A Carol for Another Christmas (1964)

Posted on December 22, 2016 at 6:41 am by Jeff Kuykendall

carol-for-another-christmas

In October 1963, a month before the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, delivered a speech in the city to promote the controversial organization. Eyes were watching. Long before the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Dallas was fast becoming a haven for right-wing extremism. In 1960, JFK’s running mate and U.S. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, along with his wife Lady Bird Johnson, were cornered and accosted by right-wing protesters organized by Dallas-based Republican congressman Bruce Alger, an ugly, violent confrontation that made headlines. The John Birch Society was also based in Dallas. The organization saw Communist plots around every corner and believed the goal of the UN was to create a “One World Government.” So when Stevenson arrived in 1963, his goal was to educate the people of Dallas on the UN and to combat the propaganda of extremists. His speech was interrupted by protesters rushing the stage and scattered taunts from the audience, though he received cheers to back his every retort. On the way out to his limousine, he was struck with a placard, called a “traitor,” and spat upon. As Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis recount in their book Dallas 1963:

The chauffeur guns the engine and the car pulls forward as protesters fall away. The limo hurtles through the parking lot, screeching as it turns a corner. Inside the car, Stevenson takes out his handkerchief and wipes the saliva from his face.

Addressing no one in particular he asks:

“Are these human beings or animals?”

Following the incident, a concerned UN proposed a series of all-star, made-for-TV promotional feature films for an American and international market. The purpose of each film would be to educate the public on the value of the UN in encouraging dialogue between nations rather than war. They were joined in this effort by Xerox, whose left-leaning CEO agreed to a company contribution of four million dollars, despite the protests of Conservative stockholders. The first – and most notorious – of these ventures was A Carol for Another Christmas (1964), written by Rod Serling and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and featuring an impressive celebrity cast.

Sterling Hayden, as cold-hearted industrialist Daniel Grudge, pays a visit to Hiroshima, with Eva Marie Saint playing a Navy WAVE.

Sterling Hayden, as cold-hearted industrialist Daniel Grudge, pays a visit to Hiroshima, with Eva Marie Saint playing a Navy WAVE.

The last episode of Serling’s freshly-cancelled The Twilight Zone had aired the previous summer. A Carol for Another Christmas plays exactly like a feature-length Twilight Zone special (the series had already experimented with long form in the hour-long episodes of its penultimate season – to mixed results). Serling, left-leaning himself and a pacifist, was only too happy to contribute a script to the UN’s project. Though in retrospect one can see that Mankiewicz’s career was about to wind down, he had just come off the megabudget spectacle Cleopatra (1963), nominated for multiple Academy Awards including Best Picture, and the highest grossing film of its year (regardless of the fact that it didn’t make its money back). Given the strain of Cleopatra‘s production, it might be easier to understand why he’d be willing to downsize so dramatically for his next project. Joining Serling and Mankiewicz were Sterling Hayden (The Asphalt Jungle), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest), Ben Gazzara (Anatomy of a Murder), Robert Shaw (From Russia with Love), singer Steve Lawrence, and – fresh off The Pink Panther – Peter Sellers and film composer Henry Mancini. Mancini wrote the special’s main theme, and Sellers lowered his salary to just $350 to participate in the political-themed film. ABC aired A Carol for Another Christmas on December 28, 1964. NBC and CBS had turned it down, fearing political backlash. As it was, the John Birch Society flooded Xerox with letters of protest. As Mitchell Hadley describes the situation for the website TV Party, “The prospect of a massive protest might have intimidated CBS and NBC, but ultimately it was unable to prevent the series from going on the air. Typical of the mainstream public reaction was a letter to TV Guide in which the writer protested ‘this mail campaign to stop a wonderful series by Xerox on the United Nations… No lunatic fringe of prejudiced, prolific letter writers should decide for the rest of us if the United Nations is to be learned about!'”

Ben Gazzara playing Hayden's nephew, Fred.

Ben Gazzara playing Hayden’s nephew, Fred.

As the title suggests, Serling’s script was a retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but one infused with the tensions and anxieties of the Cold War. Hayden plays the Scrooge stand-in, Daniel Grudge, who has grown bitter in the years following the WWII death of his son Marley. (Peter Fonda played the ghost of Marley in scenes cut from the final film.) His nephew Fred (Gazzara) criticizes him for his isolationist politics, all stemming from Marley’s death in wartime. Later that night, Grudge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. But their mission is broader than mere character rehabilitation: they examine Grudge’s politics, and the repercussions of isolating oneself and not engaging in dialogue with the international community. The Ghost of Christmas Past (Lawrence) meets Grudge on a ghost ship traveling through foggy waters and occupied by the specters of dead military men from various points in history. They discuss the brutality of war. He then takes Grudge to Hiroshima, where – in a deeply disturbing scene – Grudge walks through a tent filled with victims of the blast, their faces hidden behind bandages that flutter at their breaths. The Ghost of Christmas Present (Pat Hingle, Splendor in the Grass) indulges in a feast at a banquet table while international refugees crowd nearby in a fenced-off camp. He accuses Grudge of gluttony while others are starving. The Ghost of Christmas Future (Shaw) joins Grudge after a nuclear apocalypse. The small band of survivors – all that remain of the world – worship (with Beatlemania-style screaming) a man called the Imperial Me (Sellers), who dresses in a pilgrim outfit, a cowboy hat on his head spelling ME. This is America after it has cut off all diplomacy and dialogue; when the talking stops, Serling tells us, the fighting begins. Now this savage little community continues to dwindle, killing themselves in the race to become the final individual on Earth. Grudge even witnesses his servant (Percy Rodriguez, Peyton Place) executed for attempting to voice reason to the mob.

