From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999)

This may surprise you guys reading, but I was recently turned into a vampire. I don’t intend to let that stop me from doing my reviews, though. Or really, anything else in my normal life. Because really, being a vampire isn’t a big deal, and those who become vampires shouldn’t let such a pesky detail just ruin their plans. I mean, we all gotta pay our bills, you know.

If you’re wondering why I have come to this conclusion, it’s because I stopped listening to inferior movies such as Near Dark or Let the Right One In, and started listening to From Dusk Till Dawn 2, the only true manifesto of how to be a vampire the right way: don’t let it fuck with your day job.

Director: Scott Spiegel

Starring: Robert Patrick, Duane Whitaker

IMDb

The first From Dusk Till Dawn wasn’t great, but it was entertaining and had some fun scenes. This one’s a festering, heaving shitpile with no redeeming qualities, and when it's directed by the guy who made Hostel III, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

We start off with some woman in a building on her way to an appointment to be attacked by bats, which is never something you want to be late for:

"I can't be late for my 3:00 either, guys!"

It takes a really long time for the bats to kill her though, and then we see they even do her the courtesy of sending the elevator down to the first floor for her afterward. How nice of them!

"Sirs, this is your floor. Please exit the elevator in a timely manner."
Wait a second, nobody hears things like that when they exit an elevator anymore. JOKE RUINED...FOREVER...

Then we get true genius as we see Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 playing some jackass redneck. He’s hanging out at his trailer and takes time out of fucking a hooker to adjust the TV set. Yes, really. I don’t even know what angle to come at that from.

"Honey, you know I only hire hookers when there's nothing good on TV! But now Duck Dynasty's about to come on! Get out of the way!"

They see on TV that one of their friends, Luther, has escaped police custody and is now on the run. We then see Luther himself calling up Patrick’s character from a payphone. In the middle of a bright sunny day. With a cop car right behind him. He’s sure lucky the cops in this town are of the ‘doughnut shop’ variety rather than anything actually competent or remotely realistic!

I guess the story here is that Patrick’s character Buck is assembling a sort of low-rent Ocean’s 11 group to go and rob some dinky bank in Mexico, because really why not, you know? His first stop is to go get this guy, who likes to make his dog run on a treadmill and make the camera do ridiculous things like give us “bottom of the beer cooler” perspectives:

That's one grimy, dirty looking beer cooler. You sure you want to drink anything out of that? Oh who am I kidding...by Texas standards that's practically squeaky clean.

That’s...so stupid it’s really just sad. I don’t even really have a joke here, because frankly I can’t form coherent thoughts when I’m being shown a camera POV from a dog’s water bowl:

Because if you can't simulate being eaten by an ugly dog in your movie, you've really just wasted an opportunity.

Or a perspective shot from the eyes of a guy doing push ups!

Yeah, a shot of his crotch and legs was really good and necessary. You get an A+.

I realize it’s cool to be all artsy and shit with your directing, and there are some directors who can do really clever shots like this. But...oh, hell, what do I care? Just put your camera in a fucking washing machine next time, you’ll get a really good POV shot from that when you turn it on and film it!

There’s also this jackass named Ray Bob, who is so clumsy he nearly destroys the security guard room he’s setting up when Buck surprises him:

Because, you know, a guy who’s that clumsy is always good to have around on a bank robbery job. I’m also inviting my paraplegic friend and pyromaniac friend who tends to start fires whenever she gets nervous. That’ll really be a good bank robbing team! Make sure to wear all pink and have bells attached to your shoes too. That will truly make it an awesome bank robbery.

They end up staying in some shitbag hotel and watching porn, to which actual time in the film is taken to show - yes, a movie that sinks so low as to actually have characters watching porn as a featured thing in the runtime that takes up minutes of your life.

Nothing gets him off like watching porn with a group of other sweaty, morally questionable middle aged men.

The snuff tapes from Vacancy DO make good hotel room viewing, I guess.

Money was spent putting this moment on screen. You could’ve spent that money feeding starving children or donating to charity or even paying for a bucket at Target so you could dump ice water on your head. And you did this. You absolute waste of life.

Then we get a scene where Luther, while coming down to meet them, gets his truck broken down due to an unexpected visitor:

Get that Halloween mask from K-Mart out of my face.

