A VAMPIRE IS BORN

From the
“Movie Reviews From Memory”
Series

The immensely influential 1983 vampire movie, “The Hunger,” delivers an embarrassment of riches to the discriminating aficionado of cinematic abomination. In one bold stroke, the film confirmed David Bowie as our greatest pop-star thespian since The Monkees, catapulted Catherine Deneuve into the inescapable limbo of the middle-aged sex goddess, and supplied an essential rung in Susan Sarandon’s astounding scramble to superstardom. But most critically for today’s viewers, “The Hunger” provides a priceless insight into what it meant to be vulnerable, confused, undead and helplessly in love at the tail end of the second millennium.

Presaging his later work in “Top Gun,” Director Tony Scott audaciously kick-starts the movie with a long, repulsive, whacked-out monkey scene (I don’t recall any specific simian denomination being mentioned, so for the purposes of this review, I shall simply call the mischievous creature, “Big Monkey.” No offense is intended. I guess it could have been a largish chimpanzee). Big Monkey is jumping, flailing, screeching and throwing bananas, and while I’m no psychiatrist, it appeared to be more serious than your typical mid-life, pud-pulling, incarcerated-monkey depression. Frankly, it reminded me of Congressman DeLay on the floor of the House of Representatives, so perhaps hypocritical megalomaniacal dementia was involved. Moreover, Big Monkey has killed and eaten his first wife – and I know that’s usually a warning sign among moralizing conservatives on their way down the chute. Ultimately, the excitable primate collapses into a raw, nasty pile of twitching monkey meat
( " ... and I forgot my spoon!" ).

These events make no more sense to me than the Clint Eastwood films featuring Clyde the orangutan. Some might posit that I just don’t like movies with monkeys, and as a matter of fact, that’s true. Or apes. Conceivably, I suppose, the mental and physical collapse of Mr. Big Monkey could be a gratuitous, film-school metaphor for something – arranged marriage, the brutalizing effect of the penal system, or even the “Bedtime for Bonzo” administration contemporaneous with the movie’s release.

But wait a second … monkeys-vampires-right wing Republicans? On second thought, I guess it does make sense.

But more to the point, I personally did not find the scene sexually arousing, and furthermore, the monkey ratatouille really put Jeannine and me off our meat (as is our custom, we had prepared for video night with a nice bottle of Montepulciano and an antipasto of olives, peppers, head cheese and salami). Frankly, if not for the advertised soft-core lesbian action to come, we might have switched to “Poltergeist VI: Chesty Corpses in the Kitchen” right then and there.

In any case: adiós, Big Monkey, we hardly knew ye, and don’t let the door hit your backside on the way out. Happily, the chimp is out of the picture, and David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve are soon partying with a couple of young, hip club-hoppers: stroking their leather pants, licking their belly buttons, slicing open their carotid arteries and gulping down their life’s blood. Jeannine and I looked at each other and sighed in relief: pass the salami, sweetheart, and how about another splash of this tasty red?

Ever since the renaissance of modern vampire lore, when the emphasis shifted from superstitious terror to lubricious titillation, there have been a number of comforting assumptions pertaining to the topic: fangs, coffins, stakes, garlic, crucifixes, eternal lives of damnation, and so forth and so on. You might prefer Dracula or Lestat, Nosferatu or Ann Coulter, but everybody enjoys the tingly sexual frisson of seeing a young, nubile body, preferably with a white, heaving bosom, drained of its ichor by an elegant fiend. If she too ends up becoming a plasma-sucking ghoul, well then, so much the better, eh podner?

The talented Anne Rice, acknowledged doyenne of this half lit realm, takes it all too far: vampire rock stars, witches, mummies, midgets, leprechauns, and bloodthirsty bed bugs. But even worse is her carelessness with details. For example, in “Interview With a Vampire,” a family of three undead living quietly in 1700’s New Orleans requires, more or less, a round half dozen of fresh humans per day – remember, they don’t eat the meat, much less any pasta, vegetables or fruit. Hence, this isn’t gluttony, being comparable to a daily diet of six to eight quarts of hot, thick V-8 juice. So let’s do the math: three vampires killing six locals a night, 365 nights a year, lead us to approximately 2200 dehydrated Creoles per annum showing up in the public restrooms and shrubbery of New Orleans – out of a eighteenth century population of 15,000 to 20,000. And nobody notices! No wonder they call it The Big Easy!

“Mamán! Jacques found Papa’s carcass out behind the garbage cans!”

“All right, mon cher, now go wash your hands, because the crawdaddy jambalaya and dirty rice is almost ready.”

“The Hunger” bucks the traditional canon in a number of interesting ways. Perhaps most significantly, Dave and Cathy kill not with their canines but with these nifty little letter openers worn around their necks (subsequently popular with film and literary agents). They don’t care about sunshine or garlic, they don’t sleep in coffins, and a little silver crucifix isn’t going to deter them at dinnertime. The fact is, they’re not so different from any upper middle-class lawyers, stock brokers or motivational speakers living in Marin, Westchester or Boca Raton.

