Inescapably Her Iron Age Druid Bog Mummy Telekinetic Alcoholic Hottie Self: THE ETERNAL (1998)

Ireland - birthplace of literary horror and unrepentant alcoholism - full of murky bogs and steamy moors; dark pubs and hellfire-haired hotties predisposed to take a nip or a dip into the tannin-rich peat to preserve their sunken shrouded shamaness bodies across the sodden centuries. And then there's horror author Bram Stoker, Irish as the day is blurred. Some speculate he contracted a horrifying venereal disease while in a London brothel and it perhaps left him equating sex with death and personifications of archetypal malice incarnating in irresistibly charming high-end ladies. And he also did a mummy story, adapted by Hammer in 1972 as Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, called "Jewel of the Seven Stars." Director Michael Almereyda used it too as uncredited source material for The Eternal (1998) and it's a similarly fascinating and classic horror film reference-enriched follow-up to hip downtown NYC vampire movie Nadja (1994). The Eternal is an unfortunately generic title for a film that's anything but. Using his fascination with contrasting media formats (Nadja made noted use of a Fischer-Price Pixelvison camera) to depict various incarnations of his druid mummy and her long brown haired hottie lineage, Almereyda unspools an unusual, atmospheric alcohol-enriched saga helped no end by Alison Elliott as both a bog mummy druid priestess and a hipster alcoholic mother prone to seizures.

There may not be any of Stoker's phrenological acumen in Almeryeda's bag of cool tricks, but there are unique and oblique references to horror movie classics stretching from Caligari to Ulmer's Black Cat to Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and even Luis Fulci's Manhattan Baby, all shellacked in a Bava-by-Freund glaze. Jared Harris stars as Jim with Alison Eliott as Nora, and they make a very believable and interesting pair of hard drinking but still fun parents Jim and Nora, the latter who is prone--especially lately--to passing out even while climbing stairs. Nora's NYC doctor notes her problems aren't going to get better until she stops drinking altogether. She doesn't like to hear that, so figures a trip to the ancestral homestead, which she fled, under a cloud, before meeting Jim, will do the trick. "You're going to Ireland to dry out?" The doctor replies, bewildered. (He obviously never saw the 1934 Columbia voodoo movie Black Moon or he'd know that ignoring the call of an ancestral homestead results in far worse than blackouts). Irregardless of the illogic, the family heads off to a Baskerville-esque mansion in the moors ("When they got there it was raining, or was about to rain, or had just rained" intones the Irish girl narrator). Of course they stop at a local pub for a pint on the way, and one pint turns to many many many pints and then to a fight and then a crashed car. "Good thing we're not alcoholics" Jim (Harris) says  ("They'd been thrown out of pubs all over the world" the girl narrator says). Soon everyone is either declining a drink with a nervous twitch, accepting one with a sidelong glance, sneaking one or lurching merrily from its effect, which may include 16mm or super 8mm flashbacks of pretty women along Nora's matriarchal line, a line that stretches down into the Iron Age peat moss, before there was even silver nitrate stock to burn it out. Especially welcoming is Christopher Walken as the eccentric uncle. He's recently unearthed an ancient druid, found years ago from out of the bog and kept stored down in the basement, where naturally Nora hides out to drink in peace without her progressively more buzz-killing husband noticing. As it's rinsed off, the mummy looks uncannily like Nora. Could this be why she's fainting all the time? Some ancient ancestor is using up her soul energy to reincarnate? Wouldn't be the first time.

Either way, it's fun sneaking drinks in the basement with the ever-hip Walken. He's way cooler than Andrew Keir in the Hammer version, Blood from the Mummy's Tomb.

From top: Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, The Eternal, Tomb, Eternal

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb offers a more faithful interpretation to Stoker's novel, i.e. the Egyptian version, following the same path: the ancient magical super woman who looks just like some innocent young daughter of the man who discovered her tomb (and surely was 'guided' from beyond to find her body as the stars aligned perfectly).  Super sexy in pale skin and black velvet choker, Valerie Leon remains the primary reason to see it (I've seen it at least six times). Visiting all the exhuming archeologists one by one to kill them for their pieces of the reincarnate puzzle, Leon gets to play three types: archeologist's timid daughter, homicidal swinging mod with telekinetic skills, and ruthless Egyptian queen. But in all other points, The Eternal is the Stoker mummy movie to beat and sadly Almereyda's last horror feature, so far.

