Review of Vampire's Kiss (1989) by Still Johanna G — 24 Sep 2009

If you've ever thought Nic Cage was a tad batshit crazy in certain moments of films like "Matchstick Men" or "Adaptation", that's a far cry from 1989's "Vampire's Kiss". Here he gives the term batshit crazy a whole new meaning, even a literal one as he literally goes crazy starting with the appearance of a bat.

Nicolas Cage plays literary agent Peter Loew, a lonely mess of a man shuffling between work, trips to see his shrink, and multiple one night stands. He speaks in a fake "literary type" accent for most of the film, only dropping it when upset with his shrink. You'll know in about 30 seconds whether it's tolerable for 100 minutes. After a run-in with a bat in his apartment during a one night stand, he claims to have become aroused, then denies it, to his shrink. It gets weirder. Another one night stand with Jennifer Beals of "Flashdance" fame gets kinky and she nipples a bit on his neck. Not like a vampire, but like a girl getting screwed and nipples on your neck a little. For whatever reason, Cage then makes the assumption he's been bitten by the undead and so starts an odd, weird, comedy/drama through the depths of human insanity.

Oh yeah, there's a subplot involving Cage needing to locate a misplaced file and putting his low-level employee Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso) on the job to find it. She must sift through hundreds of thousands of loose papers attempting to find this file after Cage loses his friggin' mind at the idea that a file could even be misplaced. "How do you MISplace it?! You just PUT it in there! It's all alphabetical!" Yes, the sirens on the crazy wagon can already be heard in the distance.

Cage must have been given a helluva lot of leeway from director Robert Bierman in not only one the wackiest roles of his career, but possibly THE wackiest role in film history. The Joker, Hannibal Lecter and half the cast of Cuckoo's Nest would seem sane next to Cage's performance in this film.

As he slips farther and farther into vampire-schizophrenia he begins sleeping under an overturned couch, eating live cockroaches (Cage really ate the thing on set!), fearing sunlight, and eventually even buys fake vampire teeth. He aims high going for the nice looking ones ("With a little yellow, for realism"), but short on cash opts instead of the "cheapies" as he calls them. The plastic kind a 5-year old might have on Halloween.

Meanwhile, Alva keeps searching for that damn file and Cage continues screaming & yelling at her, then offering soup, then blaming it on PCP, then flipping out again vomiting nothing out of his mouth, but he still does the movement. Your probably thinking what the fuck are talking about? Watch it and see for yourself. I won't spoil the ending, but things get crazier and crazier, then start getting really serious as the laughs fade away and Cage is so crazy it's not a comedy but some kind of sick look at mental health. Between carrying around a giant piece of wood which he begs churchgoers to drive through his heart, or screaming at an imaginary girlfriend, it's certainly something everyone needs to view at least once.

It's pretty damn slow for the first half and you wonder what the hell am I watching on several occasions. Things pick up later in the film big time though and get real dark and fucked up, but you'll have to see it yourself. One notable element to the film was filming Cage interacting with real-life people on the streets on New York City. They have no idea cameras are rolling and Cage is in full crazy mode gumming away on plastic teeth at this point begging everyone he sees to drive a wooden plank through his chest. It must have been an interesting day to walk down that street on that day. One can only imagine all the people who Cage approached, whether they made it on film or not, never knowing of this film, but only that some bloody, crazy man with a broken plank is screaming, wailing, avoiding daylight and begging to be stabbed through the heart.

It's the kind of film that would never get released these days, I'm not even sure it saw theatrical release. It's shining moment is it's star Nicolas Cage, for without him this movie would be all but forgotten without his celebrity. Cage didn't make the cut for "The Godfather III" around this time. Was this his way of taking out the aggression? We'll never know, but check out the kickass DVD commentary if possible featuring Cage himself reflecting on his days as a crazy literary agent/vampire with the most wicked accent in the history of film.