In addition, unlike the burgeoning vampire populations of Ms. Rice, in “Hunger,” Ms. Deneuve is the one and only, 2,000 year-old Ur-Vampire, who every few centuries or so, creates just one other bloodsucker to be her table mate. As we join them, Cathy and her present consort, David Bowie, are living an urban life of enviable, if blood-soaked, sophistication and elegance, until, and this provides the crux of the tale, Mr. Bowie abruptly begins to decline into a swiftly progressing senescence. This precipitates a belated heart to heart that goes something like this:

“What’s going on here, babe? I thought I was immortal.”

“You are immortal, darling, but …”

“But what?”

“Well, maybe I should have told you earlier, but you’re going to become repulsively old and feeble, quickly decaying into not much more than a nasty pile of skin and bones. These I shall then box up in the attic as a keepsake of our everlasting love. But, here’s the good news, dearest, technically, you will still be alive!”

“Huh! Wow! This is a lot to digest.”

“Be brave, sweetheart. It won’t be easy for me either. Remember, I haven’t been part of the singles scene since 1783.”

Ms. Deneuve neglects to tell Mr. Bowie two uncomfortable facts: first, not only will he soon look more like a cranky Jessica Tandy than a cocky Ziggy Stardust, but his blood thirst shall wax to horrifying proportions, a craving he will no longer be spry enough to satisfy (we’ve all seen the sad, old guys in the clubs in their tweed caps and ascots). And, secondly, sorry, Cathy’s a vampire, not a nursemaid. Mr. Bowie is going to end up screaming for all eternity with an insane and insatiable passion – think of Pat Robertson on gay marriage – amid dozens of other shrieking shoeboxes (another difficult conversation avoided, this one about old boyfriends) … but darling, try to remember the good times.

Meanwhile, Ms. Deneuve has her eyes on Susan Sarandon, and I don’t blame her. Do you remember Ms. Sarandon’s breakthrough role in 1981’s “Atlantic City,” where she washes her young, copious chest at the kitchen window using freshly squeezed lemon juice to rid herself of the casino clam bar smell? Sure you do. We all do!

These events set the table for the movie’s main course and dessert, and we’re next served a deliciously creepy, sugar-for-grandpa scene in which a decrepit but unhinged-with-appetite Mr. Bowie almost severs the neck of a sweet young thing with whom he and Ms. Deneuve play chamber music. Unfortunately, the girl was off limits as food, perhaps, as in lobster fishing, because of size constraints; besides which the old fellow makes a helluva mess in the music room. Ms. Deneuve is justifiably a little peevish, but I couldn’t help speculating if she hadn’t planned the whole thing, thus making it a little easier emotionally for her to box up Mr. Bowie and make a fresh start. Needless to say, Jeannine disagreed: “Men are slovenly, inconsiderate jackals!” “Yes, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.” I didn’t point out that Jeannine hadn’t picked up a toilet brush or Brillo pad since Saigon fell to the Vietcong.

There’s a very tasteful lesbian sex scene – silky chemises, scented candles, gently blowing gauze – with all the tender fondling the books say women never get enough of from their brutish men. Happily, we see none of the awful grunting, thumping, eye-bulging, bellowing of coarse epithets and penile erectile dysfunction so common to heterosexual intercourse and the “fair and balanced” reporting of Fox Network News. At the appropriate point of arousal, Ms. Deneuve daintily drinks Ms. Sarandon’s blood and, in turn, Ms. Sarandon takes a sip or two of Cathy’s. Bingo! It’s done, and off they go, hand in hand, to a kd lang concert.

Later that weekend, Ms. Deneuve is feather-dusting the reliquaries of past consorts while crooning lullabies to the horrific shrieking of unsated blood lust emanating therein. Alas, in the dreamy distraction of her new found contentment, she knocks the boxes over and thus spills rotting, twitching and generally pissed off vampire body parts everywhere. Somewhat surprisingly, considering her lifestyle, this really spooks the Queen of the Damned, and she falls over the banister to plunge four stories to the marble floor of the entry foyer, and breaks her neck. This turns out to be almost as unhealthy for the undead as it is for you and me.

In the movie’s parting shot, Ms. Sarandon, wearing a sly and secretive smile, places a new shoe box in the attic to screech in an adorable French accent until the end of time. At this point, both Jeannine and I would have enjoyed seeing the scrumptious new lady of the house in a long, soapy, slow-mo shower scene to whet our appetites, as it were, for the evening’s denouement to come. We all know the director filmed one, right? Videophiles can only hope the scene is restored on the Director’s cut DVD.

By Henry E. Panky