Vampire's Kiss

For other uses, see Kiss of the Vampire (disambiguation).

Vampire's Kiss
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Robert Bierman
Written by	Joseph Minion
Produced by	John Daly Derek Gibson Barry Shils Barbara Zitwer
Starring	Nicolas Cage María Conchita Alonso Jennifer Beals Elizabeth Ashley
Cinematography	Stefan Czapsky
Edited by	Angus Newton
Music by	Colin Towns
Distributed by	Hemdale Film Corporation
Release date	June 2, 1989 (1989-06-02)
Running time	103 minutes
Country	United States
Languages	English German
Budget	$2 million
Box office	$725,131 (US)

Vampire's Kiss is a 1989 American black comedy horror film directed by Robert Bierman, written by Joseph Minion, and starring Nicolas Cage, María Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Ashley. The film tells the story of a mentally ill literary agent whose condition turns even worse when he believes he was bitten by a vampiress. It was a box office failure but went on to become a cult film.

Plot

Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) is a driven literary agent and an example of the stereotypical narcissistic and greedy yuppie of the 1980s: he works all day and club hops at night, with little in his life but alcohol, one-night stands and the pursuit of money and prestige. However, he is slowly going insane and sees a therapist (Elizabeth Ashley) frequently. During these sessions, his declining mental health becomes clear through a series of increasingly bizarre rants which eventually begin to scare even the psychiatrist. After he takes home a girl he met in a club named Jackie (Kasi Lemmons), a bat flies in through his window, scaring them both. At his next session he mentions to his therapist that the struggle with the bat aroused him, and after visiting an art museum with Jackie the next day, he ditches her, and she leaves an angry message on his phone.

Loew meets Rachel (Jennifer Beals) at a night club, and takes her home. She pins him down, reveals vampire fangs and feeds on him. He soon begins to believe that he is metamorphosing into a vampire. He stares into a bathroom mirror and fails to see his reflection, he wears dark sunglasses during the day, and, when his "fangs" fail to develop, he purchases a pair of cheap plastic vampire teeth. All the while, Rachel visits him nightly to feed on his blood. Shortly after, Loew experiences mood swings and calls Jackie back apologetically, asking to meet her at a bar. As he is about to leave, a jealous Rachel appears and beckons him back inside. A dejected Jackie eventually leaves the bar and leaves an angry note on his door asking him to leave her alone.

A subplot concerns a secretary working at Loew's office, Alva Restrepo (María Conchita Alonso). Loew torments her by forcing her to search through an enormous file for a 1963 contract. When she fails to find the contract, he at first browbeats and humiliates her, then visits her at home, and finally attacks and attempts to bite her at the place where they both work. She pulls out a gun, and Loew begs her to shoot him. Since it is only loaded with blanks, she fires at the floor to scare him off. He eventually overpowers her and attempts to bite her on the neck, ripping her shirt open and knocking her down. He takes the gun and fires it into his mouth, but is not harmed by the blanks.

Thinking he has metamorphosed into a vampire, Loew goes out to a club wearing his vampire teeth and moving like the character Orlok from the film Nosferatu. He begins to seduce a woman, but when he gets too grabby she slaps him off, making Loew even more unhinged: he overpowers her and bites her neck, having taken out the fangs and using his real teeth. He then puts the plastic fangs back in. Leaving the club, Loew has a brief, ambiguous encounter with Rachel: she admits to knowing him, but gives the impression that they have not been in contact for a long period. He accuses her of being a vampiress, and is expelled from the club.

Alva wakes up with her shirt ripped open, possibly thinking she was raped, and eventually tells her brother Emilio (Bob Lujan) about the sexual assault, who is enraged and goes after Loew to seek revenge. Meanwhile, Loew is wandering the streets in a blood-spattered business suit, talking to himself. In a hallucinatory exchange, he tells his therapist that he raped someone and also murdered someone else. Based on a newspaper, the latter appears to be true, as the girl he bit in the club is pronounced dead. As Loew returns to his now-disastrous apartment (which he'd been using as a sort of vampire cave) Alva points out Loew to Emilio, who pursues him inside his home with a tire iron.

In the midst of an argument with an imaginary romantic interest (supposedly a patient of his psychiatrist) Loew begins to retch again from the blood he had swallowed, and crawls under an upturned sofa, which he sees as his "coffin". Emilio finds him and upturns the sofa, and Loew holds a large broken shard of wood to his chest as a makeshift stake, repeating the gesture he had made earlier to strangers on the street when he had asked them to stake and kill him. Emilio, in a rage, pushes down on the stake and it pierces Loew's chest. Realizing he has committed a crime, a scared Emilio flees. As Loew dies, he envisions the vampiress Rachel smiling at him one last time.

