Movies are Stupid: Round Two...Electric Bigelow

You've likely never heard of Kathryn Bigelow. At one time she was married to James Cameron of Terminator fame. Aside from that brief brush with greatness she directed a little known film called Point Break starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. That was, and has been, the high point of her directing career. She followed up Point Break with a poorly received film called Strange Days. I think I'm one of the seven people who paid to see it in the cinema. It's overly long and takes itself way too seriously, but it doesn't suck. Ralph Fiennes is in it doing a passable American accent and Angela (should have played Storm) Bassett plays his love interest/bad-ass driver. It's a decent yarn about the end of the millennium set in a near-future that looks nothing like the actual future that came to pass. Most near-future movies are that way. Instead of "near-future" they should call them "silly special effects budget expenditure". All of which is beside the point. In 1987 Kathryn Bigelow, you can tell she's serious because she spells her name with a "y", co-wrote and directed a largely unseen film called "Near Dark" and it rocked. However, as with most movies, it was also stupid.

The concept of Near Dark is fairly simple. Boy meets girl, girl bites boy and turns him into a vampire, boy is abducted by girl's vampire family consisting of weird urban shit-kickers and, for some reason, a young boy who is really an old man. Freaky. That would pretty much be the end of it were this an episode of the Twilight Zone, but our hero cannot bring himself to kill anyone in order to eat and this means trouble as the vampire gang has gotten used to the idea of killing and eating humans. Those members who are not on board with this dynamic must leave and by "leave" I mean "get ripped apart by angry vampires". Thus a young country boy from Texas is on the run from a who's who of supporting character actors who frequently appear in James Cameron films.

Sounds great, right? How could this movie, which I so obviously like, be stupid? Allow me to illustrate. Apparently this gang of supernatural killers has been roving around the US since some time in the mid 1800's killing folks left and right without being noticed. That's some trick. I'm sure a whole raft of serial killers would love to know how to pull that one off. A little known fact about law enforcement: They take murder very seriously. Most murder cases are solved and many are solved in short order. These days they just run any DNA they find through a database and start building a profile of their killer within hours of the crime. But even in the archaic 1980's the police were not, contrary to popular belief, incompetent. Generally speaking, if you killed somebody in 1987, the police would track you down and arrest you. Whether alive or undead, everyone was subject to the law. And as such one has to wonder how a group of bloodthirsty killers can leave bodies strewn all over the countryside year after year for over a hundred years and never get caught. One could argue that they use their otherworldly powers to subdue their prey and that they further use their supernatural strength, speed and cunning to hide away their crimes that they might work in secret for all time. One could argue that, but one would be contradicted by the movie at every turn.

Here we have a group of scruffy-looking people riding around in an RV or van or SUV or other large vehicle with the windows blacked out. That alone would raise suspicions among even the most disinterested of observers. Add to that the fact that they stalk their prey by walking up to them, making small talk, and then ripping their faces off. In one scene from the film the band of merry murderers kill all but one patron in a bar and then burn the place to the ground. This is one of the few times when the film makes some kind of sense because the lone survivor calls the police who then promptly hunt down the killers. Unfortunately for both the cops and the viewers the vampires are able to escape by...wait for it...driving away. Indeed, after a harrowing shootout with the state police the vamps make good their escape by getting in their van and driving away. The cops do not give chase or even call in backup via their radios. I guess they just hang around in the desert for a while until they figure out that the bad guys aren't coming back. After that they go to Waffle House for some coffee and pie. The Waffle House bit doesn't happen in the movie, but I imagined it happening and that made me smile.

There is more idiocy to be had as the story unfolds. First a minor gripe among the many other, better fed, gripes: why don't they black out the windows of their vehicle when they steal it? Twice they are shown to be rapidly deploying their half-assed efforts to block the sunlight as dawn approaches. You'd think that after a century of hunting and hiding they would have this all down to a science. However, these are clearly the slacker vampires who never get a book published about them. Without a doubt any group of nocturnal death merchants who periodically forget that the sun will kill them are not long for this world. How they made it all the way to 1987 without bursting into flames is beyond me. In any event, my plan would go like this were I the cranky leader of a bunch of dusty cowboy vampires: Step 1) Steal a car. Step 2) Black out all the windows thoroughly. Step 3) Cautiously hunt my prey and then dispatch them where they will never be found. Step 4) Arrive at predetermined sunlight-free location to sleep. That's it. How hard could that possibly be?

More gripes; A common problem with modern movies is that directors seem to think we are morons. This is especially true when it comes to firearms. In the movie world anyone one not on camera cannot hear the report of a hand gun or a rifle. This movie has shotgun blasts in the middle of the night that arouse no suspicion and a large caliber hand gun is fired in a hotel room with no intervention by the police or other authority figures. You see, if you're not on screen you must be deaf. In addition to the soundless gun play there are buckets of blood after every attack, but everybody stays relatively clean. One scene involves a vamp using his sharpened spurs to cut a man's throat. At the end of the scene the floor, walls and even the ceiling drip with blood, but later that same vamp is plasma-free. Speaking of blood, that brings me to my final gripe.

Modern vampire stories have become morose and dour. Anne Rice made it her goal in life to douche-fy the vampire and make him a sad and lonely creature living on the edge of society wishing he could join his human brethren and no longer be on the outside looking in. Boo Hoo. One thing she got right was the idea that you can't just stop being a vampire because you don't like it anymore. Not so in Near Dark. After our hero escapes the vampires with the help of his family who just happened to be staying at the same hotel, the father gives him a blood transfusion that de-vamperizes him. Seems to me that anybody reporting to an Emergency Room with a strange blood disorder would be treated in a similar manner. A quick trip to any Doc-in-the-Box would be enough to undo the horrible fate that had befallen you. Within the confines of this vampiric paradigm the unearthly kiss of the Nosferatu is not unlike a case of syphilis. Sure, vampirisim would have been a terrible plague upon the world striking terror into the hearts of men and causing mothers to hold their children tightly to them at night for fear of the ancient evil that walked like men. This would have been true right up until the mid-1800's when blood transfusions started to become more common. By the 1900's it was a well tested technique with proven results. If all it takes to cure vampirism is a well-known and widely available medical procedure, then the vampire was defanged as far back as 1825. So, to sum up, one can stop being a vampire by taking in large quantities of human blood. That makes no sense whatsoever and begs the question: Has Kathryn Bigelow ever heard of vampires before?