The 1990s had already seen one trippy European bog mummy film, this with a male shaman with some still active 'flybane' mushrooms in his pocket reincarnated as a rabid nymphomaniacal Communist with one spoon in her lover's brain (See The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer). But the frothing at the mouth stylizations of Zulawski are hard to sink into as a genre horror film and the rote 'innocent girl possessed by an executed, entombed or defiled soul for its methodic revenge' thing of Hammer a hard rut to get out of. Almereyda mixes the two just right: there's enough druggie acumen to make it decent company next to Jarmusch and Ferrara, and enough wry nods to the classics to fit next to Freund and Lewton.  I don't have to read a Wiki to know Almereyda is a true blue classic horror film lover, for The Eternal pulses with the found value rhythms of Ulmer, the English blood and sexy thunder of Hammer, and the murk of the moody Browning. Even the deadpan macabre wit of Whale flows through in a steady bucket trickle. If you know these names, Almeyreda's Eternal is the film for you, Johnny-O. Ignore the bad RT and imdb scores. What do they know about the ancient gems, severed hands, or Iron Age moral compromises? 

Whoa - that sounded like the end of the review, but there's way more. Here's what happened: 1998 Michael Almeyreda, having had a minor critical hit in 1994 with Nadja (see my post earlier in the month), a black and white downtown NYC vampire film with lots of Portishead and cigarettes, took his winnings and doubled down on a color Irish mummy film with lots of Cat Power and whiskey. It didn't find the art house crowd it might have if he kept the black and white. Instead it went for the easy money and wound up in the cut-out bin looking more or less like everything else therein--at least from the cover. I mean look at that thing (above)! It looks like some direct-to-video Japanese softcore ghost story or hack Skinemax exorcist rip with a Waken walk-on ala The Prophecy IV instead of a druggie downtown-stylized old dark house ode to pre-code Universal and 70s Euro horrors. Well, I whipped up some real nice cover alternatives. Trimark--my gift to you:

i.e. "The Eternal Thirst" - the old booze comic Max and I did in the 80s

Here's the record collection, the wee lass, and Harris:

Debits for the ginger, their son. But he keeps his ugly haircut to the back of frame most of the time, which is just another thing Almereyda gets right. See, these parents are cool, in the old school tradition, in that they don't freak out and/or treat their kid like some precious unboiled egg in a relay race. They're partiers--they don't work (she's rich)--and they love to horse around with the kid, but the kid doesn't stop them from getting sloshed at the pub. As for returning to his hot wife's hometown and all the boyfriends she left all of a sudden-like, well, Harris is no Dustin Hoffman "pacifist" pussy but an ever-dancing freewheeling dude who's maybe a hair less charismatic than he thinks, but what drunk isn't? I admire the way Harris incorporates what is probably some dance background into his drunken twirls and rills. First thing he does to prove his mettle when the Straw Doggie skulking townie ex-boyfriend shows up is punch him, picking a fight by the juke box.

It's a great scene not least because they only stopped in there 'for a quick one' after swearing off drinking, and soon its hours later - they're tanked - and the son is falling asleep at the bar from stone boredom. Yikes! Call child services except, god bless it, this is Ireland. They just get ejected from the pub is all. "They'd been kicked out of bars all over the world" notes the yet unseen girl narrator Alice (Rachel O'Rourke), with some veiled admiration. Wait, I said all this already, didn't I? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. Come back here, laddie! I'm still talkin'...

What counts in the meantime is the groovy scenery and how Uncle Bill (Walken) has a great (as in perfect for the kind of square shit older Catholics have) LP collection (well not great, but Jim does find Joe Dolan, and they dance funkily to his one hit, "She was a Good-Lookin' Woman"). Meanwhile the girl with the disaffected expression who occasionally interjects some plot points "your mother was a witch as well," has a kind of worldly calm, she smoke cigarettes and lights one for her deranged grandma (Lois Smith).

It's all right there - in the beginning Alice is a bit like the girl in Don't Look Now (1973) and for awhile she's like Italian giallo go-to redhead moppet Nicolette Elimi with a semi-decent establishing shot matte painting ala Corman's Poe series.

