In honor of Friday being Nicolas Cage's birthday and the opening day of Season of the Witch, I thought I would take a look at Nick's strange movie from 1989, Vampire's Kiss.
To say that Vampire’s Kiss is a strange movie would be a pretty big understatement. It switches genres constantly, going from comedy to horror to tragedy in a matter of minutes. A friend of mine described it as a combination of American Psycho, Pans Labyrinth, and Nosferatu. But somehow, despite its wildly uneven tone and it’s moments of absurdity, Vampire’s Kiss is a superb movie that gives a brilliantly realized picture of an incredibly disturbed man.
Vampire’s Kiss follows Peter Loew, played by a young Nicolas Cage, a yuppie literary agent who is slowly going insane. He goes to his job everyday where he manipulates and abuses his immigrant secretary Alva, and then at night goes to clubs and has meaningless one night stands with different women every night. But we slowly learn that Peter is incredibly lonely and depressed, and when he is alone pretends that he is in a steady relationship (making coffee for two people in the morning, and when he realizes there’s no one else there he throws a fit). However one night one of Peter’s conquests bites his neck (or at least we think), and Peter begins to think that he’s become a vampire. This leads Peter down a frightening and tragic path towards complete madness.
Nicolas Cage gives a brilliant performance here that actually takes you by surprise. Recently Nick Cage has gotten a bad rap for some of his more recent work (The Wicker Man for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4MqTCIDKhU) and I think most people nowadays view him as a genuinely terrible actor. But I think it’s less his acting, and more so the terrible projects he takes on because he wants money so he can buy more castles. But I think his work in Vampire’s Kiss shows how great of an actor he can be. He gives such an interesting and strange performance, and clearly has no fear of looking utterly insane. For one scene in this movie where Peter eats a cockroach, Nicholas Cage actually ate real cockroaches (and he did three takes!). Out of context clips of his acting in this movie come off as silly and overdone (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68BjP5f0ccE&feature=related), but in the context of the rest of the movie his acting is both absurd and terrifying. It really makes you want to see Nick do another good movie, and not just the schlock that he puts out nowadays.
I went into Vampire's Kiss expecting nothing, but I ended up getting a lot out of it. All in all I thought that his was a terrific movie. This movie is constantly compared to American Psycho, but in many ways I think Vampire’s Kiss is superior. While Patrick Batemans illness was a commentary on the lack of individuality in yuppie culture, Kiss is simply a character study of one guy. Therefore it’s less ambitious and smaller in scale, but because of that more compact, effective, and moving. Though it isn’t for everyone, I would recommend everyone to approach this forgotten gem with an open mind and I think you’ll be surprised.
Rating: A-
"I was being stalked by a mime - silent but maybe deadly. Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of set of Bringing Out the Dead (1999) and start doing strange things. I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action and I haven't seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling."
-Nicolas Cage
