It may be nigh impossible to rehabilitate the image of zombies (although the likable 2007 Canadian comedy Fido came close, imagining the gruesome creatures as robotic servants), but vampires are a different breed. Much like George Hamilton and Clint Eastwood, they have transformed from punch lines and parasites into paragons of taste and figures of respect. Elegant, well mannered, needy and romantic, nowadays vampires are portrayed in movies as victims of their “condition” as much as (reluctant) predators. But scary? Not so much.
Yerba Buena Center For the Arts film curator Joel Shepherd, one of the most adventurous programmers in the Bay Area, has unearthed a trio of wildly diverse and generally rewarding flicks for a bite-and-run series he calls Dark In August: Rare Vampire Films. It would be foolish to extrapolate grand revisionist themes from these random points on the vampire-film continuum, which range from the sublime to the ridiculous, so let’s just deal with them individually.
The weekend chowdown begins at 7:30pm tonight with Near Dark (1987), the second feature directed by future Academy Award-winner Kathryn Bigelow. This halfway good movie (the patient, subtle first half) alternates a soft-centered love story with a superficial saga of familial loyalty, augmented by a couple of showy set pieces (a taunting, strutting massacre in a redneck bar, a high-noon motel shootout with the cops).
Adrian Pasdar is taken in by a Southwest-marauding “family” of vampires after his late-late-late-night pass at one of them (Jenny Wright) is met with a fang to the neck. (It’s not completely her fault, mind you.) Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton supply most of the fun, as charming bloodsucking villains, along with Adam Greenberg’s sun-sensitive lensing. Original and thoughtful for a good chunk of its running time, the movie turns pulpy and sentimental in the final reels. You will not be surprised to learn, though, that Bigelow had a penchant for fiery explosions long before The Hurt Locker.