and child in childbirth”, Louis tries to drink himself to death and gambles without a care, prompting a burly man to pull a gun when Pitt maybe cheats in a game of poker. Pitt responds by tearing his shirt half-off, revealing a shaved chest so sexy, the crestfallen burly man’s gun goes limp in his hands.
"That.. that's too sexy. I can't do it."
Shirtless Pitt not only discourages the burly man, it draws the attention of Lestat, a vampire more than eager to give Louis a taste of death after a striptease like that. Lestat kills a pimp and his whore and then sinks himself into Louis with such passion the two go airborne and the soundtrack gets aroused. As Lestat sucks his life away Pitt makes a face that can only be the orgasmic ecstasy of finally getting his death wish; nothing at all whatsoever having to do with being in Lestat’s dark embrace. Then Lestat dumps Louis in the harbor to leave him rolling in the deep.
Lestat returns to Louis’ bedroom later, caressing his bed curtains and promising a life he could “never imagine”. I’m sure Louis was lying in bed trying to imagine a life with Lestat, and that’s why he had a loaded pistol with him. But Louis, clinically depressed but so sexy the bullets bounce of him when he tried to shoot himself, takes Lestat’s offer, which will give him an eternal life to be clinically depressed in and infinite people to complain about it with.
Louis says his goodbyes to a sunrise, and then gets ambushed by Lestat. He offers to make Louis a vampire, but Louis must say if “he’ll come or no”. Louis of course says yes, but it’s Lestat who comes first, pricking his wrist with a thimble and dripping blood on Louis’ face. Louis laps it up like a puppy and becomes a vampire.
(At this point Slater adjusts his pants. “Oh goodie, Penthouse is gonna pay me bank for this...”)
As Louis is now the honeysuckle to Lestat’s honeybee, the two frolic into New Orleans. There they meet a Creole hooker who must be into the first BDSM cult in America, as she gets off on Lestat biting her neck. Lestat offers her to Louis, who somehow sucks the blood out her tongue while he kisses her, but refuses to take her life. Lestat doesn’t mind, and kills her anyway. He even leaves a tip for the busboy who will eventually dispose of the body.
(Jacques! Those gay vampires left another dead hooker on the table. But they tip so well...)
After this Louis and Lestat pretend to have diner, and Thandie Newton comes in long enough for Tom Cruise to make a mental note that she’d make a good love interest in Mission Impossible 2. One of the rats Chuck Norris didn’t eat in Missing in Action scurries on set and Lestat scoops it up with playful delight. He kills it, wrings the blood like a used tampon into a glass and offers it to Louis, then puts the corpse on the table and actually pets it. For all this movie’s faults, I like Lestat. He truly doesn’t give a shit. If one of The Help had wandered in and seen the corpse of a rat on the table, I’m sure Lestat would have remarked that sewer rat does, indeed, taste like pumpkin pie.
After learning he can eat rats, Louis goes on a binge, taking it as far as making a fool of himself back in New Orleans where he gobbles up some poodles. Later, while Louis raids the chicken coup, Lestat feeds on the slaves. That’s not an ideal business plan fellows. I don’t know what Louis’ plantation produces for profit, but it certainly ain’t in the dead slave storage business. Losing relatives and having no chicken to eat causes the slaves to have a voodoo rumpus which pisses Lestat off and away to New Orleans. Louis mopes about the table, eats Thandie Newton, then frees all his slaves and burns his mansion down in a series of flamboyantly rash acts. Lestat, riding back to give one of the slaves a what-for who gave him the stink eye as he prissily rode off, jumps through the window and saves Louis from dying in the fire.
Louis accuses Lestat of being a gold-digger- “you just take, take, take and never give”- and the two vamoose to a cemetery Lestat is clearly embarrassed to be in. Since it was pointed out earlier that vampires must sleep in coffins, and Louis just burned down everything but the slaves, how did they survive the night? I can see Lestat digging up a grave, yanking the corpse out of the coffin and then giving them to Louis to cuddle with. It might even be his wife and child that died earlier. Zang!
With no mansion but apparently lots of money, Lestat and Louis rent hotel rooms and kick it like rock stars, Lestat the Axel Rose to Louis’ Kurt Cobain. Lestat, once again, gets a hooker and tries to get Louis to eat her. Louis, once again, refuses. Lestat gets emotional and listens to “You take
my breath away” after Louis departs in a tizzy. Poor Lestat. Don’t you know players only love you when they’re playing? Drifting into a plague zone, Louis unfortunately discovers Claudia and she gives the movie permission to suck for the next hour she’s in it.
Claudia is talking to her dead mother, who’s already in advanced stages of decomposition and, modus ponens: Claudia is a retard. Louis bites her on the shoulder, encouraging Lestat to make a grand entrance and dance with the dead mother. It’s probably the funniest scene in the movie. Lestat dances like Carl Tanzer in a necrophile version of You Got Served.