Cast

• Nicolas Cage as Peter Loew, a literary critic whose outlandish descent into madness leaves him increasingly isolated and irritant. The role, originally given to Dennis Quaid, was then passed on to Cage after the former dropped out to do Innerspace.
• María Conchita Alonso as Alva Restrepo, Secretary to Loew and constant victim to his rants and impatience.
• Jennifer Beals as Rachel, the seductive vampire that haunts the dreams of Loew and pushes him into his vampire-like state. Cage and Beals reportedly didn’t get along on set with their friction most likely stemming from the part of Rachel not being cast to Cage's then girlfriend, Patricia Arquette, and instead going to Beals.
• Elizabeth Ashley as Dr. Glaser, the therapist of Loew’s real world and imaginary, who listens to his recounts of sexual experiences.
• Kasi Lemmons as Jackie, a romantic interest of Loew which he later stands up in favor of a night with Rachel.
• Bob Lujan as Emilio Restrepo, the protective brother of Alva who supplies her with a gun and blank ammunition.
• Jessica Lundy as Sharon
• Johnny Walker as Donald (as John Walker)
• Boris Leskin as Fantasy Cabbie
• Michael Knowles as Andrew
• John Michael Higgins as Ed
• Jodie Markell as Joke Girl
• Marc Coppola as Joke Guy
• David Hyde Pierce as Theater Guy (as David Pierce)
• Amy Stiller as Theater Girl
• Christopher Sluka as Hanger Out
• ESG in a cameo appearance

Production

Written “as darkly comic and deft as its bizarre premise,” Joseph Minion wrote the film as he grappled with depression. In an interview with Zach Schonfeld of The Ringer, Minion said that while on vacation in Barbados with his then girlfriend, Barbara Zitwer, Minion wrote the screenplay as a response to his “toxic relationship,” with her. Dealing with themes of isolation, loneliness, and domination, Zitwer, who would come on as a producer for the film, found the final product to be “horrifying.” The story was extremely emblematic of their relationship together and Minion’s depiction of Zitwer as a “vampire and destroying him,” was clear foreshadowing to their end of their relationship during production. Known previously for having written After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese, Minion sought to keep the “grim view of the Manhattan nightlife,” found in the aforementioned film central to his newest work.

Originally intent on taking the helm of directing the project, Minion soon gave the position up stating that the “darkness of it,” was too much for him to bear. Instead, the film was lead by British newcomer Robert Bierman who held previous experience working on commercials and short films such as The Rocking Horse Winner and The Dumb Waiter. This sudden departure however also prompted the then cast Nicolas Cage to drop out after his agent pressured him stating “this was not a good movie to make after Moonstruck.” His departure was short lived however and Cage’s “outrageously unbridled performance," was destined for the screen.

An enthusiastic employer of the Method Acting technique, Cage “took a highly surrealistic approach,” to Loew. Apart from his “pseudo-Trannsylvanian dialect,” scenes of Cage screaming the alphabet, eating cockroaches, and ranting "I'm a vampire!" shocked viewers and critics alike. The original script called for Loew to eat a raw egg but Cage decided a cockroach would be more effective claiming it would “shock the audience.” This shock was further extended to a couple of real homeless people who Cage ran into on the streets of Manhattan as he pleaded with them to drive a stake through his heart as Bierman and crew shot from afar. Physicality played a central role in the creation of this character for Cage who in several terrifying scenes sought to see "how big [he] could get [his] eyes." This was then furthered with scenes of Cage jumping on tables, sprinting across the office, and many frantic hand gestures which he claims were "extremely choreographed."

While many such as Hal Hinson of The Washington Post criticized this style of “scorched-earth acting,” it has undoubtedly cemented the film as a cult classic and become the source of many internet memes.

Release

Vampire's Kiss was released June 2, 1989. It grossed $725,131 in the U.S. It was released on home video in August 1990. MGM released it on DVD in August 2002, and Scream Factory released it on Blu-ray in February 2015.

Reception

Vampire's Kiss was considered a commercial flop upon its initial release but has developed a cult following since that time. Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 61% of 23 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 5.89/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "He's a vampire! He's a vampire! He's a vampire!" Metacritic has the film ranked at an average score of 31 out of 100 based on 10 critic reviews, indicating "Generally unfavorable reviews". In the film, Nicolas Cage consumes an actual cockroach in one scene, and had to do two takes. He received calls from animal rights activists on the set.

Variety wrote, "Cage's over-the-top performance generates little sympathy for the character, so it’s tough to be interested in him as his personality disorder worsens." Caryn James of The New York Times wrote, "[T]he film is dominated and destroyed by Mr. Cage's chaotic, self-indulgent performance." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it "a sleek, outrageous dark comedy that's all the funnier for constantly teetering on the brink of sheer tastelessness and silliness." Hal Hinson of The Washington Post called the film "stone-dead bad, incoherently bad", but said that Cage's overacting must be seen to be believed. Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer called it an "imaginative, if warped, black comedy" that "succeeds as a wicked allegory of What Men Want". Reviewing the film on Blu-ray, Anthony Arrigo of Bloody Disgusting wrote, "The film may not work very well as a comedy, but there's enough of a dark derangement present to make it almost unsettling." Furthermore, Peter Travers from the Rolling Stone argues that the film doesn’t need further criticism but rather “a stake through the heart.”

See also

• Vampire film

External links

• Vampire's Kiss at IMDb
• Vampire's Kiss at Box Office Mojo
• Vampire's Kiss at Rotten Tomatoes