THE HUNGER. 1983. BASED ON THE BOOK 'THE HUNGER' BY WHITLEY STRIEBER. DIRECTED BY TONY SCOTT. CINEMATOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN GOLDBLATT.
STARRING CATHERINE DENEUVE, DAVID
BOWIE, CLIFF DE YOUNG, SUSAN SARANDON, BETH EHLERS, DAN HEDAYA,
WILLEM DAFOE AND BAUHAUS.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I took this film out of the library
recently (yes, there are still those of us who do that, like
cave-people who've never heard of Netflix...!) and
the librarian laughed as he checked it out and remarked that the
director really had 'a thing for
billowing curtains.'
I had
to laugh too. There certainly are a
lot of billowing curtains in this visually beautiful and arty erotic
vampire film, along with classical music and classical statuary and
paintings. The director was definitely trying to create something
artistically eye-catching and in this he's succeeded, but the film's
not without its problems or, indeed, its stern critics.
Despite its being quite obviously sexy and stylish, film critic Roger Ebert described
the film as 'an agonisingly bad vampire movie.' That's
one way of looking at it, I suppose, but it's found itself a cult
following amongst the goth subculture so the news isn't all bad. Me
personally, I don't exactly hate it but I don't love it either. I'm
somewhere in the middle. I certainly think it's worth one watch.
Now to the plot. Miriam Blaylock, played
by a well-preserved Catherine Deneuve, is one hot momma. In one way.
In another, she's a stone-cold bitch who also just so happens to be a
vampire. That's right, she's an ageless and beautiful vampire who is
hundreds, maybe thousands of years old.
She lives in Manhattan in a fantastic
old house filled with the aforementioned priceless objets d'art.
She doesn't need to go
out to work because she's as rich as Croesus, although she poses as a
teacher of classical music along with her handsome younger husband.
By the way, did I forget to mention that this classy lassy with the
bottomless bank account is married to the Thin White Duke...?
Yep, her hubby is musician-actor David
Bowie who sadly passed away earlier this year and- as some people
maintain!- unintentionally sparked off a chain of celebrity deaths
that had us reeling and railing against the Grim Reaper till
midsummer at least. It's been a bad year for celebrity deaths.
He's a vampire too like his missus but
he's not up to much in this film. When we come in, he's unfortunately
started to age at the rate of knots, even though Miriam had promised
him eternal life and also eternal youth when they first got together
back in the eighteenth century.
She may have been telling porkies about
the eternal youth thing, but it seems that she was telling the brutal
truth about his living forever, which is extremely bad news for her
hubby John who's now so ancient in his appearance that he makes
Grampa Simpson from THE SIMPSONS look
young...!
Before long, Miriam is callously locking
him away in a coffin in a room at the top of the house where,
incidentally, she keeps the rotting corpses of her other lovers.
She's pledged eternal love to all of them but we quickly learn that
'eternity' for Miriam can end in a heartbeat the minute she tires of
you or you can no longer satisfy her. The corpses are doomed to lie
there, awake and aware, for all eternity because she's too goddamn
selfish to let them die. That bitch. I
told you guys she was cold...!
Things start to pick up a bit after
David Bowie has been put in his box. The sexually insatiable Miriam
turns her attentions to Dr. Sarah Roberts, the author of a dreary but
terribly worthy tome called SLEEP AND LONGEVITY who
carries out ageing experiments on monkeys, of all things.
Dr. Roberts,
a gerontologist consulted by an agonised David Bowie before his
incarceration in Miriam's attic, is played by a
freakishly-young-looking Susan Sarandon with a painfully 'Eighties
hairstyle. Poor David Bowie thought that maybe she could slow down or
even stop altogether his dreadful ageing process but it was no dice,
sadly.
Sarah can't
help being mesmerised by Miriam, who is quite simply the last word in
feminine
allure. The two have lesbian sex in
Miriam's gaff. (Well, what other kind could they have...?)
Yes, you do see boobs;
Sarah's, but not Miriam's...! The sex is all very artistically-shot
and stylish, and by the end of it, Miriam has co-mingled their
respective bloods and Sarah is on her way to becoming a fully-fledged
vampire.
Sarah
gets as sick as a dog as her body comes to terms with its new
situation. I love the scene in which Miriam tells her new lover that
she'll sleep for six hours out of every twenty-four and she'll need
to 'feed' once a week. SO YOU'RE A VAMPIRE NOW or VAMPIRES 101,
as it were.
Sarah
becomes so desperate for blood- 'the hunger,' as
Miriam puts it, is upon her- that she kills her own husband when he
comes looking for her at Miriam's place, and she joins in the gory
fun when Miriam rips a young male pick-up limb from limb.
When I
first used to watch the devastatingly handsome and sexually dominant
Christopher Lee as Dracula in the HAMMER HORROR films,
I wanted nothing more than to be a vampire too. I'd live with him in
his castle and drink blood from a jewel-encrusted goblet brought to me nightly by my new husband's naked, full-bosomed handmaidens. It was
going to be sweet. This
film put me off the idea of being a vampire for good.
All that
sweating and being sick and looking as if you're dying with the 'flu
while your body craves human blood changed my mind about it, along with the unsavoury sight of Susan Sarandon in her sweat-socks sweating buckets through her old grey T-shirt. I only
ever wanted the glamour and the sex with Dracula, anyway, not so much
the other stuff. I certainly never wanted to do my own killing, haha.
So anyway, do
Miriam and Sarah live happily ever after for all eternity, or is
eternity just too long a time even for a vampire...? There's a neat
little twist at the end that I can't tell you about, but I thought it
was a strange ending to an already strange film. Apparently, some
members of the cast were disappointed in the ending but some viewers
will think it's only right and proper.
There
are some plot-holes in the film, which is so painfully 'Eighties that it
looks a bit dated now, but the plot-holes, I suppose, are of secondary
importance compared to the look of the thing.
Willem Dafoe makes a brief cameo as a man who wants to use the phone after Susan Sarandon's finished with it and the violin-playing kid is really, really annoying. 'Eighties band BAUHAUS make an appearance and the monkey experiments stuff gets quite confusing after a while. I didn't enjoy that bit too much.
Willem Dafoe makes a brief cameo as a man who wants to use the phone after Susan Sarandon's finished with it and the violin-playing kid is really, really annoying. 'Eighties band BAUHAUS make an appearance and the monkey experiments stuff gets quite confusing after a while. I didn't enjoy that bit too much.
The
first half-hour drags a bit and things don't really get going until
David Bowie is locked away in his coffin in the attic, but the hour or so after
that is required viewing for fans of the vampire genre. Based on the
novel by Whitley Strieber, there's not one mention of the 'v' word in
the film, however, which is interesting. Watch this if you enjoy
vampire flicks. If you can overlook the flaws, it's a real little
cracker, I promise
you.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA
HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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