The Reluctant Vampire was the 7th episode of the 3rd season of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt! It stars Malcolm McDowell as a vampire who is a little bit too nice for his own good. Seriously, you can’t go wrong with Malcolm McDowell as a vampire.
The Reluctant Vampire originally aired on July 10th, 1991.
Enjoy!
Peter Sellers was a brilliant actor and comedian while also being a childish and selfish human being who, because he was always performing, never really developed a personality of his own.
That’s the argument made by The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which stars Geoffrey Rush as Sellers. The film follows Sellers from his success with The Goon Show to his subsequent collaborations with Stanley Kubrick (Stanley Tucci) and Blake Edwards (John Lithgow). Sellers becomes an international star but remains a deeply unhappy person, cheating on his wives, emotionally abusing his son, and being difficult on set. The film makes the argument that that the only person that Sellers truly loved was his doting mother (played by Miriam Margoyles) and that, having been born into a show business family, performing was the only thing that he was capable of doing. Even the few times when he’s shown to be a decent father, husband, or friend, it’s suggested that he’s just acting the role. Rush plays Sellers as being someone who is incapable of understanding how other people think so, whenever he has to interact with them, he simply imitates what he’s seen others do. Just look at the scene where he attempts to flirt with Sofia Loren by grinning up at her like a character in a romantic comedy.
The problem with a film like this is that, because he’s portrayed as being so selfish and immature, it’s hard to make Peter Sellers into a character that you would want to spend any time with. The narrative goes from one Sellers tantrum to another. Stephen Hopkins livens things up by including fantasy sequences where Sellers is taunted by some of his best-known characters, driving home the point that there wasn’t much to Sellers beyond the characters that he played and reminding us of both Sellers’s talent and Geoffrey Rush’s as well. There are also frequent monologues from Rush, dressed up like the other characters in the movie and discussing their relationship with Peter Sellers. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Rush does a good job playing Stanley Tucci playing Stanly Kubrick but when he’s made up to look like Miriam Margoyles, the conceit gets too ridiculous to work.
The main reason to see the film is for the performances, especially Emily Watson as Sellers’s first wife and Stephen Fry as Sellers’s “spiritual advisor.” Stanley Tucci is an inscrutably brilliant Stanley Kubrick while John Lithgow is a hyperactive and crass Blake Edwards. Finally, Geoffrey Rush is a marvel as Peter Sellers. Rush has a difficult job, making an extremely unlikable character compelling but he succeeds despite not always being helped by the film’s script or direction.
Like the man it portrayed, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is flawed but filled with enough talent to watchable.
Like any successful genre film, Predator would remain in the consciousness of filmgoers during the late 80’s. The film was that popular and successful. This also meant that the studio who produced and released the film were more than happy to try and replicate what made them a lot of money. So, a sequel was quickly greenlit within the halls of 20th Century Fox.
Yet, despite the success the first film was able to garner despite some major production problems, this time around luck wasn’t with Predator 2. The follow-up film would have different production issues than the first but they would affect the film in the long run.
First off, John McTiernan wouldn’t be on-board to direct the sequel. His back-to-back successes with Predator and Die Hard has suddenly made him a coveted action director. His schedule would keep him from directing Predator 2 as his slate was already full with The Hunt for Red October being his next film. In comes Stephen Hopkins to helm the sequel.
Yet, the biggest blow to the production would be not being able to get Arnold Schwarzenegger to return in the role of Dutch, the sole survivor of the elite rescue team from the first film. As with most stars and sequels, this time it would be over a salary dispute that would keep Arnold from returning so in comes Danny Glover to take on the sequel’s lead role.
Now, Danny Glover has more than pulled his own action film weight with two Lethal Weapon films already under his belt, but in terms of on-screen charisma he would be a major downgrade from the presence Schwarzenegger provided the first film. But Glover was more than game to take on the role of Lt. Harrigan of the LAPD as the setting for the sequel moves from the steaming jungle canopy of Central America to the blistering asphalt and concrete jungle of gang-ridden Los Angeles.
This change in location made for an interesting take as it helped establish some world building that showed these Predators have visited Earth many times in the past and not just in the faraway jungles but more towards areas and places rife with conflict. We learn that it hunts those who have survived the conflicts of the area they’re in. Only the strongest for these extraplanetary hunters.
Unlike, the original film, Predator 2 fails in not having a cast of characters that the audience could empathize and root for. This follow-up is mostly about action and even more gore than the first. Even the opening sequence tries to one-up the jungle shooting scene from the first film, yet instead of shock and awe the sequence just seems loud and busy,
Predator 2 suffers from a lot of that as the film feels more than just a tad bit bloated. The Thomas brothers (Jim and John) who wrote the original film return for the sequel but were unable to capture lightning in a bottle a second time around. Where the first film was very minimalist in it’s narrative and plot, the sequel goes for the throw everything in but the kitchen sink approach. We have warring drug gangs, inept police leadership, secretive government agencies with their own agendas.
What does work with Predator 2 and has made it into a cult classic as years passed was the very worldbuilding I mentioned earlier. We learn a bit more of this predator-hunter. While some comes as exposition from Gary Busey’s special agent role Peter Keyes, the rest comes from just seeing the new look of this particular Predator courtesy of special effects master Stan Winston.
The biggest joy for fans of the films comes in an all-too-brief scene showcasing the trophy case of the Predator inside it’s spacecraft. Within this trophy case are the skulls of the prey it’s hunted and killed. One skull in particular would ignite the imagination of scifi action fans worldwide. It’s a skull of a xenomorph from the Alien franchise. It made fans wonder if the two films were part of a larger tapestry. Both properties were owned by 20th Century Fox, so there was a chance and hope that the two meanest and baddest alien creatures on film would crossover together.
