Although he was only 25 when he starred in this confused (and confusing)
horror comedy drama, Nicolas Cage was actually already well on his way
to stardom, thanks to quirky lead turns in indie hits such as Raising
Arizona and Moonstruck.
It’s easy to see why Vampire’s Kiss caught his eye though – the
part of Peter Loew, an arrogant asshole literary agent whose world unravels
when he thinks he’s been bitten by a predatory female vampire,
requires almost constant bug-eyed scenery chewing and over-the-top flapping
of the limbs, two skills which had served Cage well in the past.
Presumably intended as a satire on the vapid emptiness of the Eighties
yuppie mentality, and the hollow sexual encounters that came with it,
the movie swiftly nosedives from well-intentioned commentary to howlingly
bad farce for one simple reason: Peter Loew is an utter prick.
Even before his almost-certainly imaginary bite from the vamp triggers
his mental collapse he treats Alva, his dowdy secretary, like dirt -
forcing her to carry out mundane and pointless tasks and revelling in
his power over her. Once he begins his slide into paranoid mania – eventually
wearing sunglasses indoors, wearing a set of plastic fangs and sleeping
under his couch – he just gets worse, escalating from goofy quirks
to genuine malice and back again, all the while complaining to his therapist
about how his life sucks.
While there is some amusement to be found in Cage’s deliriously
hammy performance toward the end of the film, when he enters the final
stages of his psychosis and begins acting like a silent movie star in
the 1922 Nosferatu, this is cancelled out by his oh-so-wacky rape of
Alva and a scene in which he kills a woman in a nightclub by actually
biting through her jugular vein. If there’s a point being made
in the midst of all this misplaced misogyny, a sort of mock-horror riff
on American Psycho’s violent nonchalance perhaps, it’s lost
in the jarring tonal shifts and Cage’s cartoon performance.
There are two reasons to stick with it to the end credits though. First
is the infamous scene in which Cage eats a live cockroach, supposedly
doing so in the grips of his imagined blood lust but clearly crunching
the damn thing as quickly as possible before lurching off screen – presumably
to spew it back up again. This method acting moment gave him more kudos
in Hollywood than the movie itself. Second is the final scene in which
Alva’s brother enters Peter’s apartment in order to smack
some sense into him with a tire iron. Finding Peter distraught and suicidal
under his couch-coffin, the vigilante brother does the decent thing – and
rams a shard of broken wood through his chest.
The movie ends with the
ventilated Nicolas Cage dying just as dawn breaks over Manhattan. Unlike
every other cinematic vampire ever, this one thankfully didn’t
rise from the grave again.
Need to know: The slinky seductress who Peter is convinced
has turned him vampiric was played by Jennifer Beals, forever famous
as “that
Flashdance chick”. Keep your eyes open for David Hyde Pierce as
well, best known as Niles Crane in Frasier. Vampire’s Kiss marked
only his fifth screen appearance - a tiny background role as “Theater
Guy”.
Availability: Vampire’s Kiss is out on DVD in
the UK and US.
