Let me just start by saying it has been crazy down here this week. I just got Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and that is a heavy crate to unpack. The sin files of actors and musicians are usually pretty thick, but they've got nothing on lawyers, judges and politicians.
Also, Death threw in Vanity, in what felt like a bit of an afterthought. Then, just to screw up my schedule Wednesday, he tossed in George Gaynes, who, unlike the other two, was actually in a few horror movies.
Before he acheived fame as the oblivious but likable Commandant Lassard in the Police Academy movies, or as Henry Warnimont, the curmudgeonly, adoptive father of TV's Punky Brewster, Gaynes appeared in such notable films as the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror and the not-for-TV-at-all Altered States, as well as the far less notable The Boy Who Cried Werewolf and Song of the Succubus.
But enough about him for now. It's still Black History Month and I have more pressing matters.
This week's Thursday Thriller is 1995's Vampire in Brooklyn, starring Eddie Murphy, and directed by Wes Craven.
Throughout the 1980s, Murphy starred in a string of blockbuster hits like Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop and Coming to America. In 1989, he took the directorial reigns of a film that co-starred comic legends Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor called Harlem Nights. It flopped, as did many of his subsequent films, until 1996 when he starred in the remake of The Nutty Professor.
For his part, Craven played a significant hand in redefining the horror genre in the 1970s with such films as The Last House on The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, and landed a major hit with 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street. After that his films were a little hit-or-miss, til he busted up the genre again with 1996's Scream.
So you have two famous men collaborating on a horror-comedy right before significant career upswings. Was it successful?
Not especially. Murphy blamed the wig.
So why am I telling you about it? Because it's unique. It's the funny Wes Craven, scary Eddie Murphy movie, and it's not nearly as terrible as you might want to think it will be.
Murphy plays a vampire named Maximillian, who comes to Brooklyn from the Caribbean to find a female half-vampire (Angela Bassett), because the rest of his tribe has all been killed off and she's the last descendant. As he explains in his opening monologue, "a vampire alone is a vampire doomed."
Or something.
He doesn't have to look too hard, because as luck would have it, she's one of the detectives assigned to investigating all the wreckage and dead bodies Maximillian leaves in his wake.
True to form, Murphy also plays two other characters, a black preacher named Pauly, and an Italian street thug named Guido.
Maximillian enlists the help of street hustler Julius Jones (Kadeem Hardison), who he enslaves as a ghoul. Jones spends the rest of the movie rotting and falling apart.
Rounding out the cast you've got Allen Payne from New Jack City, John Witherspoon, the dad from Friday, and Zakes Mokae, the bad guy from Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow.
.
The story itself doesn't make very much sense. Why can't a vampire just find a human woman he likes and bite her and make her a vampire? Plus, Murphy doesn't exactly exude evil. Through the wig, the fangs and the glowing eyes, you still kind of expect him to put a banana in someone's tailpipe.
The movie isn't a total loss, though.The makeup FX are good, there's a lot of really slick editing, and Hardison and Witherspoon are pretty funny.
Vampire in Brooklyn streams on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime.
No comments:
Post a Comment