One of the unique subtexts at work here is an undercurrent of pro-drunken anger - as still sick and suffering alcoholic Nora regularly has drinks taken out of her hands by Jim who says "none for us, we're quitting" and makes a big show of enjoying life without it all while nipping from a flask unseen. That kind of balderdash makes me want to retch. And I should know. The way the drinks pass her wide eyes by, or the way she works hard to seem deadpan when getting offered some whiskey down in the basement once Jim's upstairs with the ginger kid --it's the kind of stuff only drunks like myself feel keenly. How nice that there's whole films and wings of Irish literature just for us! No matter how adept his Walken impression, or grace around the dance floor, Jim's refusing drinks on Nora's behalf stings like a slap, and it's meant to. Only Eugene O'Neill really ever wrote scenes that captured the way every offered drink, every vulnerable liquor bottle, warms the alcoholic's blood like a siren call, and every 'no thanks' on their sickly behalf freezes the blood like a gut punch they're not allowed to wince from. And only Hawks and Huston ever understood it well enough to capture it (Wilder doesn't really get it in Lost Weekend); only Hawks and Huston understood how cigarettes and drinks are the currency of cool loyalty, how they bring the world into focus as well as out of it. Almereyda doesn't have time to stretch out on these branches. There's no mariachi band playing the Death Song to steady her nerves like in Rio Bravo; no agony of being denied a desperately needed drink just for 'singing lousy' like in Key Largo. No time; the sub-plot just dries out. Plus, "Why be serious? That's for people in sad countries like Poland or Africa. And anyway, the mummy catches on fire and bursts through the window and gets zapped by electric current just like Hawks' original The Thing. So add the cigarettes (Jim is constantly lighting them and sticking them in his wife's mouth; Alice does the same for the old woman, keeping one for herself) and drinks (and drink awareness) and that's Hawks enough. We don't need soberin'. We need another round. Like a hole in the head.

Other wry references: Jim offhandedly quotes Six Million Dollar Man while building a fire; crazy old bat Lois Smith's hair makes her resemble the crazy old Baroness Graps in Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill (1966), which Eternal resembles for its inter-generational war of the matriarchal sorceresses plot, and the transmigration of souls motif which also ties in with Nadja and its influences like Daughters of Darkness-ness with the dreamy beachside ending.

There's other evidence of Almereyda's artistry and laid back genius for subliminal nodding, as in the way he evokes the idea of a pharaoh's crypt by lighting the cavernous marble foyer with the kind of candle light that evokes a big archeological dig; or the subtle way the cold washrag around Nora's forehead after one of her spells mirrors the head-wrap worn by the mummy (also played by Elliott) Niamh; or how Almereyda uses super 8mm movie footage to nod to home movies for the flashbacks to Niamh's Iron Age tragedy (she let her love for a no-good man weaken her magick power) and the death of Nora's mother, (Sinead Dolan). It might have been a corny touch but Almereyda has been exploring the use of different media within film structures for awhile, as in his Hamlet's intentionally pretentious conscience-of-the-king-catching video art pieces and overwhelmed Blockbuster trips; the Fisher Price Pixelvision in Nadja.  And the grandma (Smith), the dead mom (Sinead Dolan) of Nora; the undead mummy shamaness; and the girl narrator provide a multi-generational matriarchal chain in contrasting film stocks (witnessed in Nora's head accompanying her weird flashback nose-bleeds and bird hallucinations) around which the little ginger, the local lads, and Jim are the only men and always seem a hare's breath away from being killed in a Barleycorn sacrifice. "It was the Iron Age, you had to a do lot of nasty things to get by," Walken says in reference to Nora's question about whether Niamh, her bog mummy ancestor, is good or evil. "She was uncontrollably herself." Jim meanwhile jokes around when it turns out the mattress is stuffed with dead snakes and potato-shaped stones: "The ancient druids used Mr. Potato Head as part of their rituals" he tells his owl-eyed ginger. But is the ginger really his? Straw Dogs skulking in the windows with their deux ex machina timely shots conjure wild scenarios ala 'Her Majesty's Coachmen' in Lady Eve. Then again, do they? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. These shards of Jimmy Dolan albums aren't going to just telekinetically slice into townsfolk's necks themselves!

