USA,
1994, 94 min
Shown in 1995
CREDITS
- dir
-
Michael Almereyda
- prod
-
Mary Sweeney, Amy Hobby, David Lynch
- scr
-
Michael Almereyda
- cam
-
Jim Denault
- editor
-
David Leonard
- cast
-
Suzy Amis, Peter Fonda, Martin Donovan, Elina Lowensohn, Galaxy Craze
-
COMMENTS
Michael Almereyda, Peter Fonda, Galaxy Craze and Elina Lowensohn in person.
In the darkness, a low voice speaks softly: “Nights. Nights without sleep. Long nights in which the brain lights up like a big city.” New York City. Vampire twins Nadja and Edgar attempt to escape their monstrous inheritance after Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda, in a gleefully bravura performance) drives a stake through their father’s heart. But blood ties are hard to break. Van Helsing entangles his own nephew Jim in his attempt to find and kill the accursed twins. But Jim’s wife has already been seduced by Nadja and others are drawn into the fray as the story shuttles to the darker regions of Brooklyn and on to Romania—a Transylvania of the soul. This postmodern version of the vampire film extracts new blood from the old genre. The chain-smoking vampires drink their meals from coffee mugs. Blood transfusion equipment is wielded as casually as a household appliance. The imagery alternates between luminous black-and-white 35mm and Pixelvision, echoing the polarities of the narrative’s principal subjects: love and death, shape shifters and zombies, the monstrosity of dysfunctional families, the delirium of New York nights, the improbability of domestic bliss, the pain of fleeting joy.
—Kay Armatage, Toronto International Film Festival
FACTOID #219
Daniel Talbot, editor of Film: An Anthology , was the first recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award in 1988. Later he cofounded New Yorker Films, a distribution company that introduced many foreign language films to North American audiences. The Mel Novikoff Award, named after the pioneering San Francisco exhibitor, is given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.
