Yes, this is the one that launched a thousand memes. It’s Nicolas Cage in a performance for the ages. Just don’t let the poster fool you; this is not a light romantic comedy.
Tagline: “Seduction. Romance. Murder. The things one does for love.”
WTF Factor: **** Two extra for Nicolas Cage’s performance
Notable Dialogue: [Peter is confessing his sins at an imaginary therapy session]
- Dr.Glaser: “It’s just a little id release. No use to worry.”
- Peter: “Whew. I just thought I should tell you, okay. It’s a load off my mind. Oh yeah, also, I, uh…”
- Glaser: “Just spit it out, Peter.”
- Peter: “Well, the fact is I did murder someone last night. I turned into a vampire. It’s a long story.”
Synopsis: Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) is an up-and-coming Eighties [think Christian Bale in American Psycho (2000)] literary agent; he regularly talks to his psychiatrist Dr. Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley) about the lack of love in his life and his habit of picking up one-night stands. One night a bat flies into his apartment while he’s rounding third base (Peter finds this arousing). The next night, he picks up Rachel (Jennifer Beals), who grows fangs and bites his neck (or did she?) when they have sex.
Peter was a bit weird to begin with, but now he gets weirder. He torments his assistant Alva Restrepo (Maria Conchita Alonso), who is tasked with finding a missing contract. He follows her into the ladies room, jumps up on a desk to berate her, insults her, and threatens to fire her. Meanwhile he sees Rachel nightly, reluctantly at first but unable to resist her “charms.”
Peter has an unhinged conversation with Dr. Glaser, demanding to know how a contract could possibly be misfiled and who could do such a thing.
Notable dialogue: [After Peter screams and dances the alphabet at Dr. Glaser; see YouTube]
- Glaser: “Very good. You know your alphabet.”
- Peter: “I never misfiled anything! [Emphatically crosses arms] Not once! [Hands on hips] Not one time!”
Peter feels that he is changing. He sports a permanent bandage on his neck and starts to shun bright light, wearing sunglasses indoors. He gets up one morning and eats a cockroach.
Alva calls in sick that day but Peter finds her home address and goes to her house, peeking in the window at her. He tricks her into coming in to work with him then yells at her in the cab. They stop so she can see her brother Emilio. She complains that her boss is being weird and asks Emilio for bullets for the gun in her purse; he gives her blanks instead because he has no real bullets.
In the men’s room, Peter can’t see his reflection (although we can). He thinks that he is becoming a vampire and goes to hide in his office. Rachel comes in after dark to feed. Alva finds the contract but Peter is hallucinating. <trigger warning> He terrorizes Alva, then chases her down the stairs to the basement. She pulls her gun and Peter insists that she shoot him. After she shoots at the floor instead he goes into a rage and (apparently) sexually assaults her. Alva turns into Rachel and taunts him. Peter grabs the gun, puts it in his own mouth and shoots, surviving the blanks. He then runs down the street screaming over and over, “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!”
He goes home and completely destroys his apartment. Rachel comes in and finds him under the overturned sofa, which he is using as a coffin, and she tells him, “You know what you have to do.”
Peter hides from the sun and that night he buys cheap plastic vampire teeth. With his last vestige of sanity, he calls the doctor and asks for an earlier appointment. Then he chases pigeons around the park and eventually catches and eats one. He sleeps until the next night and goes out looking like Renfield with fangs.
He pushes his way into a crowded club still wearing fangs, checking out necks and moving like Nosferatu. He attacks a woman in a side room, biting her neck and drinking her blood, then throwing up.
He then encounters Rachel with a date. She blows him off in confusion, but he grabs her, getting thrown out of the club and screaming that everyone should look at her (non-visible) fangs. He tells the crowd outside the club that he’s a vampire and they chase him away with the sign of the cross.
Peter: “She’s a goddamn vampire! She made me one too! Look at her teeth!”
Alva confides in Emilio about the assault. Out on the street and covered in blood, Peter grabs a wooden slat and begs passersby to kill him with the stake [Ah, I miss living in the city]. Meanwhile Emilio and Alva are headed his way. Peter staggers around the streets, while Emilio and Alva wait outside his apartment.
Peter hallucinates that he is having a session with the doctor and says he doesn’t need her anymore because he knows that what he really needs is romantic love and he’s going to find it. She fixes him up with another patient who seems to be perfect. He tells the doctor that he raped Alva and murdered another woman, but the doctor reassures him that it’s not a problem. He’s actually talking to a gatepost on the street. He staggers home and Emilio follows him in with a tire iron. Peter hides in his coffin but Emilio finds him. Peter offers him the stake and Emilio uses it. Things have not ended well for either of them. Cue the credits.
Thoughts: The movie’s poster suggests a romantic comedy. However any comedy present other than Nicolas Cage’s performance is very dark indeed. Writer Joseph Minion says he wrote the script when he was depressed and in what he labeled a toxic relationship. I can’t imagine his girlfriend was pleased to find herself portrayed as a vampire. Cage’s assessment of his character is, “I always saw the movie as a story of a man whose loneliness and inability to find love literally drives him insane.” Sounds like a good formula for a comedy.
Possibly for this reason, the movie originally flopped at the box office, but it has now become a cult classic, largely based on Cage’s expressionist performance. This is acting that has to be experienced, not described. Supposedly Cage modeled his acting on old silent films, such as Nosferatu (1922), where the actors are hyper-expressive rather than realistic. That would be one explanation for what he is doing. The dialogue and events were all found in the script; the only unscripted thing Cage did was eating the live bug. This was not a trick; he really ate the bug, at his own insistence. I did get one major laugh; when Cage moves through the nightclub with his fake fangs, imitating the classic postures of Nosferatu. It was a nice callback to the TV scene.
Interestingly, the film’s Wikipedia page currently insists in multiple places that Alma was not raped. However, the director says she was (as does Peter in the movie). There is definitely ambiguity written into the scene. According to the news headlines we see, he really did murder the woman in the club (or did he?). So, is he turning into a vampire (and deranged) or just deranged? One could go either way, I think. Given his manner of death, he presumably won’t be coming back as a “real” vampire, in any case.
It’s not always easy to find a copy of this movie these days, but it is worth a watch. If you don’t want to search for the entire movie, at least check out the clips on YouTube. All of them feature Cage at his most manic. It will make you curious about what goes on in-between these scenes.
Random thoughts:
- Cage’s role was originally offered to Dennis Quaid, who dropped out to do Innerspace. That would have been a very different movie.
- Peter should not have survived shooting blanks in the back of his mouth.
- The late 1980s had the worst lipstick shades ever.
- Cage’s accent in the film have has been variously described as pseudo-Transylvanian or faux-British. To me he sounds more like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which came out the same year.
- In 2018 Cage described Vampire’s Kiss as his “favorite movie I’ve made.”
Suggested double feature: Nosferatu (1922) is obvious, but how about Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) for a vampire romance?
Tagline for coming attraction: “An unearthly enemy defying modern science in a war to the death of all civilization!”