He goes into the Titty Twister bar from the first one and finds Danny Trejo still working there, even though I could’ve sworn he died in the last movie, not to mention that other little detail - what was it again? Oh yeah - the friggin’ bar blew up!

Gee, I wonder how that reconstruction process went - did they just rebuild during the night only? Was there a big conflict between doing vampire-y stuff like killing people and drinking blood, and doing REALLY IMPORTANT shit like rebuilding a bar?

"Hi, I'm Danny Trejo. I have no standards for what I appear in. At all."

For that matter, why even rebuild it? Was it absolutely vital for the vampires to have some shitty bar to call their home base? I mean, I guess it DOES allow you to have more sequels to this franchise. And cover up the fact that you couldn’t get George Clooney to come back for this one.

So because the movie can’t think of any way to move its own plot forward that isn’t complete fucking nonsense, Luther refuses the offer his friends give to come pick him up, and instead just accepts a ride from Trejo, who is a guy he never met before at a shitty, sleazy bar in the middle of nowhere in a country he isn’t familiar with. Were you literally just born yesterday?

Yes, apparently.

It turns out the bat he hit was actually a vampire, who appears out of nowhere in the desert and, surprise, is in league with Trejo. How did he survive being hit by a car and trapped inside the engine? I know being a vampire gives you some super strength or some shit, but that’s pushing it. They turn Luther into a vampire too rather than just straight up killing him, which makes sense because again, the movie wouldn’t be able to go on otherwise!

Then we see another incredibly important scene with that one guy having sex with some random woman we’ve never seen before. It’s okay though, because we see HER purpose in the film afterward: to take a shower and be attacked by a bat in a long, drawn out scene that results in her turning into a vampire too! But mostly the shower thing.

That's how all women shower in reality - in ways that exclusively make them look sexy and hot for an audience they're not supposed to know is there. Great realism, movie.

The other guy gets turned into a vampire too, and so now they have an entire team of vampires waiting to prey on unsuspecting victims. So what are they gonna do - take over the hotel and turn it into an awesome vampire coven? Turn more people into vampires? Turn more people into food for vampires? Or maybe just rob a fucking bank like they were planning to in the first place.

Yup - you heard it right. They actually just go ahead with the bank robbery plan like nothing happened. I’m sorry, did you just forget what kind of fucking movie you were making?! I admit the idea of a bank robbery movie with vampires MIGHT be cool in a pulp sort of way, but come on! These guys are turned into vampires, don’t question a thing and just go about the robbery like nothing happened? What kinda stinking rotten manure is that?! What’s wrong with you? That’s really the best you could come up with?

Turn the camera right side up, you dipshit. What is this, a Ulli Lommel production?

I mean...come on, seriously? You’re vampires. You don’t need all this secrecy and sneaking around. Just fucking break some shit and steal whatever you want. What does a vampire need money that much for anyway? You’ll be sleeping when all the Hot Topic stores are open. Not like you’ll be able to go and refill your cache of black mascara and pseudo-gothy looking capes that easily.

Oh, and we really needed this POV shot from the lock being turned around in circles:

Come one, come all; ride the tilt o' whirl!

Thanks a lot...ya jackasses.

Then we get a scene where Buck figures out most of his friends have been turned into vampires. For some reason he gets really tense and angry about this - oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know a fucking bank robber had such high-class morals as to care whether his team was human or not. You still got the money, you idiot; just take your share and worry about it later - not like the vampires will be able to follow you once the sun comes up anyway.

But the cops arrive too, and Buck gets arrested while trying to warn the cops about vampires. It’s really odd how quick Buck just accepts the fact that vampires exist. He doesn’t even blink an eye, consider any other options or seem surprised at all. Was he just always suspicious that vampires MIGHT exist and this just validated his insane paranoid delusions?

We then get a long, long, looooooooooooooong battle scene between the vampires and cops in which they fight, fight and….fight some more. It’s indescribably boring and makes watching your dad file taxes seem exciting.

I don’t even know how you make a fight scene this boring - at the very least, the action scene can be the saving grace in a shitty movie like this. But proving that nobody really gave a crap about what they were doing in this thing, even the action is boring, overdone and overlong. The film suffers from this problem any time it tries to put something “exciting” on screen, as I already talked about with the “bat attack” scenes earlier - to compensate for having little to no other ideas or points of interest in the film, it just stretched out the fight scenes to a bloated extent. Well, I can see the fucking stretch marks, assholes.

