Innocent Blood (1992) – Review

When it comes to the all time king of spectacular movie concepts that didn’t quite come off, surely squatting awfully close to the throne has to be John Landis’ other contribution to the horror/comedy pantheon, Innocent Blood. After delivering what is still one of, if not the greatest werewolf movies ever made, a decade later the director tried his hand at vampires instead with an equally irreverent tone. But beyond that, Landis hit upon the truly demented idea of mixing wiseguys in with the bloodsucking to create a vampire mob movie – however, while An American Werewolf In London is rightfully hailed as a classic, it’s vampiric sibling has all been forgotten by the horror public at large.
Despite featuring a familiar array of faces in front of the camera and a concept so utterly bizarre it positively demands attention like a spoiled child, Innocent Blood all but turned to ashes at the box office which begs the inevitable question: what gives, ya mooks?

Behold mob boss Salvatore Macelli; a guy so terrifying he’s earned the rather alarming nickname of Sal the Shark – but despite his ferocious reputation and a habit of beating guys to death with toaster ovens, he’s rapidly losing lieutenants in a mob war even he can’t win. Adding to his woes is that one of his inner circle is, Joseph Gennaro, an undercover cop who, after three years, is getting awfully close to getting the evidence he needs to reel “the Shark” in once and for all. However, unbeknownst to all of them, the biggest threat to Salvatore is Maria, a solitary, petite, French woman living in Pittsburgh who harbours something of an outlandish secret.
You see, Maria is actually a vampire who operates under a surprisingly strict moral code and will only kill and drain victims of lifegiving blood if they’re irredeemable pieces of shit and soon she fixes her funky, glowing eyes on Sal. Fortunately for her, she makes her move on Salvatore when his guard in down due to Joseph’s superiors pulling him out from his cover prematurely after Maria had previously chowed down on one of Macelli’s closest guys and disguised it as a mob hit.
However, here’s where things start to go disastrously wrong. While Maria succeeds in ripping open Sal’s jugular and draining him like a carton of juice, she isn’t given a chance to sever his central nervous system to stop him coming back as a vampire and so hours later, one of the most dangerous gangsters in town wakes up on the slab with a thirst for Blood and augmented strength and senses. Needless to say, this is some pretty bad news for the city of Pittsburgh and soon Sal is on the move and exploring the pros and cons of his new abilities.
Forming an extremely tenuous truce in order to bring Macelli down (again), Maria and Joseph set out to stop the marauding mob boss; but Sal’s had something of a brainwave: why settle for made men, when they can be remade in his image…?

I have to be honest, the very concept of a mafioso becoming even more blood thirsty after a careless bite from a vampire is one of those demented movie ideas that completely and utterly floats my boat, however, while Landis manages to wring out some of those bonkers concepts to their full potential, Innocent Blood ends up being something of a frustrating, if fun ride. Firstly, despite being a proven dab hand at comedy thanks to any number of movies the director had made during the 80s, Innocent Blood just isn’t that funny. While An American Werewolf In London managed to balance laughs and scares with aplomb, the added notion of it being a gangster movie too seems too much for Landis to juggle comfortably. If this isn’t jarring enough, Innocent Blood proves to be annoyingly slow paced for a movie that seems tailor made for frenzied chaos and while you patiently wait for Landis to bring the plot up to speed, just when you think that the movie is finally haul off and go super-crazy, the bloody thing ends leaving feeling unavoidably disappointed.
It also doesn’t help that Anthony LaPaglia’s hero is kind of boring compared to all the ghoulish goobahs and wacky bloodletting that Landis sprays around and while Anne Parillaud’s vampiric Maria is suitably slinky and ferral when needs be, her French accent is so thick it manages to make most of her dialogue virtually unintelligible.

So far, so uninspiring – but despite so many drawbacks, that central notion is so goddamn alluring that not even John Landis operating at half-strength is enough to stop the coolness of vampire mobsters seeping through. Obviously, Landis backs up his visuals American Werewolf style, with neatly themed songs such as That Old Black Magic and I’ve Got You Under My Skin and there’s plenty of TVs cheekily showing old monster movies seemingly everywhere you look. Conversely, there’s a cadre of cameoing horror personalities lurking in the cast such as Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, Tom Savini, Linnea Quigley and Forrest J. Ackerman to keep geeks like me happily pointing at the screen every so often which adds to the fun.
However, it’s with the mob stuff and the vampire trimmings where Innocent Blood finally takes flight the former is massively catered for with an appropriately slicked back cast that includes many mob movie veterans like Chazz Palminteri, David Proval, Tony Lip and Tony Sirico. On top of that, we have Don Rickles as a doomed lawyer and various other potential bloodsucking footsoldiers. The rejigging of vampire lore is pretty sweet too, with obvious fangs replaced by legitimately spectacular looking glowing eyes and a truly jaw dropping sequence involving one of the vamps eating sunlight in a hospital. It’s just a shame that Landis makes the undead kind of easy to defeat as a single bullet to the head or a snapped neck is sufficient enough to practically make anyone a budding Van Helsing if they’ve got good enough aim.
However, the main reason that Innocent Blood simply can’t be discounted is thanks to the full-on performance of Robert Loggia who, when he isn’t chewing necks and guzzling blood, is inhaling huge chunks of the scenery as he makes Sal the Shark a formidable, volcanic tempered maniac before his brush with Maria gives him eternal life and a thirst for the red stuff. In fact, his world challenging, defiant rant where he says super villain shit like “I am the power!’ and “I can fucking smell your dreams!” while fully ablaze should have been a show stopping moment of 90s horror, but as he’s abruptly stopped seconds after, it sadly loses all of its effect.

A great cast, a great idea and a great score are continuously hamstrung by a script that refuses to take its mobsters as monsters concept as far as it could go. But while Landis continuously lets his own movie down by thinking small, occasional moments of brilliance manage to make Innocent Blood one of the great, what could have beens of the decade. Still, let this movie make you an offal you can’t refuse…
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