And as for sobriety... Fuck sobriety. No one comes to Ireland to dry out and. besides, good Scotch functions as snake bite remedy. This is the dawning of the Iron Age of Aquarius, sweet ladies, goodnight. Saint Patrick can boast as he likes, Ireland always keeps serpents handy! And AA big books are by the door, if ye should be cursed with the shit liver of a mainlander. Keep comin' back, it works if you work it, and Keep Watching the Skies! 

Sinead Dolan as Nora's mom, though we never
see her outside these faded 16mm / super 8mm memories, she sure looks familiar,
until we almost miss her ourselves.

Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, THE ADDICTION, NADJA

Like so many broken down NYC artists and writers before me, I've submissively followed my vampire anima--my creative muse-- like a doting Renfield, scooping up any fly turns of phrase or spider ideas she cares to drop behind her, protected from direct harm (her rabid fangs of madness) only by some half-remembered Hegel quote kept around my ravaged neck. Lonely in the throng of my fellow lonesome vampire secretaries--all of us aging and dying as we're drug from one Annexia to the next while our vampire muses stay young and lush and flush in their coffin pages and occasionally celluloid--I simultaneously crave and fear the isolation she needs to emerge from her hairy coffin. 

The East Village where I used to live now can only be afforded by the rich or older-than-me bastards with rent controlled apartments. But back in the 80s-90s you could live in downtown NYC for only $500 a month, and there was a sudden outbreak of female druggie downtown vampire artists onscreen, serving well as metaphors for the city itself, and AIDs, drug addiction, and art's constant struggle for fresh blood. Anonymous thirsty youth prowling a city that never sleeps just waiting for a bite = ideal vamp habitat. Now we live in squalor in Park Slope and make double what we used to but can't afford to go to a bar and buy $15 drinks, so everyone's in bed by midnight; we can barely afford a gallon of Coke Zero, 2 packs of cigarettes, fifth of bourbon, and gram of weed a day habit. No vamp can find us now - and our anima slumbers out of reach, deep in the Demeter's rat-infested hold.

But there's always the 90s to revisit, and now, thanks to a genius female Iranian director, there's an indication some element of the 90s black-and-white druggy urban vampire dream lives on, in a sub-section--west side-- where it's always balmy, where it's forever the past, and LPs and cassette mix tapes are still the hard currency of connection. Iran's Bad City (aka Bakersfield, CA) a town located between the grime of Bleeker Street and the clankety-clank of Eraserhead. 

THE ADDICTION

1995- Dir Abel Ferrara 

****

"Dependency is a marvelous thing," whispers Lili Taylor to her NYU thesis advisor as they shoot up together. "It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctorate material." Of course she's going to give him more than just dissertations and heroin, she's going to give him eternal hunger in exchange for his opiated blood --basking in the satisfaction of two cravings being satisfied in one suck. She rules her space, this guy may be a teacher but he's at her feet. Yet before long she's trapped in the loft of a pompous male vampire who drinks her blood and leaves her to contort the day away in agonizing anemic double-withdrawal, giving her the gift of a copy of Burroughs/ Naked Lunch to help her learn to control her junky cravings. Ferrara leans in on Taylor's prolonged, agonized day --maybe the most extended, harrowing depiction of drug withdrawal I've ever seen, or felt (though mine were from alcohol-- probably only about 1/10 as agonizing but very similar movements and breathing). She finally makes it into the service elevator and down to the street, as we all do, to get her fix, the city barely noticing how messed up she is, which is both its best and worst habit.

Naturally someone helps, giving more than the Red Cross would ever ask and she's fine again. 

The Addiction, in other words, in a 90s black-and-white horror movie that's about a lot more than just stakes and exsanguination, it's got interesting things to say--both out loud and in the coolest voiceover narration in all of cinema, a veritable doctoral thesis on evil-cum-advocacy for drug addiction, whispered by Lili Taylor, so glassy-eyed perfect for the part it's like you're overhearing while nosing around some downtown NYC bookstore. 