We get the most convenient eclipse in the world, right as the sun is coming up, allowing the fight scene to go on even longer. AAAAAHHHH!

"Uh, hi, yeah, I'm the most convenient and plot-pandering eclipse ever made. Sorry to budge in, but the poorly written script says I have to."

We then learn several cool things, like that signs are perfectly good weapons for vampires to use in a fight, because it's not like they have super strength or magic powers or anything:

"Yield!"

Also, whoever thought this was a good idea for an action shot - you only see their shadows through the entire action sequence - needs to be Indian burned:

I didn't know the Shadowboxing championships were in town.

But finally, after what seems like an eternity of this bland nonsense, we finally see all the vampires killed off. Buck makes friends with the sheriff who just lets him go despite the fact that he committed a crime. So there’s a real-world application for ya - if you’re planning on robbing a bank, just kill some vampires nearby. That will get you off the hook.

Otherwise, this movie is the pits. Bad characters, annoying camerawork, no real story or direction and a complete waste of the ‘vampire bank heist’ concept. This movie was not only bad; it flaunted its badness, as if somehow proud of its ceaseless, unrelenting idiocy - it constantly just paraded its badness in front of your face without even trying to hide it. It's seriously a test of patience and sanity to watch any of this thing, as there is absolutely nothing in it resembling quality filmmaking. It is one of the most irritating, asinine and ridiculous things I've ever seen.

Oh well. This movie blows chunks and I'm still a vampire. I'll have to consult my therapist about it.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Month of Terror: Dracula II: Ascension (2003)

My only explanation for this movie is that the people who made Dracula 2000 looked at their movie and said, “Hey, this isn’t near nonsensical, stupid and silly enough yet! Let’s see what we can do about that!” And thus THIS.

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Jason Scott Lee, Jason London

Website: http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=dracula+II

Really, I’m at a loss for words. Dracula II, the movie that even Gerard Butler was too good for, is just a spectacle of horrible characters, ridiculous story elements that come out of nowhere and a lack of any logic. It’s a movie that would crumble at the first sign of any kind of logic. Does that sound good to you? I’d rather be eaten by a WALRUS than watch this garbage again so you know it’s going to be an interesting ride…

We start off with a lady in the Czech Republic doing one of her nightly ‘run around in a fancy white gown for no reason’ sessions. She’s getting chased around by the master of walking slowly, this Bruce Lee rip-off!

Doo dee doo...just taking a stroll out here; not like running would get my goal accomplished faster or anything! Pfft. Jogging is for losers!

No, really, he’s a Bruce Lee rip-off. Sounds like a stirring resume to me, too; stick him in the movie for the rest of the runtime!

So it turns out she’s a vampire and also has a clone of herself, and they both bite him a little before he kills them, thus setting up the central conflict for this oh-so-endearing and deep character…yeah, not really; we just switch to a scene with this cripple named Lowell giving the shortest speech ever delivered in a college classroom about how death is inevitable. I guess he’s famous for 5-second speeches…

Then we get some more amazing character development as our heroes, among them a chick named Elizabeth, who is dating Lowell the crazy cripple man, a black guy named Kenny and his girlfriend, Not-Paris-Hilton. She probably has another name but that’s all I’m calling her.

Yeah I buy this about as much as I buy...well, any other obvious chick only with a guy for his money.

After that we see Elizabeth working at the hospital with this guy Luke, played by Jason London. I don’t really have a joke about him, but rest assured, he’s a terrible actor, and five minutes into this performance and you’ll want to shoot him. They’re concerned because a body came in, burnt and scarred to all hell after being hung from a cross at dawn. His organs are white, and even though there are plenty of other explanations, Luke says he thinks it’s a vampire. At first it seems like he’s joking, but no; he really thinks it’s a vampire right off the bat. Was he just waiting for some opportunity to spout out the most ludicrous conclusion he could think of? It’s like some dumbass kid in elementary school who just talked for the sake of talking. This movie’s dialogue is on the level of annoying kids prying for attention. I’ll let that sink in for a second…aaaaand done.

