Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

[5]

Nicolas Cage stars as a publishing executive who thinks he’s becoming a vampire. To his credit, he was bitten by a vampire (Flashdance‘s Jennifer Beals)… or did he imagine that? Either way, Cage begins wearing dark shades, avoiding sunlight, sleeping under an overturned leather couch, eating cockroaches, and devouring pigeons. And if you think he’s hard on the cockroaches and pigeons, wait til you see how he torments his secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso).

I’m not sure quite what to make of Vampire’s Kiss, which in itself is almost a good thing. Cage’s over-the-top (is that redundant?) performance skews the film toward absurd comedy, but the actor almost seems at odds with material that’s otherwise serious — with perhaps something provocative to say about male sexuality. Without Cage in the film, I wager Vampire’s Kiss might be regarded more as a paranoid’s descent into doomed, self-fulfilling prophecy. That film might have been more tonally consistent and meaningful. But would it have been as memorable? Probably not.

Fans of Nicolas Cage will rejoice in this quintessential Cage performance. His unrelenting torture of Alonso’s character is indeed pitch-dark hilarious. The film is probably fifteen or twenty minutes too long, but once Cage buys a cheap pair of plastic vampire teeth and starts running around New York at night, the movie becomes… well, it’s a mess through and through. But as I’m often fond of saying: at least it’s an interesting mess.