| Horror
Movie Index
|
The Hunger, 1981 Directed by Tony Scott. Catherine
Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, David Bowie.
This kinky lesbian vampire movie benefits from having a trio of stars who the camera loves, but not much else to recommend. Director Tony Scott is more interested in smoky, backlit interiors and pretentious surface gloss than in the story -- although that may be a good thing after all, since this tale of "a dying race who live forever" pretty much defies logical storytelling anyway. Its best scene has David Bowie aging fifty years while he waits in a doctor's waiting room, but the rest of the movie doesn't have the same kind of wit, even if it DOES provide an excuse for staging a lesbian love scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. Deneuve's Miriam Blaylock is a forerunner of the effete, disaffected vampires of the 1990s, but truth to tell, I prefer vampire movies where the vampires are the bad guys (I suppose you could make an argument that they are the bad guys here, but they are so fetishized in this film--from the first frame of the movie as it so happens--that I don't buy it). Fun, I suppose, if you have an appetite for sleaze gussied up like it's respectable or something. |