Review of The Hunger (1983) by Guillaume H — 10 Apr 2015
The opening 30 minutes of this film is absolutely brilliant! Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie are very old vampires who secure a 80s goth couple from a discotheque (memorably playing the Bauhaus classic "Bela Lugosi's Dead.
" Following the secuctive and bloody feeding, Bowie begins to rapidly age and his maker, Deneuve, rather callously lets him age and die over the course of an afternoon and while she seeks to sire a new companion in Susan Sarandon.
This portion of the film is told nearly wordlessly by director Tony Scott in his theatrical feature debut. Deneuve is gorgeously elegant, Bowie is supremely stylish and also quite dramatically moving as the vampire trying to hold onto his love of Deneuve and also to his eternal life.
However, after Bowie's character dies, the film begins to slow and become less interesting. The remainder of the film revolves around Deneuve turning Sarandon into a vampire and Sarandon's friends and lovers from her old life trying to track her down when she goes missing.
Still, director Scott fills every frame with style, which will likely delight or annoy viewers. Though it's admittedly an over-directed film, I found the films use of visual storytelling quite interesting and was enough to hold my interest through the dull second and third acts of the film.
Written by Whitley Strieber, this film was an early incarnation of todays popular version of the brooding and beautiful Twilight/True Blood vampires. Anne Rice had already written "Interview with the Vampire" before Streiber's book, but that series really hadn't taken off yet and it would be a couple years after this film that she would write her first of many sequels in the Vampire Chronicles series of books.
Cliff De Young and Dan Hedaya and small supporting parts in the film and look fast for John Pankow as "1st Phone Booth Youth," Willem Dafoe as "2nd Phone Booth Youth" and Ann Magnuson as "Young Woman from Disco".
And according to IMDB, Jane Leeves also appears somewhere in the film, but I couldn't spot her.
This review of The Hunger (1983) was written by Guillaume H on 10 Apr 2015.
The Hunger has generally received positive reviews.
Was this review helpful?
