QUEEN OF THE DAMNED (2002) Hey, vampires! You suck! If you don't hate vampires, you probably will by the time you're done watching this movie. What a bunch of fuckin' poseurs, you'll be thinking, I guarantee it. If vampires like this actually existed, nobody would be afraid of them - we'd be too busy kicking their fancy-pantsed asses. Pout, pout. Whimper, pose. Fuck, I hate the strutting fashion show vampires have become. This is based on the book that follows up Interview To A Vampire - actually there's a book between them, which I read long ago but don't remember much about. Never read this one. But Lestat (now played by Stuart Townsend, Tom Cruise wisely finding more profitable avenues) is up and about in the modern world now, sucking blood from the goth world's equivalent of fops and dandies. He's a huge rock star now, holding press conferences where a wall of monitors shows his face to the fawning press, offering only people who sit in the center the illusion that this huge composite face is actually looking at individuals as it looks around (of course, even that reporter on the left would only see him looking to HER left). Such vanity is expected from vampires these days. Lestat's music basically sounds like Korn, which makes sense, since Jonathan Davis sings for him. Terrible. Actually, it's pretty bad even by Korn standards. One wonders if even goths, whose taste in music is famously bad, would be caught dead listening to this. Vampirism is part of the rock star's schtick - tired of hiding in the shadows, he decides to hide in plain sight, playing the role of the vampire as one who would easily be expected to (i.e. the next Marilyn Manson). Rice originally wrote Lestat as a rock star in 1985, I think - one wonders what kind of rock n' roll she had in mind at the time. It couldn't have been anywhere near as bad as this. Actually, it could've...1985? I'm picturing all those horror-meets-hollywood-metal movies from the mid-80's...Trick Of Treat, Black Roses...I can imagine a Lestat-fronted band sounding like Dokken. Can't say I like the thought of that much more than the one we hear here. Now, the Queen of the title is Akasha, played by pop singer Aaliyah who died not too long after filming this, preventing her from starring in the Matrix sequels. Her death might've been a loss to pop music - I wouldn't know - but not to the Matrix sequels. I always look upon pop stars cast in movies with grave suspicion, because so few of them have given me reason not to. Akasha has superpowers, even by vampire standards, setting other vampires aflame with a hammy glance. She's the villain - at least, so far as villains go where all the characters should be seeing the audience as food - but spends much of her time with Lestat trying to convince him to join her, so they can rule the world, or whatever fashion-show vampires aspire to. There are a few obligatory scenes with no life to them at all - Lestat reminiscing on getting vamped in the first place, Lestat preying on a couple of groupies. The pacing lumbers between settings, times and protagonists without grace. The vampire lore is...anatomically unsound. Much is made of not taking the last drop of blood from your victim. You'd have to be sucking pretty hard to get every last drop. (the first movie simply said you can't drink "dead" blood) The vampires in this movie can do funky vampire moves, though the visual effect conveying this is a little cheesy. They have gravity-defying wire-fu fights, which figures...this movie tries squeezing the last drops of blood from the notion of the pouty, romantic vampire; it might as well run wire-fu into the ground while it's at it. When they die, they die spectacularly - bursting into flame, dissolving into ash and cinder. If only they lives so interesting. Sharp-eyed Farscape fans can catch Claudia Black in a brief role as the vampiress Pandora, who's in a council of not-as-evil-as-Akasha vampires who want to retain the status quo of vampires' stake in things. One line. Two or three more among the deleted scenes on the DVD. Poor girl got her own book (is this the same Pandora, like, with the box? I never read it), but it all ends with a puff at the end of this terrible movie. Everything that sucks so badly about vampires these days is compressed into this one movie, so as a lesson in shameless sops to momentary pop-culture fads, clichés churned out with assembly-line ease, genre-murdering trendinesses dragged out and pranced about on puppet strings, one would have to work hard to find a less instructive movie than Queen Of The Damned. BACK TO THE Q's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE