Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Vampire's Kiss (1988)


I am unsure what I’ll be writing for this post. I’ve tried to start it a few times now, and every time I do, it feels like the wrong way to start. This is my last-ditch effort, a Hail Mary, to try and kickstart things so that I can actually write something. Anything. It’s not that I don’t have things to say about the movie. I do. I just haven’t been able to break into it in a way that felt good. Everything has fallen flat, so far, and I thought I’d just write about that and maybe get somewhere.

As we approach the ten-year mark of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I decided to toss some major movies into the mix. October was horror movies or, at the very least, horror adjacent movies. The same as it is every year. I’d already covered things like Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Halloween: Resurrection, Sleepaway Camp, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I had to find more horror movies on those levels of notoriety to watch this month. That’s what brought me to this week’s movie, Vampire’s Kiss.


Here's a rundown of what Vampire’s Kiss was about. Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) was a literary agent in New York. He lived a good life. He had his own apartment that made it look like he was well off. He and his colleagues would go to the club on what seemed like an almost nightly basis. He was a little quirky, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, after a chance meeting with a woman at the club, Peter would start his path on the downward spiral of becoming a vampire.

If you don’t know what Vampire’s Kiss is, you probably do. You just don’t know that you know. It has been the source of many an internet meme. I’ll get into some of that stuff as well as many of the other ludicrous moments that it had. There were a lot. There was Nicolas Cage influence all over it, and not just because he was in it. He clearly helped shape a lot of what the movie would be, beyond his simple eccentricities.


There were two storylines in Vampire’s Kiss. The main one, and where the movie got its title, was that Peter thought he was turning into a vampire. This was due to a one night stand with Rachel (Jennifer Beals), a woman he met at the nightclub. One night turned into two nights turned into an obsession on Peter’s part. She had fangs, bit him on the neck, and he started feeling different. He was sensitive to light. He had a thirst for blood. He ate a cockroach and started sleeping in a makeshift coffin he built out of his couch. The thing is, the vampirism wasn’t real. It was all in Peter’s head. He may not have even taken Rachel home at all. For sure she didn’t bite him with vampire fangs. He had no bite mark in the morning, until he cut his neck shaving. She wasn’t there in the morning when he was talking to her. It was all his imagination playing tricks on him.

The crux of the vampirism story involved Peter losing his sanity. He was seeing a psychiatrist, which wasn’t so much a signal of his losing his sanity as it was of his trying to save it. The therapist was meant to help Peter work out his issues. His issues with life, his issues with work, his issues with everything. She tried. She really did. But his sessions got tenser and tenser to the point of scaring the therapist. By the end, I wasn’t entirely sure that the therapist was real. The final session Peter had was a hallucination as he spoke to a wall around the corner from his apartment. It was a fantastical session where he admitted how lonely he was, only to have his therapist set him up with another patient, who just happened to be there at the same time. It was Peter’s desires manifesting themselves through his insane hallucination. Were the rest of his sessions the same?

The prior sessions could have been real. They certainly felt like they were, and they were more accurate to the things that were going on in his normal life. Prior to meeting Rachel, Peter had taken Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) back to his apartment after a night at the club. While they were in the throes of passion, a bat flew in the window and flapped around the apartment. Peter later admitted to his therapist that the bat aroused him. Eventually he got rid of the bat, ditched Jackie in favour of Rachel, and turned into a vampire. But I want to talk about the therapy sessions a bit more.

The bat flying around the apartment gave the first hint at the crazy Nicolas Cage performance that permeated through Vampire’s Kiss. As he tried to get the bat away, he shouted “Shoo! Shoo!” in a way that only Nicolas Cage would. The therapy session about the bat wasn’t quite the height of Nicolas Cage acting, but it set the stage for what would come. A later therapy scene involved Peter recounting his troubles with finding a certain contract. Nobody could find it. I’ll get into the full story about that in a bit. I just want to say that the therapy session led to a weird scene where Peter, filled with outrage, shouted about how it was easy to file things alphabetically. He recited the alphabet while screaming at his therapist, who could only respond with a “Very good, Peter. You know your alphabet.” Not much of a help, but what else could she say at that point?


One of the other revelations in the final, fictional, therapy session was that Peter had killed a woman. It wasn’t a revelation to Peter or the viewer, but it was a revelation to the therapist who wasn’t actually there. This unreal version of the therapist even said it was okay that Peter killed a woman. How did Peter get to that point? As his mental state deteriorated and he became surer that he was a vampire, Peter worried that his teeth weren’t growing in. He went and bought plastic teeth. He went to the club. He used those plastic teeth to chew on a woman’s neck and suck her blood. That killed her. Peter was a murderer.

Now, I have a few questions about that scene and what led up to it. Maybe those questions can simply be answered by “That was the New York of 1988.” I still have those questions. Why did nobody question why Peter ran down the street screaming “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!”? Okay, to be fair, I’d probably just stand there wondering what was happening. I probably wouldn’t do anything about it. So I guess that tracks. When Peter was kicked out of the club, why didn’t anyone try to figure out whose blood was all over him? Seriously, this one is a much bigger question to me. He was covered in blood because he had just bitten someone’s neck open. It wasn’t a Halloween party or a costume party. It was just a normal night at the club. Nobody wondered about the blood. They kicked him out and that was that. Even when they found the woman’s body, they didn’t put together that Peter had been covered in blood and she had lost a lot of blood. I don’t understand that.