This is no bullshit vamp psychobabble or empty LA posturing, It's real NYC, real philosophy in action, courtesy a script by Ferrara's long-time "more Catholic-junkie synergy than a dozen Jim Carrols" screenwriter Nicholas St. John. And Taylor brings just the right mix of whispery conviction to the words--a sublime mix between the idealistic and jaded, the philosophy-mad young Ritalin prescription-owning liberal arts NYU sophomore, made instantly seasoned cool by a few semesters of literary salons under Washington Square's ever-popping space needle. Cognizant of language's inadequacy even when stretched to the limit, yet unable to stop talking, she's the ideal doctoral candidate, i.e. she's annotated. She's able to back up being full of herself with memorized quotes. Following her thesis to its "the horror, the horror" nadir/pinnacle, she embraces madness, and physical decomposition (i.e. the rotting teeth so common to heroin addicts) as par for the course when transcending the dichotomy of life and death, pleasure and pain, being and nothing. 

It all starts when--just a normal grad student heading home-- she's accosted on the street by sexy vampire Annabelle Sciorra, who leads her into an alley (back when NYC had those) and says "tell me to go away" (the equivalent of "you don't want any part of this, kid" or "just say no") before throwing her against the wall and giving her the reverse fix that sets it off. Scared but turned on, Taylor just can't say no to Sciorra's hot, exotic promise. Who could? We've all seen her in Jungle Fever. Therefore, it's all the victim's fault, but is that rationalization on the vamp's part--a way rapists take advantage of fear-paralysis-- or one of those lore things, like they have to be invited in or can't cross your threshold?

Taylor's subsequent journey from shame to rapture includes an expanding wealth of widened perception--brain opening up to encompass all the horrors our conscious minds usually suppresses. As her brain opens, her body decomposes. Like Jeff Goldblum's Brundle in Cronenberg's Fly, she notes her corporeal changes a dispassionate theorist's eye, succinctly elaborating on the strange joy involved with divesting oneself from ones' own fate. They let their known parameters of self be outmoded. If the pursuit of knowledge means they morph into some unknown creature, what else is life for? Only emotion makes it all bad or tragic.

Well I remember, around the same mid-90s period, scaring girlfriends and co-workers with my own drugged-out wild-eyed rants about how I could see through time, and how space was an illusion. I saw their concern and silence as if from a distance. Taylor's fellow doctoral candidate and study buddy Edie Falco, for example, is similarly horrified by how far off the deep-end diving board her once-sober and similarly timid friend has fallen/risen. Taylor, in terse retort sneers: "Your obtuseness is disheartening as a doctoral candidate." Hot damn! She said obtuseness! From then on, it's clear just who's gonna ace their thesis dissertation, who's just going to 'pass'. Falco hurries along the dotted lines of the known, buried in books, made sexless as a side effect of proximity to the fumes from old library glue. But Taylor's huffing the solvents of the opiated beyond--seen beyond the veil--waltzed past all the old dead men still wrestling with phony differentiations between past and present, free will and destiny--and she still has the finely-etched hyper-perspicacity to succinctly elaborate--well within the parameters of dead philosopher quotations--these new paradigms to the thesis committee. The addiction has organized her life, broadened her perspective, cinched her doctorate, and made her as full of moral decay and intellectual flourish as New York City itself.

With its Weegee-style black and white photography, The Addiction manages on a flop house budget what Coppola's Dracula couldn't with all its smoke and mirrors, which is to harken all the way back to the vampire film's mythopoetic Murnau roots. Nosferatu's dissertation on the hydra polyp finds parallel with Taylor's My Lai massacre microfiche montage. The invasion of disease-carrying rats in Mina's hometown finds parallel in The Holocaust exhibit, visited by Falco and Taylor at a local museum--mass Europen death happening in the moment-- the 3-D space of 2D photos from the camps like an intrusion of the past, of death divorced from history and time, made current through the seeing of it.

No one actually dies in this vamp universe, there's no time and they were never living anyway, for one doesn't live below 14th Street. They just drag themselves around Artists and academics alone are smart enough to know that, unless they say yes to dangerous experiences (unprotected anonymous sex, heroin, vampire biting) they'll have nothing interesting to say in their art or thesis and they'll wind up just another flyover college part-time faculty hack. Receiving the disease was their decision, like a "welcome to the disease which there is no cure for" bathroom mirror urban myth. For some that's a death sentence, for others, it's a diploma. 

Throughout the film, Taylor is so sublimely low-key, sexy and very convincing in the lead she seems to become almost legitimately supernatural. She owns the role, the film, the city--she conquers with nothing but her low height and a purring whisper that seems born to say Nicolas St. John's clear-eyed lines. Abel must have lost his shit when he saw how good she was, how great this film was gonna be. Too bad more people can't get behind it, perhaps from their own lack of experience with STDs, drugs, philosophy. history, pretentious salons, or New York and its flea-bitten artsy undertow, its stolen shot seediness, which Abel captures better than anyone else. 

