Immediately after my last final in December, I loaded up the back of my pickup truck with a cooler full of Snickers, soda and licorice, a stack of blankets and two friends, and we went to the drive-in to see the double feature Interview With A Vampire and The Specialist.

I went to see IWTV hoping against all hope that I would get to see lots of people staring into the camera in extreme closeup and acting. Well, oddly enough I was disappointed. But this was probably the only cheesy overblown melodramatic film device not overused in this film, so I think my time was well spent.

If you want to skip ahead to the part where I talk about the good bits of my vacation, the one-line summary of Interview With A Vampire is Bram Stoker's Dracula without the sense of fun."

All right, so in the very first part of the movie, Christian Slater is such an asshole to Brad Pitt in a bad haircut that Pitt turns on the lights, knowing full well that this is against the rules of the movie (as we'll see later.) Slater is so shocked by this that he says "Hey! I think we got a story here...so how long have you been turning on lights?" and Pitt says "About seven bajillion years... oops.." and Slater goes "You're a vampire! I knew it!" and Pitt goes "You got me. Let's have some really dull flashbacks for about 2 hours, okay?" and Slater goes "Sure, Seinfeld isn't on tonight."

Suddenly we're in New Orleans, wincing at Brad Pitt's terrible accent and worse haircut, yes, even worse than in the first scene. We see Pitt lounge around and be langorous. We see Pitt mope across a twilit field. We see Pitt hanging around a statue. And I'm thinking "Jeez, if your wife looked like that statue, I'd be really glad she was gone."

So all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Tom Cruise comes storming in and nearly gets shot. Later we would wish he had been and that Brad Pitt had gone on to be a gunslinger in a Clint Eastwood western, but sadly, this was not the case. Pitt is too langorous to even pull the trigger when a guy busts into his bedroom and starts making eyes at him, or maybe he's just terrified in a really really relaxed way.

Now, I was confused at this point in the movie:

A. Why was Tom Cruise there?
B. Why was Brad Pitt so...inertia-filled? If he was any more relaxed, rigor mortis would set in.
C. Why was Tom Cruise going to make Brad Pitt into a vampire?
D. What was with their haircuts? Especially Tom Cruise's.
E. Who is the main character in the story?
F. Has anything happened in the story?
G. If so, what? And why can't I think of anything? If not, how come? We're fifteen minutes in, or at least it feels like it.
H. This is the big one. Why should I care about any of this?

Anyway, so Pitt takes a hike out to see one last sunset. Luckily for him, Cruise had decided to spend that previous day right out in the open, getting a suntan, I guess. I don't know. Continuity was the least of my problems with the film.

Now, Cruise bites Pitt, but there's really very little blood. For a movie which attracted so much attention for being violent and bloody, it was really awfully tame. Now, there were a couple of special effects that I liked. I liked the "fast vampire" bits - they were pretty cheap, but very effective. Also, the bit where Claudia and Whats-her-name are burned to bits in that shaft is quite possibly the best vampire-getting-burned-to-bits effect I've ever seen. Other than that, it was lame. Well, there were other lame bits too.

Speaking of which, Cruise biting Pitt was really lame. He bit the guy, then talked for a while, then threw some ketchup around, then talked a lot more, then talked a lot more... Andy yelled "Just kiss 'im instead of talkin' him to death!"

Now Pitt has been introduced to The Big Vampire Game. Let's review the rules of the game:

OBJECT: Find the Meaning of your Pointless Eternal Existence.

RULES:
1. If you are asked a question which you do not know the answer to, you must get angry.
2. If you ask a question and the person does not know the answer, you must get angry.
3. If you get angry, you must shout.
4. IMPORTANT RULE: You can only ask questions of each other.
5. Don't turn on the lights, ever. It saves money.

These are the rules by which the rest of the movie is played. Pitt asks Cruise. Cruise doesn't know, both get angry, both shout. They kiss and make up, Cruise gets mad, Pitt burns down his house for no reason, then Pitt kills some kid for no reason, then Cruise makes the kid a vampire for no reason, and she's an interesting character, but there's no reason for her to be there, there's no reason for anyone to do anything because there's no events in this movie whatsoever: this is the whole problem of this movie: you are so desperate for anything to happen... anything at all, that even normally mundane events like Claudia "killing" Lestat or keeping the woman under all the dolls are greeted with small animal grunts of interest and even small thrills of excitement, not because we think it's all that neat, but only because we're hoping that our desperate attention and eyestrain hasn't been wasted.

So suddenly, Claudia turns into the undertaker sketch from Monty Python ("Burn 'im, bury 'im' or dump 'im? They're all nasty.") And instead of doing the smart thing which is to remember that they're scared of fire and that maybe there's a reason for this, they dump him in the swamp. Then he comes back and he's got makeup which he stole from The Toxic Avenger and he's playing the piano so that we know he's evil, and so they set him on fire and then for good measure, they set the rest of New Orleans on fire and then they go to Europe, thinking, maybe, that they'll find more kindling there.

