Innocent Blood (1992)

              To a lesser extent than with Roman Polanski I feel the need to give a disclaimer at the beginning of this about director John Landis.  I am aware of his actions on the set of ‘The Twilight Zone: the Movie’ and thus have a pretty low opinion of him as a person.  It again makes me think less of the people who chose to work with him after his actions became known.  Nothing about this movie changed my mind about any of that backstory and it’s given me a few more reasons to have some very big questions about him as a person and a filmmaker.  I’m not going to get too much into it but around the hour and twenty-five minute mark of this movie I began to understand how Max Landis turned out how he did.  For those of you who have watched the movie that’s when the scene in the motel does what it does. 

              I’m not much one for separating art into various strata of worthiness, this is high art, this is low art, as if that means anything substantive, but there is an obvious contrast between a relatively high-budget mainstream movie and something like ‘Children of the Night’ or even ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre.’  The sets, the costuming, the stunt work, the casting, it’s obviously on another tier.  What money simply can’t buy, however, is a good script, and this movie could have really used one.  It doesn’t surprise me in the least that this is a script from a first-time screenwriter, although I am a little surprised the writer, Michael Wolk, never went on to get anything else produced because writing even a middling John Landis film well after his prime will get your subsequent scripts at least looked at.  Maybe he poured all of his ideas and passions into this one story and didn’t have anything else to say, which is just depressing to think about.

              The backstory behind the production of this movie is almost interesting.  After the stinging rejection of the Stallone-led flop ‘Oscar’ and a solid decade on from ‘An American Werewolf in London’ (the poster for this movie prominently names that one) Landis was apparently in the mood to try some horror/comedy again so along with Harry Shearer he developed a vampire script called ‘Red Sleep’ about vampires secretly running Las Vegas, which is fine as a premise.  Warner Bros. apparently didn’t like it but did have this script sitting around and offered it instead.  Landis liked it enough to agree to direct despite what he considered a low budget (reportedly $20 million, which in today’s dollars would be around $45 million, which seems about right).  Anne Parillaud had just had something of an international hit with Luc Besson’s ‘La Femme Nikita’ and so Landis cast her as the female vampire lead Marie along with relative unknown Anthony LaPaglia as the lead hero Joe Gennaro.  The antagonist of the movie was played by Robert Loggia as Sal Micelli, because if you have an opportunity to have Robert Loggia in your movie you take it.  The rest of the cast is sprinkled with character actors like Chazz Palminteri and Luis Guzmán.  Everyone is fine.

              The premise is fairly clever.  A vampire in modern day Philadelphia is using an ongoing gangland war to cover her feeding habits.  She attacks the head of one of the local families but is interrupted by his bodyguard before she can make sure he doesn’t rise as a vampire himself and after he does so mayhem ensues.  The mobster decides he likes being a vampire and starts to turn his entire gang before being stopped by the vampire and a cop who was undercover with the family.  As a story it has potential that is almost entirely squandered.

              The mechanics of the vampires in this movie fluctuate with the needs of the scenes and the plot.  Some of it is unimportant: vampires have reflections (mainly just so Marie can smash mirrors after she’s fed because she can’t look at herself so we know she’s a ‘good’ vampire), garlic works, crosses don’t seem to, there’s no invitation stuff going on, I don’t really care because everyone plays with the rules.  What does matter is that the movie establishes that vampires die either through exposure to sunlight, with a bullet to the head, or by snapping their neck.  It does rip a lot of the menace away when everyone in the movie is carrying a gun at all times and you can absently off a vampire whenever you feel like it.

              There are two main problems with the movie and the first one is tone.  This is somewhat nebulous but the general consensus of reviews at the time, and decidedly my opinion as well, is that this movie fails at balancing the comedy elements in the movie with the other parts.  Where ‘An American Werewolf in London’ managed to mix horror and comedy fairly well this movie introduces a third angle with the gangster stuff and doesn’t really bother much with the horror part.  A straight vampire-horror movie with gangsters could work, a comedy-gangster movie could definitely work, and a vampire-comedy demonstrably works, but all three together is basically a hat on a hat on a hat.  On the other hand defenders of this film could have a very good case arguing that this isn’t actually a comedy because it’s never very funny, but I certainly don’t think that was Landis’ intent.