So while in the real world this would have been met with derision and scorn from all parties, luckily Luke has found the dumbest person in existence with Elizabeth, as she just eats it up and goes along with it. She gets bitten by accident and doesn’t tell anyone, probably because she’s an idiot. Then Luke gets a phone call from a “mysterious third party” offering them a lot of money for the body. Lowell for some reason, can’t imagine why, says it’s a good idea that they take it. Can’t possibly be that he wants to heal his crippled body, can it? Nah. Luke freaks out and gets Elizabeth to help move the body in secret, because that’s really legal, right as the slow-walking priest/Bruce Lee rip-off comes and tries to find it.

If this jackass walked any slower he'd be going backwards. Christ.

And seriously, how does this guy arrive on time for anything? He walks SO DAMN SLOW. It’s just nuts. He’s worse than Michael Myers and Jason combined. All the other characters are doing stuff and running around like mad, and this guy is just kind of walking around slowly, like he doesn’t even know where he’s going. Kind of hard to take that very seriously…

Meanwhile, Luke, Elizabeth, Kenny and Not-Paris-Hilton are transporting the body to Lowell’s parents’ old house, which is big and gothic-like. Like any sane person would do, they put the body in a bathtub of blood and expect it to come back to life. Is this sounding like your last really screwed up house party in college yet?

Not-Paris-Hilton's real line here is "Maybe it needs to be virgin blood?" God,  the way these people think scares me.

So yeah it eventually DOES come back to life, despite all evidence to the contrary that it would probably just be an insane pot-fueled idea that even Jay and Silent Bob would blush at, and we get the ensuing garble of incoherent scenes:

Nope, sorry; not buying her falling out the window like that. She was barely even shoved at all. Did the floors just get polished with grease beforehand?

Looks like they're trying to give Grandpa a bath again...it never works out the way it's supposed to, dammit!

Take THAT bathtub!

Oh and then this guy shows up! Who is he? I don’t know. He says he’s the money!

Oh yeah, well...I'm the ATM.

Pardon my French but WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? And I don’t just mean this action scene; I mean the ENTIRE GODDAMN MOVIE UP UNTIL THIS POINT. It’s like they just threw out ten pages of the script explaining this spastic gibberish and just left us to pick up the pieces! How did they know what to do with the vampire? Did they really just have all these specific rituals waiting for the very, very specific off-chance they could bag a vampire? For that matter, why would they just jump to the conclusion that the dead body they found was a vampire? Remember, this takes place only a few hours after the first movie ended. Vampires were, as far as the viewer has been led up to this point, not a common phenomenon. It makes about as much sense as a character randomly deciding she fully, seriously believes in Bigfoot; you might as well just make that into a movie next.

Not to mention the whole subplot with Christopher Plummer’s daughter becoming a vampire hunter or whatever. Where did that go? It’s completely ignored now. What’s the logic with this? Did the writers just decide they didn’t like their own movie? What? WHAT?

After that they move Dracula to another location where they all start doing experiments on him, draining his blood only to find out he’s severely dehydrated and is running out.

This was actually how the new movie 'The Debt' was supposed to turn out. But the filmmakers quickly decided it was such a stupid idea, they sent it back to the past apparently, and that's why we now have this pile of heinous vampire-droppings here.

Wait a second, didn’t Christopher Plummer in the first movie drain Dracula’s blood for YEARS even though Dracula was all but mummified? And now like an hour of burning in the sunlight and he’s suddenly drained entirely? WHAT SENSE DOES THAT MAKE. This is seriously mind-numbing. What other contradictions are they going to throw at us? Let’s just get them all over with now.

Okay, so there’s this one part where a priest played bafflingly by Roy Scheider from Jaws (what a career downgrade!) tells him that Dracula has to be forgiven by God, although in the other movie it was the exact other way around…ahh, continuity errors, what a surprise from this movie. You can’t see my face right now, but it’s forever in a mask of stoic unimpressed-ness while watching this.

Now that that’s over with, we can get onto more important things like watching Kenny inject the vampire blood into himself even though a) he was never shown to be a power-hungry or mean-spirited character before this and b) it turns him evil automatically, which never happened in the other movie…OK, OK, done ranting about continuity errors; both of these movies suck anyway. He goes out and mugs at the camera a lot:

Save it for the Fright Night remake...