Also, it's hard to find. Not even legal in the US anymore, no region one to be found. Though I'd love to see it delivered in deep Criterion blacks, the fact that my copy is a semi-legal all-region non-anamorphic version (from Romania!) makes perfect meta commentary sense, as the film itself seems semi-legal, capturing a pre-ordinance-choked mid-90s Greenwich Village NYC, a Bleeker Street that's still wild and woolly; every storefront a decaying mass of failed punk band stickers, air pumping with ghetto blaster hip hop blaring from broken speakers. (PS 6/22- it's since come out on Blu-ray! Yay!)

Look, it's not perfect. Some of the dialogue about persecuting war crimes and living according to one's own blah blah is pretty naive (on the other hand, they are in college). Russell Simmons was a producer, which might explain the music not always being perfect (i.e. the tacky, soulful Temptations title theme song). Often the guerilla-style stolen street shots can get pretty shaky/woozy, and the whispering is sometimes hard to hear. But how often does a film about NYC college life really have such an authentic grasp on both grad school babble and heroin culture, so much that it swims in decadent drugginess and high-falutin' concepts rather than merely dipping a toe in and then skittering away, giggling or screaming? Even Roger Avary's heroin users comes off looking anemic by comparison. The Addiciton is in fact the only film of its kind, the only one to blend philosophical theory with folklore/vampirism, AIDs, addictive drugs and draws such a clear line between the four their differences vanish and they align like three identical transparency overlays. Kids need to learn --it's no longer enough to make out with your thesis advisor to be 'radical'. Shoot up for the first time, and drink his blood! Do the reading and then you can pass judgment on it (likening the smell of the NYU library with the rot of a charnel house) on your way out. 

You could fold images of Taylor in her shades (below) right in with Warhol's
black and white Edie Sedgwick,Velvet Underground, and 'moving portraits'
 factory footage and not miss a mink-lined "beat." That's good, as
 their music that's this film's only real precedent (just the Hold Steady is their only real antecedent).

Re-watching Addiction lately for purposes of this post, I started writing down relevant quotes and found myself wanting to write down the whole script, each line like manna to any starving/thirsty liberal arts graduate alcoholic or autodidact drug addict wandering the wilderness: "Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find." --I lived by those words while drinking myself into oblivion all through the mid-to-late 90s. Watching Taylor convulse on the street in withdrawal reminded me of when I was so far gone it would take hours for me to get myself together enough to get downstairs to the liquor store--which was, literally, right next door. With a twenty dollar bill taped to my shaking hand, I'd try to be too fast to stumble, trying to get my bourbon and make it back up to safety of my apartment without falling, vomiting or convulsing on the street and winding up at Bellevue in the care of old Bim. It being important too that I go and come back soon- before the real shakes and DTs start.

"... little turkeys in straw hats."

So yeah, this is right up there with The Lost Weekend for the authentic NYC 90s addict-alcoholic experience, all the better for being, as is traditional for Ferrara, void of preachy sober resolutions. Instead, it's a call to luxuriate inside your sickness. "Self realization is annihilation of self." Its a way to excuse, rationalize, and forgive the self-destructive tendencies clotting human history's arteries with war crimes so vile they crash time's mainframe, and to forgive, forgive, and rationalize our own self-poisoning.

Oh yeah, Skooly D, a longtime Ferrara collaborator, appears and scores. Christopher Walken shows up for a few killer moments as already mentioned; Onyx, Cypress Hill beatboxes the soundtrack with druggy raps pitch-shifted through blunt smoke: "I want to get high / so high" while Ferrara's camera prowls the graffiti-caked turf, and if you were a big partier in NYC in the 90s, then damn, this be like a muhfuggin' scrapbook.

Today, well, junkies, your city is gone (from downtown anyway; the Safdie Brothers can still find the pulse in the back alleys of the outer boroughs). Luckily, the buzzy flashback of that first ecstasy and cocaine highball stroll at dawn after an all-night sesh lingers---just ask the drug-dealer alien in Dark Angel [1990] AKA I Come in Peace == that's the best shit there is.