              By far the bigger problem is what the movie doesn’t do with that basic premise.  There is one scene that I’m convinced was the genesis of the entire idea: after Loggia’s Sal has decided to start turning the other gangsters into vampires he tells them, “You’re gonna be made men.  But when you’re made by me, nobody can touch you.”  It’s not an unclever line.  The problem is that this scene happens at minute 95 of a 115-minute movie.  The entire point of a film with vampire gangsters is to see vampire gangsters and we don’t get that until we’re well into the third act, and because the movie has to have a happy ending as soon as they’re introduced they’re quickly dispatched of by our heroes in essentially the same scene.  In the entire movie there is only one non-gangster victim and that’s a cop.  Those are not horror movie stakes, that’s just the body count of a bland gangster movie.

              So what does the movie spend time on?  It essentially spins its wheels getting to that third act by focusing on Sal figuring out he’s a vampire (which is where a lot of the ostensible comedy lives) and somehow trying to sell us on a romance between Marie and Joe.  It does an all-right job of establishing Marie as a vampire, characterizing her, and laying some basic rules of her abilities and how she operates.  It also introduces us to LaPaglia’s Joe and gives him some characterization and shows how he relates to the gangsters as a former undercover cop.  The fact that they team up to try to take down vampire Sal is fine in and of itself but the way they get there is distractingly stupid.  The cops in this movie are the worst, by which I mean they are stupefyingly incompetent.  They blow Joe’s undercover role when he shows up to an active crime scene and the managing US Attorney decides to grab him and shove him in front of the news cameras for no clear reason other than Marie needs to see it in a newspaper so she knows he’s a good guy when they team up several scenes later.  When Joe tracks Marie after her attack on Sal he doesn’t bother to inform anyone what he’s doing and just wanders into and out of buildings with his gun drawn. 

              I gave up on the movie at the end of the second act.  The first act is establishing vampires, establishing gangsters, and climaxes with Sal being turned.  Fine so far.  The entire second act is Sal wandering around learning he’s a vampire, which is a big ol’ waste of time because the audience knows he’s a vampire so we’re just waiting for the characters to catch up to where we are, Marie and Joe running around chasing each other also wasting our time because we know they’re going to team up, and all three of them deciding to bed down for the day waiting for night to fall so they can have the third act.  Sal goes to sleep in a frozen meat locker run by Sam Raimi, which is a fun cameo, and Marie and Joe end up in a cheap hotel where Marie gets naked and they fuck before he learns her name because that’s how John Landis apparently rolls.  I like Robert Loggia sucking on raw meat and attacking Don Rickles as much as the next guy but we could have skipped a whole lot of this.

              The climax shows how much this has been a squandering of an interesting premise.  Marie and Joe track down Sal and his now-vampiric goons to a strip club so Landis could include more boobs (I’m fine with screen nudity if there’s a point but there’s a lot of creepy-old-man energy in this movie for a director who was 41 at the time), they off the other vampires incredibly easy then chase Sal off of the roof.  He jumps down to the street where he’s hit by a bus.  Marie and Joe follow him down, set him on fire with some leaking gasoline, Sal makes a stupid speech while he’s burning and then Joe just shoots him in the head.  Marie decides she’s going to greet the sunrise to kill herself, Joe stops her because he’s apparently in love with her, it’s implied that Marie decides she’s going to turn him into a vampire as well, and that’s our happy ending.

              This movie under-performed at the box office and combined with 1994’s ‘Beverly Hills Cop III’ and especially 1998’s ‘Blues Brother 2000” ended John Landis’s time as a major filmmaker.  It earned just under $5 million from the aforementioned $20 million budget and was not well-received by critics.  His most recent director’s credit is 26 episodes of the tv show “Stan Lee’s Superhero Kindergarten,” which I am informed airs on the previously unknown-to-me VOD service Kartoon Channel.  The home video release history is also almost interesting as various cuts existed in various formats for years and the theatrical widescreen version wasn’t widely available until it was issued on blu-ray in 2017.  There’s no real reason to see this movie.  I’m happy that Anne Parillaud got a paycheck and Robert Loggia seemed to have some fun but this was a bad script made by a formerly talented filmmaker in steep decline.