I want to take a quick moment to go back to the plastic teeth and Peter’s trip to the club. There’s a moment when Peter first puts in his teeth that is one of the underrated funny moments of the movie. Nicolas Cage put the teeth in his mouth, looked directly at camera, and made a kind of hissing sound. Then he started crawling on the ground. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not sure about the choices that Nicolas Cage makes in most movies, though, so I’m not going to be able to explain it. When he went to the club, however, there was reason for the way he was acting. Some people call it overacting. Some call it homage. I think it could be a little bit of both. Peter entered the club and walked around like he was Nosferatu in the 1920s movie. You could see the glee in Nicolas Cage’s face as he was walking around like that. It was clearly overacting as it didn’t feel realistic at all. At the same time, it was an homage to that earlier film. It was a little bit of both. No need to sit on one side or the other.


It's about time we get into the second storyline that was woven through Vampire’s Kiss, and that was the workplace harassment drama. As I said earlier, Peter was a literary agent of some sort, working in an office. His secretary or assistant was Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso). Peter was always abusing her in one way or another, and things got increasingly bad as the movie went on. It was clearly a metaphor for an abusive relationship, and it was easy to see all the similarities. She never left the situation. She undersold how bad it was to other people. When she did leave, Peter apologized and acted nice, until she returned and he acted worse than ever. It was the same story you hear about abusive relationships all the time. Only, in Vampire’s Kiss, it was a work relationship.

The Alva storyline was where I think the most ridiculous moments of Vampire’s Kiss shined. I don’t mean that to make light of how horrible Peter treated Alva. There’s no excuse for his mistreatment of her, especially the sexual assault near the end of the film. But there were certain things that Nicolas Cage added to his performance during this storyline that were things only Nicolas Cage would think of, then execute upon. There were some raw Nicolas Cage moments within a story about an abusive relationship.

There was one scene that perfectly showed how an abusive relationship could show itself in public. In the middle of the workday, Peter started calling for Alva. She ignored him. He kept calling, getting louder and louder each time. Eventually, he came out of his office into the main area where the rest of the staff were. In the most Nicolas Cage way, he jumped up on someone’s desk, pointed down at Alva (asserting his power position over her), and shouted “There you are!” Alva fled the room, he followed her, going so far as to storm right into the women’s washroom.

The real power of this as an allegory for an abusive relationship came from the interaction that followed. Another woman was in the washroom and asked why Peter was in there. The woman asked if everything was okay, to which Alva replied that it was. This was something that frequently happens with abusive relationships. The victims will, for some amount of time, downplay how bad the relationship is. They will forgive their abuser, usually out of fear that the abuse will get worse. Alva feared what Peter might do to her in the future, so she wouldn’t let anyone interfere.


Things got worse in private. Peter brought Alva into his office to talk about the contract he tasked her with finding. This was when things got threatening beyond what was happening in public. His voice got quieter so that people outside couldn’t hear. His eyes widened as he looked directly into hers. Peter said that there was nobody else he would want to do that job because it was one of the worst jobs he could think of. He would rather have Alva do that job because of how horrible it was. He wanted to torture her with it. It was very much the way that an abuser would emotionally and mentally threaten a victim behind closed doors, talking about all the horrible things they could do to their victim. Peter was laying that threat out there for Alva to see, without it being physical. It was a threat he would follow through on later.

Alva felt so afraid to go to work that she confided in her brother, who convinced her to stay home. Peter, in his full abuser form, found Alva’s house and apologized. He convinced her to return to work, only to then do something much, much worse. He raped her in the office building, somewhere in one of the back rooms. Abusers do this sort of thing all the time. When the victim tries to leave the relationship, they will change their tone completely to try and persuade them to stay. They manipulate in a way that will downplay to the victim how bad they were. Then, when the victim is convinced of the abuser being sorry or turning a new leaf, the abuser will do something even worse because the victim tried to leave them. Peter persuaded Alva to return to work, only to immediately betray her trust in the worst way. The only way she could think of to get away from her abuser was to fight back. Alva took her brother to Peter’s apartment, and her brother killed Peter, driving a piece of wood through his heart. It was like a stake to a real vampire.


So there you have it. That’s Vampire’s Kiss in a nutshell. There were two storylines, intertwined because of one man’s mental deterioration. Peter was losing his mind, which led him to believe he was a vampire. It also worsened his already abusive relationship with coworker Alva. Eventually, both sides of his life would come together to end it with a stake through the heart. Or the abdomen. It definitely looked like the piece of wood was driven into his body below his heart. Either way, he died because of what he did to Alva in the most vampiric way, without being an actual vampire.

I didn’t know what I was going to write when I set out to put together this post. I knew it would be something about Vampire’s Kiss, since that was the topic and I had just watched it. That’s all I knew. I didn’t know how I would get into it. I didn’t have some other topic I wanted to approach. It ended up being a post all about the movie. I guess that’ll work, though the movie might not have.


Now I’ve got a few notes to close things out:

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