NADJA 

1994 - Dir Michael Almereyda 

***1/2

Like Taylor in The Addiction, Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) talks incessantly, albeit far less philosophically, with much less contentment with eternity. "I want to simplify my life," she blathers at a downtown bar to some future victim, "even on a superficial level."  The dude buys her another drink, as if hearing nothing she's saying, and she's barely saying anything, except that compared to NYC, all Europe is a rural village, and that the city actually gets more alive and exciting after midnight (no shit). Born "in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains," she's East Village Eurotrash from old Transylvanian money, currently grieving her father, Dracula (Bela Lugosi, seen via ingeniously overlapped and incorporated images from [the public domain] White Zombie), even though she hated him because he made her "eat butter." Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) has finally staked him, only after finding him strung out on drugs (like the real Bela), "old, confused, surrounded by zombies," notes Helsing, "he was like Elvis in the end."  Van Helsing's nephew (Marin Donovan)--the most fey boxer ever--is married to Nadja's new love interest (Galaxy Craze). They meet when Galaxy asks her for a cigarette at a nameless coffee house and we fall in love too, right off, with Craze's strung out 'love child of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy' look. We can tell she would make a great vampire --her speech already half-forgotten, vaguely slurred but very open, like she's talking to a therapist while trying to hide that she's bleeped on Oxycodone courtesy the chick from Liquid Sky. David Lynch is the morgue attendant in charge of Drac/Bela's body. He helped produce the film --he's playing Mel Brooks to Michael Almereyda's version of himself forThe Elephant Man. Lots of video art with Pixelvision cameras making snow look Atari; Nadja walks down the street at night, digging the flakes, smoking and gliding, and then Portishead starts, "How can it feel / this moment?"  That's when Craze, looking super androgyne sexy in her lumberjack coat, asks for a light; the water starts to whistle in the kettle. She tells her his brother wants to destroy her."Does he live in Carpathia," Craze asks, concerned. Nadja looks at her coldly, "no - Brooklyn." The sound in these dialogue scenes is crisp, you wish like hell barroom chat could be this writerly with concrete details and deep analytical acuity. "The pain of life is the pain of fleeting joy." with the only music that which you put on the jukebox yourself, trippy 90s Lynch style post-noir trip-sludge, over which you might slide the words of your forceful Euro-style assertions of fleeting joy monologue like slotted spoons. 

Crazy keeps a tarantula as a pet, "he scares most people." The dialogue is pretty great; Nadja is impressed when Craze runs to grab the tarantula so she doesn't crush it in her freaking out over a Dracula puppet going off on their Christmas tree. You realize you would hang out with these people intensely for days after you met them, unable to tear yourself away, if you banged into them. As you wonder if the whole cast is matching Craze's zonked disaffect out of a kind of filial love (ala the men with Mina Harker in the novel of Dracula, or Helen "Mina Harker" Chandler in The Last Flight.)

Galaxy Craze

Nadja's writer-director Michael Almeyreda displays a clear love of the good things in life/death: cigarettes, Universal horror (particularly Dracula's Daughter), Jean Cocteau, and the lesbian vampire movies of the 70s, and cool, wry black and white art films like Lynch's, Madin's, and Kern's. He wondrously fuses the downtown grit of NYC with the Universal pre-code Expressionism of Karl Freund within a narrative structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, Dracula's Daughter, (the 'first' lesbian vampire movie) crossed with the more overtly sapphic Vampire Lovers and Daughters of Darkness. The occasional lapses into pixelated imagery, culled from a then-the-rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera, create a feeling of dreamy disconnect, reflecting perhaps the Nadja eye view (especially when she disappears into parallel dimensions, becoming in a sense one of the unseen audience) and making the rest of the film's grainy video-ish look seem like high grade nitrate by comparison. It's under the Pixelvision we're treated to one of the hottest lesbian bite scenes ever. It's subtle, beautiful, strange, and it outclasses Jean Rollin at his own game in one button (though Rollin would never throw away the hottest parts for such low pixel rates, and maybe that's the problem.) Even if heterosexuality triumphs in the end, it's hard to hate Martin Donovan for--like even Jared Harris here, all young and ravishing, as Nadja's doom-slinging twin brother--he's truly man-crushable, and he does have a pretty good reason, by then we're so far beyond either the hypocritical prudishness that undoes most vampiric/sapphic trysts. (See also: Almereyda's classy and underrated The Eternal.) And stick around to the end credits music cuz it's Spacehogg! Remember them? How a movie made in Manhattan in 1994 could know in advance how to make itself a perfect time and coolness-level capsule baffled the imagination of everyone but those of us who know the answer: Almereyda.... Almereyda. 

