Vampire's Kiss

Dir: Robert Bierman

1989

****

Robert Bierman’s Vampire’s Kiss has become a cult classic. The truth is that there are approximately three dreadful scenes to every good one but that really doesn’t matter. It's not actually about Vampires either but again, this doesn’t matter. This film is all about Sir Nicolas Cage. His performance is one of his greatest, the first really great performance of his career. I think he aimed for 50% Max Schreck and two quarters Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, with the wide eyed Max Schreck look being most memorable. Of course, the end performance is 100% Cage and every bit as glorious as you could ask. The film itself is about male paranoia. In much the same vein of other great quirky comedy dramas like Eraserhead and How to get ahead in advertising. It is also a product of its time, there is ambiguity to it but I always saw it as a swipe at the self-important, the eventual down-fall of the narcissistic yuppie. Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) is a driven literary agent and an example of the stereotypical narcissistic and greedy yuppie of the 1980s, who is slowly going insane. He works all day and club hops at night, with little in his life but alcohol, one night stands and the pursuit of money and prestige. He sees a therapist (Elizabeth Ashley) frequently, and during these sessions his declining mental health becomes clear through a series of increasingly bizarre rants that eventually begin to scare even the psychiatrist. After he takes home a girl he met in a club named Jackie (Kasi Lemmons), a bat flies in through his window, scaring them both. At his next session he mentions to his therapist that the struggle with the bat aroused him, and after visiting an art museum with Jackie the next day, he ditches her, and she leaves an angry message on his phone. Loew meets Rachel (Jennifer Beals) at a night club, and takes her home. She pins him down, reveals vampire fangs and feeds on him. He soon begins to believe that he is changing into a vampire. He stares into a bathroom mirror and fails to see his reflection, he wears dark sunglasses during the day, and, when his "fangs" fail to develop, he purchases a pair of cheap plastic vampire teeth. All the while, Rachel visits him nightly to feed on his blood. Shortly after, Loew experiences mood swings and calls Jackie back apologetically, asking to meet her at a bar. As he is about to leave, a jealous Rachel appears and beckons him back inside. A dejected Jackie eventually leaves the bar and leaves an angry note on his door asking him to leave her alone. A subplot concerns a secretary working at Loew's office, Alva Restrepo (María Conchita Alonso). Loew torments her by forcing her to search through an enormous file for a 1963 contract. When she fails to find the contract, he at first browbeats and humiliates her, then visits her at home, and finally attacks and attempts to bite her at the place where they both work. She pulls out a gun, and Loew begs her to shoot him. Since it is only loaded with blanks, she fires at the floor to scare him off. He eventually overpowers her and attempts to bite her on the neck, ripping her shirt open and knocking her down. He takes the gun and fires it into his mouth, but is not harmed by the blanks. Thinking he has transformed into a vampire, Loew goes out to a club wearing his vampire teeth and moving like the character Orlok from the film Nosferatu. He begins to seduce a woman, but when he gets too grabby she slaps him off, making Loew even more unhinged: he overpowers her and bites her neck, having taken out the fangs and using his real teeth. He then puts the plastic fangs back in. Leaving the club, Loew has a brief, ambiguous encounter with Rachel: she admits to knowing him, but gives the impression that they have not been in contact for a long period. He accuses her of being a vampire, and is expelled from the club. Alva wakes up with her shirt ripped open, possibly thinking she was raped, and eventually tells her brother Emilio about the sexual assault, who is enraged and goes after Loew to seek revenge. Meanwhile, Loew is wandering the streets in a blood-spattered business suit, talking to himself. In a hallucinatory exchange, he tells his therapist that he raped someone and also murdered someone else. Based on a newspaper, the latter appears to be true, as the girl he bit in the club is announced dead. As Loew returns to his now-disastrous apartment (which he'd been using as a sort of vampire cave) Alva points out Loew to her brother Emilio, who pursues him inside his home with a tire iron. In the midst of an argument with an imaginary romantic interest (supposedly a patient of his psychiatrist) Loew begins to retch again from the blood he had swallowed, and crawls under an upturned sofa, which he sees as his "coffin". Alva's brother Emilio finds him and upturns the sofa, and Loew holds a large broken shard of wood to his chest as a makeshift stake, repeating the gesture he had made earlier to strangers on the street when he had asked them to stake and kill him. Alva's brother, in a rage, pushes down on the stake and it pierces Loew's chest. Realizing he has committed a crime, a scared Emilio flees the place. As Loew dies, he envisions the vampire-Rachel smiling at him one last time. It is both tasteless and silly and every bit as brilliant as a mix of the two could ever be. The conclusion is very satisfying. The fact that he buys fake vampire out of his feelings of inadequacy is genius satire and comedy gold. It would be a heart-breakingly sad film if it weren’t so funny and outrageous.