Lestat makes Claudia a vampire so Louis will stick around. This improves Louis’ mood a bit, but Claudia is so damn annoying that it doesn’t matter. Claudia is retarded, remember, so it takes a montage of her killing people in the house and putting on dresses before she figures out she’ll never grow up. This rattles her cage enough to keep a dead woman in her bed she hides under dolls and does God-knows-what with when Lestat and Louis aren’t around. Eh, she probably talks to it like she did with her mother and plays patty cake until, after another montage, figures out dead people can’t move.
Lestat throws a fit when he finds out about it and the plot hole of how he and Louis missed a rotten corpse they both neither smelled nor noticed Claudia dragging in. Claudia attempts to kill Lestat by letting him drink dead blood, then Lestat comes back fueled on Gatorade, toads and frogs. Louis sets him on fire and him and Claudia head off to Europe, leaving New Orleans to burn to the ground.
In Europe Louis eventually runs into the Theater Vampires, headed by Antonio Banderas trying his best to be the sexiest gay vampire alive. He wants to make Louis his Bucho but Louis ain’t having it, so he runs his hand over a candle and has a philosophical conversation. The other theater vampires are vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires pretending to be actors in a romance pretending to be a vampire movie.
"I can take pain. Get the hint?"
Claudia finds a woman for her new companion, and wants Louis to make her a vampire, because she’s “not strong enough”. Just wait for that special week in the month, Claudia: then you can bleed for a week and make all the mothers you want. Louis won’t do it, so Claudia tells her female friend: “Louis is just too shy shy. Hush hush.” Louis finally agrees, although he’s very displeased with having to touch a woman.
Banderas gets his thespian peons to put Claudia and her newborn mother-figure in a well, and they get burned up by the sun like Gremlins in a microwave. It rocks.
Burn baby, burn.
Louis takes his revenge, and I have to admit, this scene is pretty bad-ass. He douses the Theater Vampire’s coffins with ale, sets them on fire and then decapitates them as they fly out. The teleporting vampire- I forgot to mention him earlier but he teleported out of my attention span- has a brief duel with Louis that leaves him cut in half by a scythe. Stupid Parisian pansy. Don’t pick a fight with a scythe-wielding Louisiana farm boy. It’s a bit disappointing Louis doesn’t scalp the other vampires or that they didn’t ship him Claudia’s head in a box first.
I told you bitches, don't mess...
Banderas tries to seduce Louis to stay with him, and the two come as close to kissing as they can before actually touching and causing a singularity of sexy that would collapse the universe. Louis wants to kiss Banderas so bad, but his lips are “venomous poison”.
Louis leaves in the melancholic wake of the soundtrack, never to see Banderas again. Rumor has it Banderas has found another vampire, and is now just someone Louis “used to know”.
Louis returns to America and watches Superman. He discovers Lestat again in a graveyard with a house in the middle of it. Lestat wants Louis back and reminisces. But Louis was dying when he met Lestat, and he’s trying to forget him. Lestat persists.
“No one could deny me, not even you.”
“I tired.”
“Yes, and the more you tried, the more I wanted you.”
Great. Cameron tried to say “No.” to Ferris Bueller, so they must have had a little something something going on as well.
Lestat wants to “fetch around” and rekindle, but Louis tells Lestat they are never ever getting back together and leaves, again. Christian Slater is aggravated with this ending, as I’m sure the test audience must have been, and wants to be a vampire. Louis protests.
“Haven’t you been listening? I mean, duh- you’re not gay...”
Slater won’t take no for an answer, so Louis grabs his throat and asks him if he likes dying, then disappears, for good this time. Slater needs his shorts changed, so he jumps in his car and pops the tapes in. Then something beautiful happens.
Slater forgot one of the Zombieland rules and didn’t check the backseat, from which pops out none other than Lestat. Lestat drinks a bit, starts driving and, blessedly, turns off the goddamn tape. “Have you had enough?”
Yes, Lestat. God yes.
Slater is worried, but Lestat says his catch phrase “I’m going to give you the choice I never had.” He laughs and cranks up the god-awful cover of “Sympathy for the Devil” by Guns N Roses, and the credits fly over them to close out the movie. It’s a badass ending, and I suspect Anne Rice had nothing to do with it.
Is Interview with the Vampire a good movie? Yes and no. It has one of Tom Cruise’s best
performances, and the first and third acts are great, but the damned second with Claudia could be cut entirely. It’s far from the best vampire movie ever made, but succeeds in making vampires accessible without being goofy, or just flat out non-vampires. I give it 3 and half stars. Also, unlike other vampire films, it didn’t spark a Fast and the Furious type cult- as far as I know.
Ew. Fast and the Furious. I’m going to have to review that mean machine, aren’t I?
Special thanks to Lori Nichols for the spectacular art work. Except for the above, pictures used in accordance with Fair Use. Copyright, 2013, The Deconstructionist.