Vampire’s Kiss (1988) The Patient Zero of Nicolas Cage Performances

What would us cinephiles do without Nicolas Cage in the world? Internet discussions about the man who successfully shook off the reputation of coming from the Coppola family by simply picking whatever project he felt like (some good and plenty bad), tend to forget that he’s a very strong and charismatic actor. He has a natural aura around him no matter what he’s in, so even a bad Nicolas Cage film is worth a watch simply to see how he’ll enhance the material, or at least enliven it. Debate about his skills and abilities sometimes falls by the wayside whenever his performances are mined for memes, and the internet’s certainly not short on options. Whether he’s being attacked by bees in the Wicker Man remake, looking confused at Pedro Pascal in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, or smiling with a mullet in Con-Air, no stone’s left unturned when making Cage an utter legend of the online world. Well, there needs to be a whole new word invented to describe whatever the hell he’s doing in Vampire’s Kiss because in all my cinephilic life, the majority of Nicolas Cage memes stem from this one film and his showstopping, all-encompassing, scenery-chewing, scorched-earth performance. 

Robert Bierman’s Vampire’s Kiss isn’t a film that prides itself on subtlety, starting and ending with some moody but lightweight strings and relatively normal credits sequences, but that’s about the only indication that you’re watching a film made by entities of this planet. The film has a somewhat eccentric, but still relatively normal first act, with Cage playing a stereotypical up-himself yuppie called Peter Loew, who’s working in the Big Apple as a literary agent and regularly courting and sleeping with different women. It’s during a meeting with his therapist that he describes the arousal he felt when a bat flew into his room during one of his many one-night stands. That’s right – the sex didn’t get him going, the bat did, and we realise the guy is probably a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Cage initially turned down the chance to star as Peter Loew so the opportunity was offered up to others like Judd Nelson and Dennis Quaid, and while I could see Quaid giving it a go, there’s no denying that this interpretation of the script could only come from one actor. Openly inspired by expressionist cinema, Cage takes all of Loew’s creepy and awkward tendencies and pushes them to their absolute extremes, delivering a performance so audacious and over-the-top, it almost makes you forget that there’s actually a movie surrounding it, or that the film isn’t actually too bad – it’s just a pity you’ll barely remember the rest of it. It’s hard to tell whether Cage’s performance dictates the style of the rest of the film, or if he was simply given instructions on how to perform and he’s simply playing to what was asked of him.

For all the hilarity that may come naturally from scenes in the movie or the memes they spawned (I’ve had the image of a wide-eyed Cage at a desk burned into my brain since the age of 10), there’s undeniably something hypnotic about the sudden escalations of intensity, the longing looks of menace that last an eternity, the hysterical fits of yelling and crying, and the Nosferatu allusions every time he’s in a vampiric mood. I still have no idea whether it’s good or not, but only Cage could give you such an outward and visceral performance in this way, and it’s the expressionistic qualities of it – along with some of the more outlandish scenes in the third act – that enhance the somewhat ropey screenplay from Joseph Minion (responsible for Scorsese’s After Hours). Although it’s not particularly bad, certain exchanges lack a natural ebb and flow and the middle is a bit aimless as Peter keeps slipping in and out of insanity and doing things that get steadily more monstrous. Perhaps it’s this stiff and clunky feel that Cage is deliberately trying to mask because I certainly wasn’t concentrating on these flaws whenever he engulfed the screen, that’s for sure. 

No matter how extravagant Cage goes, the script never seems quite sure what tone to strike as although Vampire’s Kiss markets itself as a dark comedy – and that’s definitely the prevailing impression for some of the runtime – it can also be a vampire movie, a psychological thriller, a twisted fantasy, or even a workplace drama where an assistant is under physical and mental duress from her psychopathic boss. Vampire’s Kiss plays like a precursor to American Psycho, but while Peter Loew and Patrick Bateman are unlikeable yuppies on the surface and demented disturbed weirdos in private, this arguably takes things even further than Harron’s film. 

The abusive boss-worker dynamic proved to be the story’s strongest throughline for me as although Cage’s performance reaches supernova levels of scenery-chewing, the script actually gets dark and seedy enough to back up his insanity. An extremely uncomfortable act of assault lends a whole new perspective to events in the film, and casts a sinister shadow over the vampiric lunacy that happens towards the conclusion. Maria Cochita Alonso plays the abused secretary Alva, who’s forced by an obsessive Loew to search for a specific document amongst hundreds of files, and somehow manages to hold her own against Cage’s performance. This angle of the script is surprisingly engaging when the film finally focuses on it, and the interactions between Alva and her family are not only interesting on a narrative level, but they’re a much-needed reprieve after yet another scene of Cage almost eating through the screen. Alva is necessary as a relatable human being to counter the Cage’s caricature of a mad yuppie because sometimes the eccentricity completely overkill, and I found myself quite exhausted because of Cage’s intense performance, wishing that there were more scenes without him.

Vampire’s Kiss is by no means a bad film, but it’s also not one that can necessarily be criticised in a professional sense. It has a reasonably engaging narrative, and tonal shifts that make for a memorable watch irrespective of everything else, but it also has a lead performance that’s so audacious, so overdone, so enigmatic, that it completely overshadows anything else going on, evaporating any critical faculties you may have left. If you need a more thorough and cogent analysis though, this new Blu-Ray release from Radiance Films comes with a brand-new commentary from critics Nick de Semlyen and Kim Newman and a 40-page booklet with academic writings on the film, and together they can offer you far more insightful observations than I ever could.

As for me, long live Nicolas Cage, and I am a vampire.

ALEX’S ARCHIVE – VAMPIRE’S KISS