In a way, it’s the Rosetta Stone of Nicolas Cage movies.
Vampire’s Kiss, released in 1988 and directed by Robert Bierman (A Merry War), contains just about every one of Cage’s signature acting movies, from the slick and smooth charm of a classic leading man to the outrageous and unexpected outbursts and often misplaced emotional energy of a madman. He even throws in an Elvis move or two.
So, Vampire’s Kiss is a critical Nicolas Cage movie. It’s just not a good one.
In the movie, Cage plays Peter Loew, a sleazy New York City publishing company executive. Loew spends most of his time tormenting his secretary, Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso), when he’s not off drinking with his buddies and picking up women for one-night stands. In other words, a total scumball
One night while out trolling for his next conquest, Loew sets his sights on an exotic lady in red named Rachel (Jennifer Beals), who turns out to be nosferatu in a bustier. She feeds on Loew and turns him into a vampire, too.
Or does she?
One of the quirks of Vampire’s Kiss is that it plays with the idea that Rachel doesn’t exist and that his vampirism is all in Loew’s mind. It’s not an idea the movie pulls off entirely, but it’s enough of a plot twist to give Cage free range to act like he thinks a man turning into a vampire would act. Or something like that.
And so we watch Cage scarf down a New York-size cockroach (and yes, it’s an actual roach, and he eats it). We later see him try to keep down the pigeon he eats, too. He starts to wear dark glasses in the daytime and sleeps under his overturned couch like it is his coffin. Disappointed that real ones haven’t grown in, he even goes to a store in Chinatown and buys a pair of plastic vampire fangs to help him look the part.
And he still criticizes and belittles Alva. He even rapes her after luring her to his office, as if being a violent, misogynistic jerk was part of his ‘vampire’ curse. It’s disgusting.
If Vampire’s Kiss is supposed to be a comedy, it fails miserably. We may laugh at some of Cage’s antics, but the tone he and his director set is far from funny. And it doesn’t work as a horror movie, either. The cockroach scene may gross you out. You may be horrified when Loew takes his first real victim, biting an innocent woman in a nightclub with his plastic joke shop vampire teeth and sucking on her neck until she dies. That doesn’t make Vampire’s Kiss a horror movie. Horrible, yes. Horror, no. Wikipedia defines horror as “a film that seeks to elicit fear for entertainment purposes.” Vampire’s Kiss does neither.
Ultimately, Vampire’s Kiss is less than 103 minutes of Cage uncaged. And while a dose of that is something fans usually look for — or long for — in a Nicolas Cage movie, there is just too much of it — and very little else — in Vampire’s Kiss. Maybe doing the film was just Cage’s way of shaking off the success of its predecessor, Moonstruck, which brought him so much critical and commercial acclaim. It’s a pattern you see the actor often follow in his career: he has a hit, then does something almost guaranteed to make people question what happened to him.
Or he liked doing it. In a 2018 GQ interview, Cage stated that this is his favorite movie he had made.
