"The question is: what can save us from spreading the blight in ever widening circles?"
(Before I start a review proper, I should note there's at least one point here where Lili Taylor manages to time travel so she can cosplay in 1995 as Tommy Wiseau (black hair and black glasses and all)).
This is one of the unsung great vampire films and among Ferrara's best, and this is almost despite what is at times a pretentious script. But on the other hand, the setting is obsentibly college classes where intellect is first things first. Ferrara's direction is what makes this stand out, and not just black and white cinematography (which does rock quite amazingly). It's what we first see here and what he periodically returns to throughout: atrocity.
We open on images of the Vietnam war, all of those bodies that were laid to total waste. Taylor is the only one really shaken by it in the class, and a brief conversation about the responsibility of this is the only thing that precedes the first attack (one of a couple of key scenes for the amazing Annabella Sciorra). What is true evil and how evil is just what it is and can't be stopped is inherent to what the film is going on about. At the same time, I dont think that Ferrara means to show addicts *as* evil... At least I would hope not
No, the addiction at heart is how it transforms people completely inside out, and the uncontrollable nature of it - the Cypress Hill melody of "I want to get hiiiigh" comes up repeatedly" - makes people do things they otherwise wouldn't do; even down to Taylor's look in black and black glasses makes her turned into some punk crossbreed of Lou Reed and Patti Smith. But at the same time theres so much complexity to how the movie is constructed and the ideas baked into it: vampirism is questioned itself in ways I haven't seen outside of Romero's Martin.
When Christopher Walken's downtown NUC loft dwelling vampire brings in Taylor midway through to try to get some sense into her, he bites and drinks her blood anyway. That was something different... Though then again, Walken may be just so apart from everyone else in the WORLD he can do that, but I digress.
I think a question to think about watching this is: does an addiction bring out the evil that was in someone all along - the whole "tell me to go" as a come on while that predator really won't go, a Nazi tactic coincidentally to all the holocaust images Taylor looks at as she ponders in narration the nature of good and evil (and the lack of the former) - or is the addiction a way that evil can be... Justified? So many millions of people have been slaughtered throughout the world, and there had to be an addictive element to it, the whole "following orders" whether its nazis or regular garden variety soldiers. But there's more thematically to the meat here.
Or, to put it another way, after a while when something is repeated one doesn't see the acts as evil. Evil, after all, requires some moral equivalency, for someone to see that something is *wrong*. What if its not seen as wrong? If one is on the prowl to bite some f***ers necks, wheres "evil" is just seen as having a fun time? Cinematically, this all culminates for Ferrara with a post-graduation party for Taylor's character where she and the others she and Sciorra have bitten invite a lot of others and chaos ensues (featuring Edie Falco no less).
But it's a sinister kind of chaos, how it"s shot and edited into this carefully controlled frenzy. On a physical level, what makes this movie so astonishing is how the ideas, which are heady and full of existential questions (Sartre and Beckett are name checked, and almost as a kind of joke Walken mentions those books have the lessons for vampires to take in, like they were written for people who would live forever, lol) is that the filmmaking brings out those ideas into raw force.
This is a dirty Manhattan/New York City movie (right before it wasn't so dirty anymore) and both Ferrara as director and Taylor as an actor commit so wholly to it. She as Kathleen throws her whole BODY in such a way that I can only compare to Possession with Adjani. She is at times literally throwing herself this way and that, in her apartment and on the streets, and in a way she makes this to be like this fascinating unofficial double feature with Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. Emotionally, spiritually, physically, becoming so debased in a film... It should be hard to watch, but there's humanity here besides the "cool" horror black and white, and the grimy realism of the streets.
I should end this ramble by saying simply that this is a unique, genre subverting (yet embracing) trip that asks the audience to question evil and existence and humanity - or even who is sitting next to them in a theater (Walken brings this up on the newly restored Arrow blu ray and it makes sense), but they dont sacrifice all of that without giving people looking for a chilling vampire story true
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