Vampire in Brooklyn [reviewed by Lackey]

Wes Craven, 1995 (100 min.)
My rating:
IMDB

An Eddie Murphy vehicle that doesn’t deserve to be as entertaining as it is.

* * *

Premise

Maximillian, the only survivor of a cabal of Caribbean vampires, has come to New York, in search of a half-vampire woman. She turns out to be Rita Veder, a tough Brooklyn cop. Maximillian intends to take her as his mate and re-establish his vampiric line, but seducing her isn’t as easy as he expects…

Critique

On paper, it probably looked like a slam dunk. Eddie Murphy was still a bankable personality; in retrospect, he’s often described as having been suffering from a “career slump” since 1988’s Coming to America, but the truth is that most of the films he’d done since then were solid box-office performers. Angela Bassett was fresh off an Oscar win from having played Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It. Vampires were a hot commodity; most notably, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels were at the peak of their popularity, with Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire bringing in some impressive cash the previous year despite the target audience being not entirely confident in the casting of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the lead roles.

So Murphy + Bassett + vampires = box office gold! What could possibly go wrong?

Yet it flopped upon release, but hard. Harlem Nights is perhaps Murphy’s most notorious flop, but at least that one made back its production costs. So did the long-since-forgotten Distinguished Gentleman. Vampire didn’t. Looking at the film, a better question is “What could possibly go right?” The big problem is that Vampire is really two movies in one. The first is a horror-inflected, darkly comic love triangle. The second is a factory-standard broad comedy of the kind we’ve come to expect from Murphy. The former isn’t as good as it should have been; the latter is more entertaining than it has a right to be.

Still, this could have been a lot more cohesive with the right director, a filmmaker who’s simpatico with the Murphy comedic aesthetic. Failing that, someone with a style bland enough to keep out of Murphy’s way. John Landis, who’d directed Murphy in three previous films (and, incidentally, Bassett in one) might have been the perfect director for something like this.

Unfortunately, the director they got was Wes Craven. Craven is a very good director, but in this case he’s completely incompatible with Murphy, and he’s unable to keep his auteur tendencies in check, making sure his indelible stamp is seen as often as possible. It constantly breaks the mood. It doesn’t help that an early scene is reminiscent of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and that there’s a voodoo subplot that recalls The Serpent and the Rainbow. Instead of being delighted by the references, I found myself wishing I was watching those other, much better movies instead.

Craven’s unsuitability to the material is the least of the film’s problems. The audience is supposed to buy Murphy and Bassett as points of a love triangle that also includes Rita’s partner, who’s never identified as anything other than “Detective Justice” (it’s unclear whether Justice is intended as a first or a last name). He’s played by Allen Payne, who’s genial enough, but he doesn’t have any chemistry with Bassett, so it’s pretty hard to justify rooting for him over Maximillian. That is, it would be hard to justify if I actually cared about her picking Justice over the vampire—and I didn’t, because Bassett is pretty bland here. (As the highest-profile young black actress at the time—again, it bears noting that this was her first film role after winning an Oscar—her casting is pretty obvious.)

Payne and Bassett pretty much allow the other major cast members to steal every scene they share. With Murphy, this should shock no one. But Murphy, even when his lines are obvious one-liners, does manage to put in a fine, understated performance as Maximillian. Despite the vampire’s lack of character definition, he comes off as the most likable point of the love triangle, and I was a bit surprised to find myself buying him as a sex symbol.

However, this is an Eddie Murphy movie, and one of the traditions of Eddie Murphy movies is that he’s required to play multiple roles, including one white character, under makeup, and this is where he hams it up and puts in the sort of performance that he’s become known for. The style of humor in these scenes is vastly different than the style of humor in most of the Maximillian scenes, and it’s very jarring. But it has to be admitted that some of the scenes are pretty funny.

These are my overriding feelings about the movie: first, that it’s a mishmash of different tones and styles that don’t work together, and that there’s a lot of stuff that really shouldn’t be funny but is. Vampire in Brooklyn doesn’t really work as a horror movie, partially because there’s never any sustained attempt to establish and maintain a mood. Whenever things look like they might have a chance of scaring anyone over the age of 5, you can guarantee Kadeem Hardison (in a memorable supporting role as Julius, Maximillian’s human familiar) will wander into shot, spout a couple of inane one-liners and probably lose a limb. He also forms a double-act with his landlord, played by John Witherspoon; the two characters are so based in racial stereotypes that they make Amos ‘n’ Andy look like progress. But Hardison and Witherspoon pull it off, and made me laugh at a lot of dialogue that should have, by rights, fell to the floor with a resounding thud.

The whole thing stinks of calculation: bankable actors, a respected director and a script based around a trendy monster and lowest-common-denominator humor. No risk involved here. (Craven seems to have been picked not so he could stretch a bit and work outside his comfort zone, but because he’s a director of horror movies, and those things are all the same, right?) The ultimate blame for this whole mess seems to belong to Murphy himself, who conceived the original story along with his brother Charles, who also co-wrote the final screenplay. However, the ultimate credit in making it even remotely watchable also seems to belong to Murphy, along with a couple of supporting players. Weird how that works.

Still, even though it tanked horrifically, a couple of people were able to rebound: Craven’s next film was a massive hit (perhaps you’ve heard of Scream?), and Murphy reinvented himself as a star of family films (his live-action output has been pretty dire, but he’s become a solid voice performer in animated features, and is easily the best thing about Mulan and Shrek). All’s well that ends well.

Moment of Zen

“♪ Evil…is good! Evil…is good! ♪”

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