But you seem to have less than great taste when it comes to what movies you star in, sir. More specifically, you sometimes seem to confuse "artistic" with "horribly dull."
Oh sure, you were The Goblin King and Tesla. And you were awesome as both. But I'm becoming more and more convinced that those were flukes, roles for fun rather than the "serious" movies you are otherwise more drawn to.
I first fell for the trap when I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth. "David Bowie as an alien???" I remember thinking, "This will be amazing!"
It wasn't.
Because of that experience, I have avoided watching The Hunger. There were a lot of the same adjectives used: "stylized," "elegant," "artistic." I saw the writing on the wall. But then I started this vampire marathon and I found myself thinking again, "David Bowie as a vampire??? Oh come on, brain, this will be amazing!" And I was fooled again.
Now, the dullness actually has very little to do with David Bowie himself. He is easily the best part of this movie. In fact, the worst thing that this film does for my interest is kill vampire David Bowie off very, very early.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. This movie opens with one of the most amazingly promising vampire movie openings. It's so '80s! It's so stylish! It's so dark! It has Bauhaus! It's gorgeous!
(*Warning for mild nudity in the video).
That opening may be the best I've seen in any vampire movie. My hopes shot straight up... which was a problem because the rest of the movie really isn't as good as those first six minutes.
The basic plot is that a vampire named Miriam has taken lovers throughout the centuries, David Bowie's character being her most recent. However, vampires in this universe are a whole different species and therefore cannot truly "make" more vampires. They can "change" someone temporarily so that they are essentially a vampire, but at a certain point their bodies will shut down, they will age rapidly, and then they will die. Miriam, on the other hand, appears to be truly ageless and immortal.
Bowie Vamp knows that he is on a not-so-slow path towards death when his hair begins to fall out and liver-spots appear on his hands. He is depressed. Miriam mostly tries to ignore it; she has been through this before.
Now, I have to give The Hunger credit: this is an interesting concept. And the late director Tony Scott clearly achieved the low-key, long, elegant, quite aesthetic he was going for. And the scenes with Bowie all worked for me. I could feel his pain and I felt like the slowness just made the inevitability of his death that much more powerful.
But Bowie's aging is not the whole movie. In fact, it's barely the first third. The other plot involves a biologist played by Susan Sarandon who has been studying aging and genetic defects. A monkey in her lab essentially goes through the same process as Miriam's not-vampires: he kills another monkey and seems bloodthirsty, and then he ages rapidly and dies.
Somehow knowing that she's the person to go see, Bowie Vamp goes to Dr. Sarandon, but she is busy and keeps him waiting for hours, causing him to age even more.
Then Bowie Vamp dies. And the movie's slowness suddenly doesn't seem like it's working anymore. After all, if the movie was about the march toward Bowie Vamp's death, then the unique/slow tone would match the story. But from then on, the tale becomes a fairly standard one for a vampire movie: the ancient vampire is lonely and seduces a human to become her companion.
Yes, the rest of the movie is about Miriam seducing Sarandon. And it really doesn't seem to take much.
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| This is Sarandon's "interested" face |
Then Miriam turns her into Susan Vamp and we get the incredibly-standard-for-a-vampire-movie scene where Susan Vamp is craving blood but doesn't want to eat/is becoming freaked out by what is happening to her body. She gets her blood tested at her lab only to find out that a foreign strain of DNA is trying to take hers over.
*Bonus fact: During Sarandon's "freak out" scene, she is hit on by two young men while she is trying to use a payphone. One of those men is Willem Dafoe, whose only line in this movie is: "Hey lady, how about it?" That is an amazing moment.
Anyway, back to the plot... So Dr. Sarandon goes to Miriam, who wants her to kill and drink blood to complete the process, but Susan Vamp doesn't want to... and then things get weird.
(*Spoilers for the movie's end*)
- Susan Vamp's boyfriend shows up.
- Susan Vamp kills her boyfriend because she needs blood
- Susan Vamp tries to kill herself out of grief/anger/???
- Thinking she has succeeded, Miriam takes the body to her TOMB OF BODIES, where she seems to have kept all the mummified corpses of every lover she's ever had
- They all come to life and attack her
- Susan Vamp somehow is alive and can now live forever like Miriam because... uh... just because.
By the time the movie ended, I was yawning ever few moments. Once Bowie Vamp disappears from the film, it just seems painfully long and somehow both far-too-standard and yet also confusing. The artistic and slow tone doesn't really fit the movie's second half, causing that whole segment to just seem needlessly pretentious.
Ultimately, it just feels... dull.
The Hunger marks the point in this list, however, when the vampire movies I review are getting more complete. Tony Scott knew what he wanted The Hunger to be, and that's what ended up on film. Unlike Warhol's art project, this is definitely a movie/film with real acting and a soundtrack and effort.
However, like Underworld, the "what it wanted to be" kind of got in the way of enjoyment or a fully sense-making plot. Sorry, David Bowie, I just couldn't enjoy this one much.
2.5 out of 5 bites
~ LK
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