It would be many, many years before such a team-up would happen. Even when it finally did fans of the franchises would be let down with what they get after waiting for over a decade.
Predator 2 could be seen as trying to make lightning hit the same patch twice or it could be seen as a quick cash grab by a studio seeing a potential franchise. Both are true and without its two biggest stars, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McTiernan, returning to reprise their roles for the sequel the film was already behind the eight-ball before filming began.
While the follow-up had some interesting new ideas that helped round out the Predator as one of film’s greatest onscreen villains, it also failed to capitalize on those ideas in a creative way. There’s some good in Predator 2, but way too much baggage and too much bad to have it live up to the success and popularity of the original.
Four suburbanites (Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) are driving to a boxing match in pricey RV when Piven takes a wrong turn and they end up lost in the wrong side of the city. Not only are they lost but they also witness Fallon (Denis Leary) and his gang murdering a young man. Jeremy Piven thinks that he can negotiate with Fallon and get his friends out of the situation by pulling out his wallet and flashing a few bills. Guess how well that works out for them? With Fallon chasing them through the city, these formerly smug and complacent yuppies are forced into a battle for survival.
Judgment Night is a deeply stupid but compulsively watchable movie. From the minute that Piven shows up with that RV and Estevez says goodbye to his wife and newborn child, it is obvious what’s going to happen. Fortunately, the cast is better than average and Stephen Hopkins does a good job of making the city look menacing and keeping up the pace. There are a few times that Judgment Night pretends like it has something to say about wealth and society but it never tries too hard to be anything more than an exciting B-movie. Though it may not have been hard to do considering that his main competition was Emilio Estevez, Denis Leary easily dominates Judgment Night. Fallon may be a cartoon villain but Judgment Night is a cartoonish movie so it works.
Today, Judgment Night is best remembered for its soundtrack, on which nearly every song was a collaboration between hip hop and metal artists. The Judgment Night soundtrack may not have invented the genre of rap rock but it was many people’s first exposure to it. The Teenage Fan Club/De La Soul collaboration Fallin‘ opens the movie on just the right note while Biohazard and Onyx’s Judgment Night is such a strong track that there’s no way the rest of the movie can hope to live up to it.
Judgment Night. The movie is ok. The soundtrack is fucking amazing.
Do you remember Race?
It came out in February of this year and it was kind of a big deal for a week. I think everyone was expecting it to be a big hit, just because there’s never much competition in February. Race is a biopic of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who sets world records and won gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defeating a legion of Aryan athletes while Adolf Hitler watched from the stands. Not only is that a compelling story but 2016 was also an Olympic year. Eddie The Eagle had already been a success due to the Olympic connection. Add to that, Focus Features promoted the Hell out of this film. In they weeks leading up to its release, I saw commercials for it on a nearly hourly basis. The reviews, when the came, were mixed but generally positive.
I’m not really sure how Race did at the box office. According to Wikipedia, on its opening weekend, it was sixth at the box office. Apparently, the film only had a budget of five million and ultimately made a profit of $20,000,0000. I guess that would make it a success. All I know is that it seems like, for all the hype, Race just kind of came and went.
In fact, I didn’t see Race until about two months ago. It’s one of those films that’s not really great but it’s certainly not bad. It’s pretty much the epitome of being adequate. It was well-made and generally well-acted. Director Stephen Hopkins occasionally struggled to maintain a consistent pace (Race is over 2 hours long and feels longer) but he still did a good job filming the scenes of Owens of running and competing. In the role of Jesse Owens, Stephan James was well-cast. You not only believed him in the dramatic scenes but he was also believable as a record-setting athlete. He had some great scenes with Jason Sudekis, who was surprisingly believable in the role of Jesse’s coach.
With all that in mind, why didn’t Race make more of an impression? I think that, too often, Hopkins allowed the film’s focus to wander away from Jesse and the inner conflict he felt as he won medals for a country where he was treated like a second-class citizen. There were too many random scenes of Jeremy Irons and William Hurt, playing Olympic officials and debating whether or not to boycott Hitler’s Olympics. During the second half of the film, Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) showed up and we got a few scenes of her trying to film Jesse’s triumph at the Olympics despite the interference of Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbles (Barnaby Metschurat). All of these extra scenes are supposed to set Jesse’s struggle in a historic context but they’re unnecessary and distracting. All the context that the film needs can be found in the fact that Jesse was a black man living in America in the 1930s.
For the most part, Race is uneven but occasionally the film delivers a powerful scene or two. One of the most powerful parts of the film comes when Jesse, after setting world records and being proclaimed as a hero across the world, is informed that he still can’t enter a New York club through the front door. As well, the scenes depicting Jesse’s friendship with German jump Luz Long (David Kross) are poignant. In fact, they’re so poignant that I initially assumed that they were fictionalized for the film but actually, Jesse and Luz Long did become good friends during the 1936 Olympics.
Race is uneven but it’s not bad. Stephan James gives a good performance as Jesse and, if nothing else, the film provides a worthy history lesson.
Since I’ve been reviewing so many Dracula films as of late, it seems only appropriate that tonight’s excursion into televised horror should be about a vampire as well!
The Reluctant Vampire was the 7th episode of the 3rd season of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt! It stars Malcolm McDowell as a vampire who is a little bit too nice for his own good. Seriously, you can’t go wrong with Malcolm McDowell as a vampire.
The Reluctant Vampire originally aired on July 10th, 1991.
Enjoy!
Through the Shattered Lens 