Review of The Hunger (1983) by Drew S — 20 Jan 2011

An absolutely wretched piece of 80s offal. Points are earned for what I presume was some semblance of originality, as I guess Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve locked in a lesbian vampire affair was pretty sensational back in the day.

I guess if you're into viewing films as time capsules as I am, there's a certain curiosity to be derived from the nightmare disco aesthetic and its subsequent segues to dreamy, pseudo-erotic ephemerality.

But all of this is clearly striving for something greater, positing its lesbianism as high art rather than a cheap thrill scaffolding a crappy film; Tony Scott clearly had faith in his product when it obviously didn't merit any.

It's way too far up its ass to serve any sort of camp value, and the plot is an incredible non-event. Many of the sequences are populated with unbearable pauses, protracting a senseless mystery about David Bowie getting older and Deneuve is an evil vampire or something.

The screenplay is probably about forty pages long, and I imagine Scott took one look at it and decided to pad it with "meaningful" silence and imagery. The only real praise I have for The Hunger is that it could easily be worse, but in this day and age there's honestly no reason to see it at all.