The Addiction (1995)

Kathy Conklin (Lili Taylor) is a graduate student at New York University.  Walking home from a lecture, she is accosted by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra).  Casanova is a vampire and, after a conversation, encourages Kathy to tell her to go.  Kathy, instead, gives in and is bitten.

After being released from the hospital and admonished by the police, Kathy starts to go through a change - vomiting blood, wearing sunglasses to protect her from the sun and covering the mirrors in her apartment.  She also finds that she is craving blood.  When extracting with a syringe doesn't do the trick, she applies the more traditional hands on (or fangs-on) method we are all familiar with, creating a number of other vampires in her wake in order to slake her thirst.

Along the way she meets Peina (Christopher Walken), an older vampire who has managed to largely overcome his addiction to blood, only to find his lifestyle unbearable and his words hypocritical, as he feeds off of her.  Finally, after a number of attempts to throw off the addiction, Kathy gives into it, before ultimately seeking a final solution to her problem.

Abel Ferrara is a frustrating director.  I like a number of movies he has made (The Driller Killer and The Funeral chief among them), and he seems to range from exploitation to flawed art house to pure exploitative trash.  Here he tries to for the middle one, presenting vampirism as an allegory for heroin abuse (something done before in The Hunger and alluded to in many vampire movies before and since) with a heavy dose of philosophizing about the nature of evil in humanity and the possibility of ultimate redemption.

In the end most of the movie turns into a jumbled mess.  The parts with Walken are interesting, as is the take on vampirism, but too much of the film is Lili Taylor reading lines of classical literature and pondering her fate in a monotonous, repetitive narrative.  Much of this may have been intended, but it is no less grueling to watch.

Still, it is far from a bad movie.  It is just that Ferrara's intentions get buried, and the jumbled ending doesn't help either.

The Addiction (1995)
82 minutes
Starring: Lili Taylor, Annabella Sciorra, Christopher Walken
Director: Abel Ferrara



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more