QUEEN OF THE DAMNED
Directed by Michael Rymer
Starring Aaliyah and Stuart Townsend
Playing at Showcase Cinemas, West Springfield

Vampires have long fascinated the populace, inspiring everything from a subgenus of the Goth lifestyle to kinky blood sport sex games to relatively innocuous pop-culture entertainments. There’s even a Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vampires, which I happen to own. Some have attributed the ageless appeal of the undead to their sensuality (which has always perplexed me, because how erotic, exactly, is a demonic walking corpse?), while others have illustrated the psychological underpinnings of vampiric mythology: our fears of mortality, our love/hate relationship with religion (what with all the Catholic iconography), our concerns with our insatiable appetites, and our nihilistic, primal urge to be close to danger. Of course, they may just make really cool movies.

Ever since the heyday of the ’70s supernatural soap opera “Dark Shadows”, vampire entertainments have lost the nocturnal fear of classics like Nosferatu for something different: a poetic-gothic romanticism that have turned vampires from charming, bloodsucking ghouls into tragic icons of lost innocence. There’s almost a deep reverence for them. Nowadays movies, books and TV shows set up underground societies where vampires can live with Bacchanalian decadence, apocalyptic carnage or soulful angst. Surprisingly, Queen of the Damned is only the second adaptation of a novel by Anne Rice, the author who has done the most to perpetuate the idea of the vampire as the new human. The first was 1994’s luridly overripe Interview with a Vampire – a long, toothless, puffy-shirt period “epic” that was like the world’s bloodiest (and mustiest) homoerotic Harlequin romance novel ever. Tom Cruise sank his teeth into the role of the vampire Lestat with scenery-chewing zeal, but co-stars Brad Pitt and Christian Slater looked as though they were earnestly eyeing the exits and the movie got bogged down by director Neil Jordan’s assumption that he was making a serious drama. Queen is not as stuffy as Interview was, but it’s just as mediocre, as both films lack any lusty, hungry passion.

Lestat is once again the focus. However he is not played by Cruise, but by Irish actor Stuart Townsend, who is awfully lifeless – even for someone playing dead. With his high cheekbones and lithely muscular body, Townsend looks like a male model, and he acts like one too. He sneers and preens and struts with apropos hauteur, but it’s a one-note performance that torpedoes the movie. The fact that Queen of the Damned is a melodramatic bore that lacks the humor and horror to justify its atmosphere of luxuriant narcosis hardly helps matters.

Lestat has been sleeping in his New Orleans crypt for a century, but now he has woken because he likes the sound of our music. As soon as he’s up, Lestat reinvents himself as the lead singer for the goth-rock band The Vampire Lestat, brazenly parading his vampirism in public (his adoring fans eat up the “gimmick”). This has made him the enemy of the other vampires who want their identities to remain secret.

Lestat’s music as also awakened the ancient Egyptian vampire queen Akasha (the late R’B princess Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash last summer), who delights in the cruel bloodletting of immortals and mortals alike. Akasha wants to rule the world with Lestat as her king, because she has a thing for him. Other characters, most of who also have a thing for Lestat, include Marius (a lively Vincent Perez), the ancient who sired Lestat, and the dull human Jesse (Marguerite Moreau), a London based paranormal researcher who longs to be a vampire. Lena Olin has a barely-in-the-movie role of Maharat, a good vampire whose reason for existence remains murky at best. (It’s hard to believe that three people – including a queen – could be attracted to such a charmless pretty boy as Lestat.)

I never thought I would hear a soundtrack more earsplitting then the one for this year’s Rollerball, until I heard the original music for Queen of the Damned, sung by the band The Vampire Lestat. Composed by Richard Gibbs and Korn lead singer Jonathan Davis, the songs are pounding heavy metal tunes that seem designed to make the ears bleed (still, I thought the song “Forsaken” wouldn’t be out of place on the radio).

But it’s not just the music that’s been amped to headache levels. The entire sound quality – the shrieks, the screams, even the dialogue – has been increased to piercing decibel levels that shred the Dolby Digital system. It’s yet another movie that mistakes loudness for energy. Lethargic and somber, Queen of the Damned doesn’t have any cheesy horror movie fun until the end which features a Matrix-style fight and special effect blasts of flaming bodies and decapitated heads. By then it’s too little, too late for a movie that has been a tired lump. The movie even denies us a giddy parody of the gauche world of rock stars, though a music video styled on German expressionist classics like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has the right edge of schlock-dread eeriness that characterize Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails videos.

Fans of Aaliyah will be disappointed because she doesn’t show up until an hour in, and even that’s only for a scene where Akasha decimates a vampire pub (replete with a heart being ripped out of a chest). She then disappears until the big climax, when Akasha finally becomes a major character. Aaliyah was a promising actress who’s one of the few people on screen who seems to be having fun. She plays Akasha with the right mix of kittenish playfulness and seductive menace; she juices the movie whenever she’s on screen (which is not nearly enough). However, the fact that her character is so small and that Aaliyah is given top billing in the previews is proof that Warner Bros. is willing to exploit her lost star to sell the movie. There’s nothing wrong with releasing a movie with a deceased star, but there is something wrong with piggybacking on that name for box office success.