MOVIE REVIEW: Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

Shaun Watson
3 min readOct 4, 2020

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Does the above image look familiar? It should; it is the image used for the Nicholas Cage meme when people want to express their boredom with a repeated or obvious comment. It’s usually topped with the words “YOU DON’T SAY”. This image is vintage Nic Cage, as it is a still from the 1988 black comedy/horror film Vampire’s Kiss. The scene above takes place midway through the movie, so let’s back it up to the start.

Nic Cage plays Peter Loew, literary agent. He is a self-absorbed New Yorker from the late 80s/early 90s, and so are many of his contemporaries. His bad attitude spills over to his love life, producing a string of one-night stands he confesses to his psychiatrist. During one of these one-night stands, a bat flies into his window, scaring the girl off. Instead of declaring that criminals are a superstitious lot and becoming Batman, Peter fights off the bat. In true Nic Cage fashion, he gets aroused by the encounter and tells his shrink. The feeling pays off when he meets another girl later on and takes her home. It is there he is bitten by the girl Rachel (Jennifer Beals), a vampire.
Every day becomes a new type of hell for Peter after the bite, and he passes the buck down onto the new girl working at the literary firm named Alva (an understated study in beauty named Maria Conchita Alonzo). Every day he tortures her over some contract he needs for a client, but when the client tells him that it doesn’t need to be done right away, Peter lies to Alva about the situation and continues to harass her. The scene where Peter threatens to fire Alva is where the still comes from. The treatment gets so bad she asks her brother Emilio (Bob Lujan) for real bullets for the gun she carries to ride the subway — it was the days before Giuliani cleaned up New York, so this was normal. She hopes that she never has to use it, because there’s only one person she is scared of: Peter Loew.

Alva (Maria Conchita Alonzo) deals with her micromanaging, sexually-harassing vampire of a boss Peter Loew (Nic Cage).

After a very long and visible breakdown into a raving madman, Peter became the thing he feared and Alva had to use her gun. It didn’t matter, because he was invincible — a vampire, as he now giddily proclaimed as he ran though the streets — and he went out on the town to enjoy his new nightlife. In his new form, he killed a girl by ripping out her throat with his own teeth but he was not ready for the post-homicidal depression that would grip him. And grip him it did, as he found a plank of wood on the street and begged passersby to kill him, i.e, stake him through the heart. In the end, it was not a passerby, but a home invader that struck him down in his apartment near his makeshift vampire coffin — a turned over black leather settee couch. Pays to lock your doors, folks.

Readers who have seen this movie will notice I have left out choice narrative elements. Why? I have done that as the movie has done his to us all: it left us in the dark on how vampires work in this world and allowed us to think pretty much anything we wanted about vampire myths and logic, what was happening to Peter Loew, and his view of the world. It was this kind of decision that makes the movie good in a way, but it’s also how the movie became a flop during its theatrical run and only came into cult movie status later (evinced by the movie still becoming its own meme). So I hope those in the know will fill in the blanks, as my job is not to tell the whole story, just to recommend the damn thing….and I cannot do so in good conscience.

— previously published 6/12/2016 on Facebook Notes —

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Shaun Watson
Shaun Watson

Written by Shaun Watson

Writing from a need to get my notes from Facebook to a place where someone can see them, I hope you like my stuff.

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