…and then bags himself his first vampire whore!

Just to add 15 minutes of runtime to the movie, I suppose...

Some more stuff happens, and we find out that the vampire chick killed her own cat. Well now that this movie has animal violence I just can’t stand behind it anymore. I declare that this movie now officially sucks!

So she gets killed and then Kenny gets killed too…ah just play it:

After that? Time for some good old hallucinations! Although this time they’re more like rejected Twilight scenes rather than Tim Burton rip-offs. At least director Patrick Lussier is experimenting more! We also hear Dracula’s stunning monologue skills as he lists off all of his various names: Nosferatu, Judas, Vlad Tepes, El Hazarid, and other stuff that I'm sure they spent a lot of time on Wikipedia looking up.

Peter Griffin, George Carlin, Snoopy, Bill Cosby, Ozzy Osbourne...

It’s revealed then that Lowell was fooling them the whole time into thinking there was a third party who wanted Dracula when really it was just him wanting to heal his crippled body…I don’t even get this subplot; what difference does that deception make, anyway? We’re supposed to be surprised that the cripple who’s been ordering everyone around the entire movie and has the most direct, clear-as-day motive for experimenting with unusual medical practices, actually wants Dracula for himself? I thought that was just a given. But I guess that means I don’t have the intellectual prowess necessary to enjoy this masterpiece. So for the rest of the review I will now be praising this film.

No real reason for posting this except that it's yet another Funny Face in a Horror Movie.

We see the movie’s undying devotion to bloodcurdling terror as Dracula slaughters Lowell and that weird British guy, even ripping off the latter’s face whole! But it’s OK, as he comes back as a vampire somehow despite that. I’d say the following image is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life, but that wouldn’t even come close to doing it justice. In fact, it’s downright poetic:

.............well I think that speaks for itself.

Isn’t that just a peachy image? And what’s this – they’re defeating him by shoving a water bottle of holy water through his facial opening? How inventively creative and fresh! And I don’t just mean fresh as in, it was incredibly fresh water either!

That ought to be in a Zephyrhills ad or something. "Zephyrhills Crystal Clear water! It kills mutated and deformed vampires!"

Then we get some truly awesome battle scenes between Dracula and the slow-walking priest, who finally caught up to the movie I guess, but it’s OK since they were just building suspense. It doesn’t matter that it was completely silly – I was just missing the point before. We get some stock footage from the first movie and somehow that really pisses the slow-walking priest off, perhaps because he never liked the first film either. Clearly this one is superior in every way.

So yeah, all in all, I liked Dracula II. The characters were wonderfully colored, the storyline was only confusing if you’re an idiot who needs everything spelled out for you and the acting was unparalleled. So all in all, if you didn’t like this movie, you clearly have no idea about anything good in cinema. After all, if a guy with no face with a water bottle stuck in his head isn’t art, WHAT IS?

…now that I think about it, this was a pretty dumb movie after all.

NIC CAGE MONTH: Vampire's Kiss (1988)

Director: Robert Bierman

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Maria Conchita Alonso

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098577/

"Alva, there is no one else in this entire office that I could possibly ask to share such a horrible job. You're the lowest on the totem pole here, Alva. The lowest. Do you realize that? Every other secretary here has been here longer than you, Alva. Every one. And even if there was someone here who was here even one day longer than you, I still wouldn't ask that person to partake in such a miserable job as long as you were around. That's right, Alva. It's a horrible, horrible job; sifting through old contract after old contract. I couldn't think of a more horrible job if I wanted to. And you have to do it! You have to or I'll fire you. You understand? Do you? Good."

-Nic Cage, giving one of his famous pep speeches to his secretary 

Okay, seriously. Whatever crack addled minds in 1989 made this movie were clearly prophesizing Nicolas Cage’s eventual rise to Internet stardom. I mean almost every time he freaks out in this movie, it’s begging to become an internet meme. This movie isn’t even that good! It’s pretty much just ‘watch Nic Cage freak out, laugh at it, and then wait for the next time while being bored at the rest of the movie’s plodding pace.’ The soundtrack is a late 80s synth nightmare and the production values look more like something out of the 70s - it’s like Nic Cage’s equivalent to Hercules in New York.

Yes folks...this is Vampire's Kiss.

