Monday, April 18, 2005

Innocent Blood (John Landis)

I don't know why this movie is so little seen. I'd barely heard of it, I've never heard anyone talk about it, and the reviews I looked up after watching it were mostly negative. But it's so much fun to watch. It's a vampire/gangster/comedy/horror movie that finds a perfect balance between all these elements and is almost as good as Landis's other attempt at this kind of thing, "An American Werewolf in London." Anthony LaPaglia, Don Rickles, and Robert Loggia are great in it, the cameos from Sam Raimi, Tom Savini, Dario Argento, and Frank Oz are funny, and the gore scenes are satisfying in the way that only disintegrating flesh, decapitated heads, and gushing blood geysers can be. The dialogue is funny not so much in the way it's written, but in how it's spoken. Here's some dialogue on paper:
LaPaglia, after chasing a lady vampire all over the city and being knocked down by her: "Man .... Just when I thought I understood some shit."

Lady vampire, after dropping from a skyscraper onto LaPaglia's car, smashing the hood, then jumping into the passenger seat: "You're a cop, right? Where's your cop radio?"
LaPaglia: "This is not my cop car, which is why I wish you hadn't jumped on it."

Not particularly funny, right? Somehow, the way LaPaglia delivers these lines is absolutely hilarious. I don't know why. Some actors can just deliver the goods. The comedy goods. Am I right?

Semi-related aside: There was a five-second scene in a strip club with very brief nudity and, though there were two other much sexier scenes with extended nudity, the videotape was completely shredded for only this one scene. Some previous tape renter has a serious strip club fetish.

2 comments:

Spacebeer said...

In fact, one scene with extended nudity is the very first scene of the film, where the lady vampire vamps around her candle-filled apartment with not a stitch on. Full-frontal in the first 10 seconds of a film can either be very bad or very good. In this case, it was awesome.

Traci Drummond said...

may i add that you can never go wrong with don rickles. ever.

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