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

2014 Dir Anna Lily Amirpour
****

At last! An Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in the 80s (at least music-wise) in the fictional but familiar "Bad City," (actually Bakerfield, CA), run-down and littered with ever-pumping skeletal oil derricks (pumping up "blood" as Daniel Plainview would say). There's nowhere to run but out in the depressed Bad City, the only people on the street are hustlers and drug-dealers; the only thing worth having is a car; the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. First-time director/skateboard star Amirpour makes a big entrance with this film--positing herself somewhere between Sofia Coppola and Abel Ferrara--as does star Sheila Vand, as strange and cool a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed Middle-Eastern women as you could ask for. Wrapped in her black hijab like Dracula's cape (or Nadja's hood), she preys mainly on male predators, usually waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move--all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out, it will be clear to any one of a drug-using nature). Her hunting pattern is to silently stalking her and mirror her (male) quarry, gauging whether to kill them based on their response. The wrong responses get killed, some just get passed by, the glass slipper right response comes from the young, insecure but semi-cool Arash (Arash Marandi), a go-getter forced to give up his prize car to dad's evil drug dealer, a giant, buff, coked-up, abusive tattooed pimp with a habit of sticking fingers in girls' mouths (big mistake). Even though Arash's blood is rich in MDMA (after a costume rave where he dresses as Dracula), our heroine holds off indulging, instead bringing him up to her room and engaging with him in an extended slow-motion shared moment below a madly whirling disco ball, with White Lies' "Death"-- playing on her record player. A perfect song to bring them together, as it builds slowly to an emotional grandeur all the more special for seeming to be coming so guilelessly true to their shared moment ("I love the quiet of the nighttime / the sun is drowned in deathly seas") Amirpour lets the moment completely land and for that moment the film becomes the Let the Right One In-verse of Sixteen Candles,

A lot of movies use pop songs, but how many 'get' the heady deep tissue impression pop music makes on the young, how the right songs come pouring from radios like poems conjured from their own unconscious, there to linger and associate this moment, this now, which has completely stopped, or at least slowed way down, with this song?  Dazed and Confused, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rushmore, The Big Chill, Lost in Translation i.e. not very many. Most just try to force new songs from sister corporation labels down the synergy pipe--they don't get it. Kids dazzled by surging hormones are way better at feeling then analyzing or conveying their desires, so music fills the gap like a translator-cum-DJ wedding planner, and each song that does this hangs in the person's history like a combination scrapbook photo and emotional high replay. A Girl Walks Home Alone might be the first where pages of unspoken dialogue beams out between two quiet characters who barely move as the music plays.

Slight as it is, Amirpour's film sits nicely inside the druggie black and white vampire girl genre, it's the Tom Waits graveyard at the edge of the 'down and out' black and white 16mm post-neorealist movement between Jarmusch's early work and the early 00s Argentine new wave (as in Bolivia and Suddenly). I would have dug it if the film slowly turned to color during the ecstasy scene, then slowly back down to black and white for the come-down. I'm always hoping more films will try that kind of thing. So few do, besides Coffin Joe's Awakening of the Beast (1969) and Wizard of Oz. God damn it.

Either way, the film does nail exactly what ecstasy is like, capturing the rush of blood in the ear and the way a teasing hottie will surround you with auric tentacles of come-hither, leading you on, only to brush you off the instant you bust a move, sending you reeling with the double kick of heady intoxication and sudden, short-shock shame. And in its own way, Amirpour's White Lies moment does all that one better, the slow motion really reflects the temerity of the moment, and so it does later as well, while we wait for Anash's hand to come out of a glove compartment--wondering if a gun will come out-- and the slow drone music drives us onwards into the oil-black future, tapping our typewriter train ride way to Annexia, Zentropa, and on and on, loyal as Oskar, doomed as Håkan before him, ready for our William Tell routine, one goddamned Seward asylum fly at a time... but no drug so sweet as to turn the city again to color...