I mean, this shit is just insane. The basic plot is as follows: Nic Cage is the head of some literary editing company or something, and he loves to harass his secretary Alva, who quite literally lives in fear of him by the end of the movie. He starts going crazier and crazier in his loneliness in the urban city setting, and when he sleeps with a strange hooker (who comes back again and again to suck more of his blood as the movie goes on), he starts to think he is a vampire, thus going even crazier and getting even more violent with his secretary. At the end of the film, he is unceremoniously murdered with a stake in his dilapidated and wrecked apartment by the brother of the terrified secretary.

The two plots (the vampire thing and the secretary thing) don’t really even make a lot of sense together. It’s kind of like the writers were halfway through the script, coming up with these clever metaphors for struggling in life, when the director approached them and said, “Hey, we just got Nicolas Cage to sign on for this. You don’t really have to write anymore. We’ll just have him jump all over the place and scream a lot, and you can still get paid for the half script you did write.”

The writers then had their eyes physically replaced with dollar signs, and that was that.

The movie’s pace is pretty flawed, as I said before, as it’s just too slow and too plodding when Nic Cage isn’t absolutely losing his shit. You’re literally just sitting there watching this movie waiting for the next freak out, because the parts where he isn’t freaking out are just flat out boring. The dialogue isn’t that good and the story is a bit stale – nothing that wasn’t done better by Cemetery Man or American Psycho in years to come. The sole reason to watch this movie is for Nic Cage.

But isn’t that what NIC CAGE MONTH is for, I ask you?

Let’s go through some of the highlights, shall we?

Look at all that rage! Man, that’s insane. And the way he calms down right at the end to say “And you call yourself a psychiatrist”…how can you not be TOTALLY CONVINCED this man is not completely insane, on heavy drugs, or both? He’s just so into this.

“THERE YOU ARE!” I didn't know people his age still got that enthusiastic about hide and seek...

We’ve all had moments like this, haven’t we? Those moments where you think you’re a vampire so you run down the street screaming about it and…oh, what’s that? Nobody’s had those but me? Oh, well OK then.

I just love how obsessed he is with his secretary and with finding those files. It should be sad and scary how creepy he is with stalking her and all, but this is just SO HAMMY. There’s literally nothing else on his warped mind but finding her and making her do the job she’s already trying so hard to do. Imagining it from her point of view is both funnier and even more terrifying. One of which may be more prominent, depending on your point of view.

So, yeah, I think that’s evidence enough. The Vampire’s Kiss is batshit insane. If you like Nic Cage, this is mandatory, but just don’t go in expecting much more than a silly curiosity. Now, I'm off to drink more blood and work on my freaking out in front of the camera.

"It's a very IMPORTANT job!"

Review: Queen of the Damned (2002)

Director: Michael Rymer

Starring: Stuart Townsend, Aaliyah

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238546/

Oh my GOD this was a horrible movie! Just…ugh. UGH. On every level! I can’t think of a better way to introduce this that won’t end in violence to someone, maybe even myself, so let’s just dive right into the crack-induced destruction of everything cinema worked so hard to establish, Queen of the Damned.

The film starts off with the credits, which are played over some shots of statue heads and other Gothic looking stuff, and it quickly goes into our first bit of pretentiously ball-aching narration by lead wannabe transvestite Stuart Townsend, playing here the Vampire Lestat. It starts off pretty typically, giving us the usual spiel about the vampire’s immortality being all fun and games until you realize you’re alone in the world. You know, the usual soul-searching diatribes given. But where it really gets, um, interesting, is what he says immediately after this. He says, in a nutshell, that he wants to become a rock star.

…what? WHAT? I’m sorry, there aren’t enough WHAT’s to go around for that sentence! The logic used is just insane. A vampire is lonely so he becomes a rock star? What kind of lunatic thought that up?! It’s like saying…a werewolf is conflicted because he can’t control his instincts, so he becomes a milk delivery man. Frankenstein’s monster was jealous of other peoples’ ability to feel and emote with each other, so he decided to invent a new type of candy. What’s the connection here? In what fucked up parallel universe does this make sense?

