Saturday, May 28, 2022

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

My friends and I watched this around the time it came out on videotape. I don't remember why we picked it. Watched it again on Pluto. 

Nicholas Cage gives an uninhibited performance as a yuppie literary agent. He hangs around clubs at night, brings home strange women, and he's being treated for depression. After a bat comes fluttering into his apartment, through a mixture of mental illness and misunderstanding, he comes to believe he's a vampire. 

I admired Nicholas Cage after seeing this. I don't remember seeing any of his movies for years after that, but I heard that his acting had become weirder and weirder, although that's hard to imagine. I read a few years later that he had taken up bodybuilding so he could do action movies. 

At one point, he's shot with a gun loaded with banks which confirms in his mind that he's now undead. I think audiences now would know or suspect that the blanks would have killed him.

I don't know how people in small towns would have reacted to Cage's character, but New Yorkers seemed rather kind at times, helping him when he collapses on the street at the sight of a cross.

How should we react to a horrible, soulless yuppie who commits terrible crimes but only after becoming insane?

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