a review of 午夜猎物

HOOPTOBER, NIGHT TWENTY-SIX: Tonally, this movie was all over the map in ways that feel very familiar to John Landis movies. The first several minutes felt pretty encouraging in establishing both Anne Parillaud's feisty French vampiress and a coming mob war in NYC spearheaded by the great Robert Loggia. In my head, I imagined maybe something along the lines of a vampiric Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars, with our literally bloodthirsty heroine succeeding in playing the mobsters against each other until a final showdown. But what it turns into is kind of a screwball love story/buddy cop picture between the vampire and a recently-undercover cop played by Anthony LaPaglia. Parillaud, whose performance is undeniably hampered by Landis' insistence on periodically putting her in unconvincing red contacts with a harsh electronic voice treatment, kind of fades into the background with most of the big "hero" moments being handed to LaPaglia for no real reason. At 112 minutes the movie is pretty long, not just for a horror movie but also for the action and comedy pictures that it's also trying to be at the same time. If Landis had focused a bit more, and perhaps trimmed some of the fat from Loggia's all-too-slow realization of his newfound vampirehood (this plotline is interminable), and spent a bit more time treating Parillaud as a competent heroine in her own right, I think this movie might have made a bigger impression all around.