Sucking blood makes for lifeless movie
C. SPENCER BEGGS
Scene Editor
The second installment of a film adaptation of Anne Rice's popular "Vampire Chronicle" book series, "Queen of the Damned" unfortunately trades in the thoughtful, mythical commentary of its predecessor, 1994's "Interview with the Vampire," for high-end special effects and Hollywood glitz.
"Queen of the Damned" is a sequel of sorts; the scrawny Stuart Townsend has taken over as the main character the Vampire Lestat formerly plaid by Tom Cruise. The only real similarity between the characters is the name, however. In fact, there is a reordering of time if one were to try to follow the story from one movie to the next.
Logic gaps aside, "Queen of the Damned" opens with an awakened Lestat, who after living in the shadows for a few hundred years, entered a state of hibernation for a century after being unable to psychologically handle his immortality.
Lestat returns to the shadowy unlife of the nightwalker at the dawn of the 21st century; where he joins (brace yourself) a goth-rock band and lives openly as a vampire, which is treated with skepticism from humankind, but raises the ire of the vampire world.
Even if the MTV-ish premise can be accepted, the movie gets more ridiculous as it recounts Lestat's history and introduces the late Aaliyah in the title role, Akasha, the Queen of the Damned. The Egyptian death goddess is supposed to be the mother and the most powerful of the vampires, but Akasha seems to spend most of her very brief time on-screen undulating and taking sensuous baths – two activities at which the death goddess excels.
While Akasha seduces Lestat, the lucky bloodsucker is also the object of mortal paranormal investigator with a death-wish played by Marguerite Moreau. While "Interview with the Vampire" examined the connection between of sex and death in the vampire world, "Queen of the Damned" focuses mostly on the sex. So much time in this movie is spent with its characters deeply gazing into one another's eyes that the vampires appear to be more romantic than deadly. The less-than-soft porn atmosphere of the movie is almost comical.
While scenes like the vampire showdown at Lestat's ultimate rock concert in Death Valley are fun to watch, the battle scenes are remarkably predictable. Where "Interview with the Vampire" focused on how vampires would perceive themselves, "Queen of the Damned" focuses on how vampires would kung-fu fight each other. Even the sexual relationships of the characters, which appear to be so important to the story, seem to be less about sensual relationship and more about the overly revealing high-fashion clothes the characters are wearing.
Still, "Queen of the Damned" is not a terrible movie for what it is; it's just disappointing to see Rice's intelligent novels produce such empty Hollywood movies. But certainly "Queen of the Damned" will be immortal in its own way: it looks like something that will appear on late-night Showtime channels forever.
All Scene Stories for Thursday, March 21, 2002