Why go to Europe? I'm confused on this point. It's part of The Game, right, so they're thinking that someone in Europe knows the answer. But why would they think that? It's obvious Lestat doesn't know, and if he doesn't, why should anyone he hung around with know?

I found it really odd when watching the credits to see that there really was a "Paris crew". Paris looked like it was a backlot made up to look like Paris. It didn't really bother me, but y'know, if you're gonna shoot a movie in Paris, you should really get your money's worth and do a good job.

But they don't. You know it's a terrible movie when you're hoping Gamera will show up and start wrecking cities. Anyway, so they go traipsing around Europe and they run into a weirdo who climbs walls like he's Sammy Davis Jr. and his buddy, a freak who kills people right on stage. A neat idea, I liked it. A pity it took so long. If I'd been sitting in that audience in the movie, I'd been shouting "Hey, just kill her, I'm double-parked!" and if they'd insisted on taking the full half hour, I'd have thrown fruit.

Anyway, so Pitt gets picked up on by this guy, and little kid throws a tantrum. But we're unimpressed, since she's been throwing tantrums throughout the flick, and we really really really just don't care by now. So she drags Anonymous Woman #1 in and yells "Give her to me!" which confuses us, because she's sitting right there. But what she means is that Pitt should talk her to death like Cruise did to him. So he does, which wears him out, and then totally out of nowhere, the weirdo and his weird buddies show up for no reason, grab Anonymous Woman and Annoying Kid and Pitt for no reason and throw Pitt in a coffin and Woman and Kid in a kind of neat little conveniently placed sewer shaft for no reason. Why Pitt in the coffin was supposed to be so interesting, I'll never know, but they kept showing him there, interspersing with A.W. and A.K. getting burnt to bits, as mentioned before. I myself think that the weirdos had it easy, because what if someone had parked over that grate? Huh? Then they wouldn't have gotten burnt up.

Anyway, Armand ("Armand Hammer" we called him.) comes and releases Brad Pitt, and says "Is your hair mussed?" and Pitt says "Of course not, this is a good hair century." So Pitt runs down and scatters AW's and AK's ashes to show how much he cares. He also acts.

Okay, then we have a scene that I thought for a minute was going to save the movie, but I was dead wrong. Pitt gets horked off because the weirdos didn't even ask him if he wanted the Annoying Kid killed, so he grabs a scythe (!) and some kerosene (!!) and heads down to duke it out with them.

My first problem with the scene is this: is it daytime or night- time? If it's night-time, what are the weirdos doing still their coffins? Why aren't they up whooping Brad Pitt's pasty white undead butt? If it's daytime, as Pitt's horror-filled expression at the cheap imitation Hollywood backlot fog outside seems to indicate, what the hell is Pitt doing awake, how did he get to the church or wherever that place was, why did he think this was a good idea, why didn't he plan some means of escape and why did Armand Hammer's Plot Convenience Playhouse Vampire Taxi Service come rolling up right in the nick of time? (pant pant pant)

My second problem with the scene is the way the coffins were constructed. Apparently, these were special nineteenth-century spring-loaded explosive coffins, because when Pitt sets them on fire, they fling their occupants twenty feet into the air and blow up. Then Pitt chops them in half with the scythe, but it isn't as cool as it sounds. In fact, it's quite a lame scythe-chopping scene.

My third problem with the scene is what happens when the head weirdo shows up. He and Pitt do this little fake-out scene where the weirdo zooms back and forth and shows his fangs, and Pitt shows his fangs, and it's really neat, and I yell "Yeah! Finally! A Mad Monkey Kickboxing Ninja Kung Fu Vampire Fight!" But by the time I was done yelling that, it was over. The head weirdo turned out to be a wimp, and Pitt chopped him right up. Where's a pair of giant robot suits when you need them?

And let's not forget this totally gratuitous Vampiric Taxi that arrives. I said "What? How the hell does that work?" Mia says "He was reading his mind so he knows where to take the carriage." Jason: "Yeah, but it's daytime." Mia: "Well, maybe it is." Jason: "And why would he care?" Mia: "Okay, okay, you win. I can't figure it out."

So, then, for no strictly apparent reason, Pitt goes back to America in the 20th century. He runs into, you guessed it, Cruise again! Yeeh! Hoo boy! Just what I wanted to see, you know, I was sitting there in the back of my truck downing a bottle of Dr. Pepper saying to myself "Boy, you know, I wish Tom Cruise would come back. He did so much for this movie." And lo, there he was, now sporting makeup that looked scary back when Lon Chaney wore it in Phantom of the Opera. They talked for a while, but I'll be damned if I can think of anything important they said. Ah, I see my mistake: I'm trying to relate what they were saying to the nonexistent events of the movie. What they were saying was no more and no less relevant than anything else.

Then, we're back in the room with Christian Slater, who, good lord, hasn't fallen asleep through this whole tirade, and they talk a while about, you guessed it, irrelevancies, and then Slater leaves, and then Tom Cruise shows up to introduce the sequel, and by that point, I really really really really just don't care.

College Park By Night

Paul M. M. Jacobus (vampire@digex.net)