Unleashed upon the world on this date in 1995, Anne Goursaud's erotic Gothic tale EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE.
After
growing up in public over the course of wholesome sitcom WHO'S THE
BOSS?, breathtaking Alyssa Milano decided to loudly declare her passage
to adulthood by taking on a sexy vampire movie ("The innocence is over,"
declares the movie's poster).
Backing up Milano are, among others, Charlotte Lewis (as photographer Sarah) and, in a part unusually small for her, Jennifer Tilly. Some really solid casting, and everyone is giving it their all.
But the movie badly needed a vampire. Martin Kemp, the bass player for Spaundau Ballet, tries to fill the role--he's credited as The Vampire and never given a name--but he's hopelessly outgunned by a mess of a script and creative direction that, while giving him a character and story that could have been made to work, has him delivering one inane howler after another.
Directress Goursaud had, by this time, been working as an editor for 17 years, on films as diverse as Chuck Norris' A FORCE OF ONE, BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA and THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WHEN OUT IN GEORGIA. This was her directorial debut and EMBRACE is at its best when she has it successfully tapping the vein of the classic Euro-sex-and-horror pictures of the '60s and '70s. Powered by some outstanding photographic and editing decisions, the film's world is repeatedly made to come unmoored and drift into an erotic fever-dream until, by the end, that world has almost entirely become that dream. There are remarkable moments that untether agreeable neurotransmitters and accelerate the atoms of one's extremities. Sarah's attempted seduction of Milano's Charlotte is particularly good.
That's also where the pictures repeatedly falls down though, because bad creative decisions are allowed to creep in and puncture that atmosphere. Kemp's vampire is written and directed as without a trace of charm or humor and so Overwrought Melodrama Serious that he looks, in every moment he's on the screen, as if he's on the verge of imploding or dropping instantly dead of a stroke, which, one would think, would be quite a trick for a vampire.
"Who are you?", Charlotte asks him.
"I'm your destiny," he breathlessly replies, with all the desperate, hypertension-fueled Deadly Earnest he can muster. One needs to feel some smidgen of sympathy for the fellow and his plight for his part to work but it's hard to muster much when it's a such an incessant struggle to keep from bursting out in laughter. It's Artifice, cranked up to 11, a dash of cold water that instantly brings one out of the dream the movie is trying to weave.
Goursaud is also very music video in her approach at times, which is at cross-purposes with the rest of the picture. The opening flashback begins as girl-porn romance novel covers come to life then takes an intended darker turn that mostly just showcases the deleterious influence of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA from a few years prior. None of it works. Some of the later fantasy sequences of this species are the same way--brightly lit, painfully literal, overdone and silly.
None of this had to be terminal to the project. Some different writing, direction, thespianan decisions could have reigned this in, toned it down, made it all work as more of a cohesive whole. For those who appreciate EMBRACE's dual genres--Gothic horror and sex picture--its wrong turns can be frustrating. It's a movie about which people often joke, "there's only one reason to watch this. Well, two." An assessment that is both unfair and that the movie often begs viewers to make.
"Who are you?", Charlotte asks him.
"I'm your destiny," he breathlessly replies, with all the desperate, hypertension-fueled Deadly Earnest he can muster. One needs to feel some smidgen of sympathy for the fellow and his plight for his part to work but it's hard to muster much when it's a such an incessant struggle to keep from bursting out in laughter. It's Artifice, cranked up to 11, a dash of cold water that instantly brings one out of the dream the movie is trying to weave.
Goursaud is also very music video in her approach at times, which is at cross-purposes with the rest of the picture. The opening flashback begins as girl-porn romance novel covers come to life then takes an intended darker turn that mostly just showcases the deleterious influence of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA from a few years prior. None of it works. Some of the later fantasy sequences of this species are the same way--brightly lit, painfully literal, overdone and silly.
None of this had to be terminal to the project. Some different writing, direction, thespianan decisions could have reigned this in, toned it down, made it all work as more of a cohesive whole. For those who appreciate EMBRACE's dual genres--Gothic horror and sex picture--its wrong turns can be frustrating. It's a movie about which people often joke, "there's only one reason to watch this. Well, two." An assessment that is both unfair and that the movie often begs viewers to make.
At the same time, it's also the case that many wouldn't even see these things as wrong turns. Most of the stuff about
which I've been complaining is a regular feature of these kinds of pictures and aficionados tend, out of necessity, to develop a high tolerance--even, sometimes, an affection--for them, whereas I, also guilty of aficionadodom, think the movie, when it works, works very well and see these as failings that prevent it from being what it could have--should have?--been. I like EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE. I wish it left me with less to criticize.
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