Oh, fuck it, so he goes and…doesn’t waste any time, I guess, as he finds the first shitty ass rock band he can come across and tells them he’s joining them. I love the editing in this scene especially; like when Lestat ‘teleports,’ it’s more like they just turned the camera off and everyone switched places while the director snorted some more coke. Editing so bad you’d swear it was out of a home movie. And Stuart Townsend is just a miracle, isn’t he? It’s like he didn’t even have any direction besides ‘play the most generic pretty-boy vampire ever and make sure to have a condescending smirk on your face and roll your eyes upward at all times.’ I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a worse caricature of every single damned girly-boy, gothy, depressed vampire ever made. He looks the part and he sounds the part, with every bit of smarmy, slick arrogance you'd imagine. And his lines, too. Garbage like "My black little heart" or "There is nothing but the cold, dark wasteland of eternity." Oh, yes, speak to me, great lord of all that is whiny and sissy!

Well, I'd love to say this surprised me, but frankly if Lady Gaga can get popular, this isn't much of a longshot.

Then the director gets bored with that scene, I guess, and jumps forward to a random time when the band is now famous for having a vampire on vocals. Through a lot more directionless narrations that the movie assumes are interesting, we see him getting two random hot chicks at his mansion for…some unexplained reason…and he got them there by doing…some other unexplained thing. I’m glad this movie is so thorough. They try to have sex with him and stuff, but then are, for some reason, surprised when he starts crawling on the wall and then jumps down to “taste” them. Gee, you go to the house of a guy who at least claims to be a vampire and then are surprised when he does something like this? I’d say that makes you FUCKING MORONS! But that’s just my opinion.

And then…a flashback! Because that makes sense! Because the flow of this movie wasn’t incoherent and disjointed enough, we get a random flashback 20 minutes into the movie about the origins of this character. Do you people know anything about telling a story, about coherent narrative flow? What sense does this flashback make, at all? Sigh…okay, so basically the flashback tells us that this other vampire named Marius invaded Lestat’s home one night over 200 years ago and turned him into a vampire. Then, he…oh, wait, we’re switching scenes again; guess the filmmakers decided they didn’t want to take their ADHD pills again.

Now we’re watching a young woman watching one of the music videos of the band fronted by Lestat. She goes into work the next day and tells a board of people in important looking suits – apparently some kind of paranormal research group – that she found hidden messages in one of the band’s songs that leads people to a vampire coven in England…I’m sorry, what? Personally I think the parents whose kids committed suicide because of Judas Priest songs had a better case. Apparently this group has Lestat’s diary in their library somehow? I don’t know, they just needed an excuse to show the flashback.

…and then back to the flashback again! We see Lestat going into this dark chamber and playing a violin really fast, which somehow wakes up this ancient ‘mother of all vampires’ called Akasha, or something, but not all the way. Then Marius plays some kinky bondage games with Lestat – don’t ask me – and leaves randomly, with no explanation given. Apparently a lot of time passes, Lestat…is magically untied somehow…and then wanders the Earth, convinced that he will be alone forever because this one guy left him. What a pussy.

So because she read the diary, the woman, named Jesse, decides she has to see more. So she goes on a plane to England to find the vampire coven. Why? What motivation does she have to do this? I don’t know. I’m just going to assume she got majorly into Twilight a few years after this. It makes sense enough. In the vampire bar she gets into trouble with a bunch of hungry, horny vampires and is saved by Lestat, who happened to be there. This is an excruciating scene with a ton of really, really bad attempts at the whole ‘forlorn, loveless vampire’ cliché shoehorned in with all the articulation of a sledgehammer crashing down on the window of your car. They exchange ominous dialogue in low, whispery voices about how she knows his pain and how she thinks she knows him well, and then the tired, trite scene mercifully ends. God, this movie is lame. It’s like every horrible middle-schooler’s emo-vampire phase multiplied by a thousand and translated into film. It’s just painful beyond belief.

She comes back later to give him the journal, and also because she wants him to take her out and make her a vampire, too. Again, no logical reason why this character thinks this way; she just kind of does. They go out and Lestat scares away some lowlife trying to attack a woman, only to attack her himself.

"I find you sexy because fat 14 year old girls would, and this movie needs to sell sex."

"Is she okay?"
Well...not anymore she isn't.

