When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula back in 1897, he turned the age-old vampire myth into something sexually repressed Victorians could really sink their teeth into—an irresistible, sexually dangerous, darkly romantic seducer whom women couldn’t help but invite into their bedrooms after dark. Bela Lugosi may have created the indelible screen image of the Count in the 1930s, but as Bauhaus have famously observed, Bela Lugosi’s dead. Since then, it seems like every era has gotten the vampires it deserved. In the sexually licentious ’70s, Udo Kier’s pallid, beleaguered Count in Blood for Dracula couldn’t find a pure-blooded virgin anywhere; by the time The Lost Boys hit the screen in 1987, the bloodsuckers looked like members of a hair band, and the fearless vampire killers were the Two Coreys. Now, in the age of boy bands and coquettish pop virgins, we have Queen of the Damned, a vampire movie in which the vampires are so defanged, they’re as sexually dangerous as Justin Timberlake and Britney.
The film, based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novel, begins with the preposterous idea that the long-dormant vampire Lestat would find today’s music appealing enough to awaken. From there, things go from bat to worse as Lestat decides to start his own band. Actually, the idea of a vampire as nü-metal god would be brilliant satire, what with the manufactured angst, rock-star poseurship, and adulation of millions of unwitting young consumers. But director Michael Rymer isn’t going for satire, so what we get is Rice’s lugubrious, overwrought eroticism in slick music-video packaging, complete with concert footage.
When we last saw the vampire Lestat, he was Tom Cruise (in Neal Jordan’s spectacularly awful 1994 adaptation of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire). This time, he’s Stuart Townsend, a boy at least as pretty as anything in B4-4 or N-Sync. Townsend gets by on good looks and a certain impudent charm, but in retrospect, Cruise’s widely panned performance was better. His Lestat was an aging rake trapped in an immortal young body. Townsend, wearing the fakest-looking fangs in recent memory, never convinces us that Lestat is older than he looks, especially when he’s belting out Goth-metal anthems like “Redeemer.” (Korn frontman Jonathan Davis provides Lestat’s tortured singing voice, which quickly makes you wish Sarah Michelle Gellar would show up and put Lestat out of his misery.)
As Lestat’s fame grows, so does his infamy. He attracts the attention of Jesse Reeves (Marguerite Moreau), a young researcher with the Talamasca, a group of vampire historians. Jesse, who had spent her early childhood with her vampire aunt Maharet (Lena Olin), discovers that Lestat’s lyrics are giving away carefully guarded vampire secrets, making a lot of other vampires very uneasy. One of these is Marius (Vincent Perez), the vampire who “sired” Lestat. (An extended flashback reveals their vaguely homoerotic past; apparently, all of Anne Rice’s vampires spend as much time out of the closet as the coffin.) Worse, Lestat’s music has awakened Akasha, the 4,000-year-old mother of all vampires, who had been dormant so long she had become an undead statue. Akasha’s sheer age makes her incredibly powerful; she reduces vampires to charred cinders with a wave of her hand and slaughters humans by the dozen. But does she want to destroy Lestat or make him a king?
Akasha is played by lite-soul princess Aaliyah, who walks like an Egyptian in her midriff-baring outfits, but talks like Cleopatra doing a bad Lugosi impression. (Aaliyah’s recent death in a plane crash gives the role an unfortunate irony, not unlike Brandon Lee’s last performance in The Crow.) Like Townsend, she fails to come across as anything other than young, which makes their short, chaste love scene (in a hot tub strewn with obligatory rose petals) as lifeless as a dormant vampire. Their equally androgynous bodies go through the motions of human desire without arousing any of the emotions. Like the rest of the film, it could have used a great deal more bite.
(1.5/4)