In 1994, Neil Jordan’s take on Anne Rice’s sumptuous vampire novel managed to do the impossible and finally bring the author’s brooding, romanticized blood suckers to the big screen. The cast was stacked, the production was lush, the cast was impossibly photogenic and the ending seemed to hint that more entries from Rice’s vampire cannon was destined to take us ever deeper into her sprawling lore. And they didn’t.
For reasons I’m far too busy to research, any more entries in the so-called Vampire Chronicles stayed locked within their own, personal coffin, seemingly uninterested in coming out to play while that absurdly attractive cast all aged out and progressively became more expensive.
Then, in 2002, with the sound of a creaking casket lid, Rice’s most beloved character, the brattish, spiteful vampire, Lestat, rose from the grave to stalk his way across the screen once more. But this was not the Tom Cruise version we’d seen before and this certainly wasn’t the lush, brooding world that Neil Jordan had crafted right years earlier – no, this was Queen Of The Damned and damned is exactly how you’ll feel after watching this.
After a lengthy sleep to shake off some vampire-related lethargy, Lestat de Lioncourt awakes to the sound of nu metal pounding away in his house as a band practises their music. However, instead of banging on the ceiling and yelling at those kids to keep that bloody racket down, Lestat is entised by the music and does what we’d all do in this situation – insist on being their front man and immediately become famous for his croaky, vampire-based lyrics.
But while his Korn meets Criss Angel style of showmanship gets him groupies to feed on, his tell tale lyrics insense the vampire community who feel that this upstart punk is endangering their existence thanks to his songs shining a nu metal light on their secrets and soon they plan to kill him.
Meanwhile, Jesse Reeves, a researcher for the secret, paranormal studying society known as the Talamasca, manages to figure out that Lestat is a vampire and after getting hold of his journals, studies his life as far back as 1788 when he was first turned by Marius de Romanus. It was also back in his early days as one of the undead that his violin playing awoke Akasha, the first vampire who ever existed who at the time was chilling in the form of a statue.
While Jesse tries to track down Lestat due to her own growing obsession and the vampire community plot to storm his upcoming concert in Death Valley, Akasha rises once again in order to make Lestat her king and demand that vampires finally leave the shadows and take the world as their very own.
With the entire world in jeopardy, what will the notoriously flighty Lestat choose? His music career or a chance to rule over everything?
The problem with vampires is that when they’re in good films, the can be every bit as seductive, terrifying and tragic as their movie needs them to be with such diverse titles as Dracula, The Lost Boys, Let The Right One In and, yes, Interview With The Vampire proving my point perfectly – however, when they pop up in a bad film, they become insufferable, ridiculous things, preening, brooding and strutting around the place in an attempt to be cool and mysterious when they just look fucking silly. Of all the bad vampire movies I’ve had to sit through – be it the unhinged chaos of Blade: Trinity, the irritating whining New Moon, or the low budget clunkiness of the first From Dusk Till Dawn sequel – not a single one of them can possibly hope to manage to eclipse the sheer eyeball rolling stupidity of Queen Of The Damned.
Before I suddenly descend into dishing out the foam flecked vitriol this movies seems to be begging for like a masochist pleading to have their nuts stepped on, I suppose a bit of context is in order. Firstly, in the movie’s defence (and pay attention, because it’s the only example I’m willing to offer), it doesn’t seem to want to be a straight follow up to Interview With The Vampire as not only has the lead actor changed, but absolutely none of the other characters from that story are even mentioned during this more conventional story. Matters are immediately made worse by the fact that this film is trying to adapt two of Anne Rice’s books simultaneously by clumsily splicing both The Vampire Lestat and Queen Of The Damned together via some tremendously clunky and annoyingly long flashbacks that throw off the entire first half. Any hint of the dark romance between the main characters on Neil Jordan’s film are all but erased by some of the worse vampire acting I literally have even seen where barely contained yearning and elaborate gaslighting are instead replaced by cartoonish pouting and an alarming lack of charisma. The chief offender is Stuart Townsend, an actor who is more famous for the films he wasn’t in (he was originally cast as Aragorn, don’t you know?), who seems to have confused raw magnetism and rampaging ego for a performance that somehow feels like an embrarssing Edward Cullen parody even though that character hadn’t even been created yet. Still, he’s still better then 90% of the cast who all give the same, vacant, glassy-eyed performance whether they’re a member of the undead or not – you’d think that the vampire who created the great Lestat would be a character of great presence, but instead Vincent (The Crow: City Of Angels) Perez plays him like a bitchy middle-managenent type instead which continues the movie’s unbroken streak of making a string of immortal creatures as bland as uncooked chicken.
Much has been made of the movie featuring R&B singer Aailyah before she died in a tragic plane crash, but while she probably has more presence than anyone else in a film that also contains Paul McGann and Lena Olin, it doesn’t actually give her much to do other than sashay around in a revealing pharaoh costume and make other vampires explode in a fiery ball that makes the CGI in Blade look like fucking Avatar. Saying that the actress deserved better is something of an understatement considering her relationship with R Kelly and dying horribly young, but having this film come out posthumously while banking off her image is the very definition if being kicked when you’re down.
And yet, unbelievably, it still gets worse as battleship-sized plot holes assault you with the ferocity of a starved attack dog – if the vampires are desperate to remain secret, why the fuck do they launch their attack by storming the stage during a gargantuan music gig? The director doesn’t seem to give a shit about any of this, not when he can pretend that he’s making movie by needle dropping the Deftones in during a love scene or filming the entire movie like an over lit, poorly planned music video. And while we’re on the subject, while I don’t mind a bit of nu metal every now and then, making it the film’s entire identity means the fucking thing was horribly dated probably around three weeks after it was released.
Utterly dire, poorly made and relentlessly confounding (how can you adapt two books in one and still make it feel like nothing is happening?), Queen Of The Damned somehow contains less thrills, plot, drama and action than a lesser episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and stands as a vampire movie so toothless, it should’ve been called Queen Of The Damned Awful.
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