Meanwhile it turns out that Akasha, that vampire queen from earlier, is apparently awakened again by music, even though it was never explained why she fell asleep again after the first time. What’s up with these vampires being awakened by music, anyway? When was that part of the legend? It’s not that I really mind messing around with the canon, but…this just doesn't make sense. Why was she turned to stone anyway? Why does music of all things wake her up? What kind of music is needed? Will any kind do, or are there certain kinds that work better? There are so many questions here you could just fill a goddamn phone book with all of them and still not have any answers!

So at the concert full of songs written by the douchemonkey from KoRn (and no, I’m actually not making that up; it is true), Akasha attacks and sort of kidnaps Lestat away while Jesse and everyone else is watching. Boy, they must feel ripped off, man. I’d ask for my goddamn money back if I was there. Not that I would ever go to a concert with music from the guy who fronts KoRn sung by a feminine, prissy-goth-vamp poser with a voice like a cat thrown into a cheese grater:

Making even KoRn look dignified. That's impressive!

I actually have self respect. Even if it is diminishing every second I watch this.

Akasha and Lestat talk for a while in low, spooky voices, because there is no other mode of discourse in this film at all, and then we get…uh, well, look at these pictures:

I mean WOW, you thought this movie couldn’t get worse? It just plummeted off a cliff with an anvil attached to its back; that’s how far it just dropped. A stylized sex scene, coming randomly out of nowhere with no warning or segueway, with the two of them reimagining American Beauty’s artsy bathtub full of rosebuds thing. Except here it’s done with all the taste and style of a three month old trash bin! And all the while with horrendous, ass-felching 90s-style nu metal playing in the background. ISN’T THIS JUST SO USEFUL TO THE FILM? I can’t imagine it without THIS scene! Ugh, somebody PLEASE kill me now.

So I guess the movie kind of forgets the whole concert thing, even though that was what it was building up to this entire time, and just throws in a new plot in the last twenty minutes. God, what the fuck, man? Can’t you just stick to one central script and plotline? You’re breaking me here, movie! You’re really pushing me to my limits! From what I can tell, there’s this group of ancient vampires who are in this weird garden-mansion place that apparently Jesse visited a lot as a kid, and has now somehow found again. These guys are all trying to get rid of Akasha, who poses some kind of vague threat to mankind.

Akasha, meanwhile, has killed a bunch of random people and littered them all over the yard of Lestat’s house, which seems to piss him off, because I guess he’s a good vampire now. The two of them go – without Lestat putting on a shirt for some reason; guess they needed the extra fanservice to keep the brainless goth girls watching – to fight those ancient vampires. Akasha gives some generic speech about how mankind is a disgrace and how they should be destroyed, and after watching an hour and twenty minutes of THIS GARBAGE I am inclined to agree.

So Akasha tells Lestat to prove his loyalty to her by killing Jesse. They face one another…the shot dissolves into a very similar shot of them facing each other, from a different angle…and then he bites her. Then he bites Akasha’s arm, too, because this movie really wants to go for the whole ridiculous sexual angle on the vampires. But it turns out he’s just faking it the whole time! And then both Akasha and the viewer are gang raped by silly cartoony special effects:

They kind of eat her alive, which begs the question as to why everyone was so afraid of her…she got killed in like 5 minutes when they actually confronted her; it seemed pretty damn easy! Why were they making such a big deal out of her? She turns into an oil-spill survivor, and then erodes into dust in an extremely over dramatic display of mediocre special effect jerking off that probably cost more money than it did to pay for the writers of the film. Jesse gets turned into a vampire, the soundtrack vomits out some more garbage and I want to gouge my ears out.

I mean, man, this is a miserable piece of cinema. Queen of the Damned is a movie with no reason to exist beyond causing pain. Pure, unadulterated, gluttonous pain, straight from the fiery pitchforks of down below. There is no logic here, no real plot, no anything that isn’t covered in a slimy layer of disgusting music and even more disgusting pretension as it tries to make us think these vampires are SO COOL. This is a movie that exists solely to make ugly black-mascara clad pre-teen girls with no lives or boyfriends squeal – “Oh, it’s so sexy and erotic!” Literally, that’s the only reason this sewer scum ever got popular. Pure wet-dream fuel for people who aren’t going anywhere in life. Fuck that. This shit’s the worst and I can't see any defensible reason that anyone would enjoy it.