Peter Sellers as the "Imperial Me."

Peter Sellers as the “Imperial Me.”

It’s quite astonishing to see a Christmas special get as very, very dark as A Carol for Another Christmas. Not an ounce of joy is to be found; each image of misery doubles down on the one that came before. Of all the segments, the one set in a bombed-flat Hiroshima is the most laudable, as Hayden’s arguments in support of the bombing and its role in ending the war come face to face with the direct human impact, and the hideous scale of war is on full display. (One can imagine Serling writing this with a copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima in one hand.) But this is followed by the Ghost of Christmas Future sequence, which tries to imagine an even more desolate and inhuman setting by melding science fiction with avant-garde theater; think The Twilight Zone meets Samuel Beckett meets the “Fall Out” finale of The Prisoner. At its jaw-droppingly darkest moment, the crowd chants to Rodriguez to commit suicide by jumping to his death above the arena where they gather, only to have the decision made by a little kid who takes the gun belonging to his dead daddy and blows Rodriguez away. His mother, played by Sellers’ wife Britt Ekland, smiles approvingly. (This was Sellers’ first acting performance following a string of eight heart attacks that nearly killed him. Reportedly the heart attacks were triggered from popping amyl nitrites as a sexual stimulant.) One can only imagine the reaction of families who’d innocently gathered together one night in 1964 to watch this “Christmas Carol from the guy who did The Twilight Zone.” Even after witnessing this grim moment, Grudge, returning to the present, is not rejuvenated with the spirit of Christmas peace. He does apologize to his nephew, at least, before joining his servants for breakfast in the kitchen. This is his grand gesture – eating in the kitchen with the servants, who are nonetheless still preparing his breakfast. He could at least offer to brew the coffee! Instead, he doesn’t smile, but listens to Christmas music while eating, alone with his thoughts. You can practically feel Serling’s presence hovering over you, chain-smoking, sternly urging you to keep watching, and perhaps demanding that you write an essay on the role of the UN after the ending credits are through.

Grudge and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Robert Shaw), witnessing the end of the world.

Grudge and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Robert Shaw), witnessing the end of the world.

It’s talky and turgid, and despite some impressive, stark imagery and strong performances, it represents Serling at his most lecturing. The screenplay consists almost entirely of long monologues. The intention might be noble, but the result is almost indigestible; at least the appearance of Sellers, giving it his all as usual, and a very outré apocalypse liven things up a bit for the viewer in the final act. But the Cold War theme does make this film feel like a straight-faced, non-satirical companion piece to Dr. Strangelove (1964), which featured Hayden (and his “precious bodily fluids”) and Sellers, and was also shot in dramatic black-and-white and released the same year. Perhaps it would work best as a special feature on a future Dr. Strangelove home video release. In fact, A Carol for Another Christmas has never been commercially available apart from bootlegs, out of circulation until Turner Classic Movies unearthed it several years ago. Now, every couple years, TCM brings it out of the vault (though the copy being used is missing the Mancini theme music). It’s a curiosity, and that’s all it will ever be, but it’s the rare curiosity that has the perfect (on paper) pedigree. Was Serling right? Did grim times – and the post-Kennedy years were grim indeed – call for grim Christmas fables? If so – then maybe in 2016 Carol for Another Christmas is finally back in season?

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Black Christmas (1974)

Posted on December 17, 2016 at 10:20 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Black Christmas

The creaking of a rocking chair. A tune hummed very softly. Corpses strewn about an attic. The girl in the chair, with the defaced plastic doll in her arm, has long ago been smothered by a plastic bag, and she looks like an insect trapped in amber. A voice whispers in a broken cadence: “Agnes? It’s me, Billy.” You never see the speaker, not fully. He’s usually just a hand or a pair of legs, sometimes a fist clutching an improvised weapon before the camera – whatever can be used for killing in this mostly empty sorority house one December in the early 70’s. Most often he’s just a shadow in the background, while the sorority sisters are looking in the opposite direction. On paper, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) shouldn’t work as well as it does, and it can easily be lost amidst the stacks and stacks of slasher films that followed. Unseen killer – shots often taken from his point of view? A body count of sorority girls, picked off one by one? A fake-out ending? The calls are coming from inside the–? Check, check, check. But it is not only one of the first films to do all those things, it also handles them extraordinarily well, without condescension, and with quotable dialogue and believable characters. Yes, many of the moments in the film would soon become clichés, but one of the reasons Black Christmas is so enduring is that, here in prototype, they are not treated like clichés. Bob Clark believes in them, and he persuades you of the reality of the peril. The first time I watched Black Christmas I was jarred. I was halfway through the film before I realized that the movie I thought I was watching was vastly inferior to the movie that I was actually watching, and I only realized this because my body was beginning to ache from nervous tension; I was in a cooking pot, and Bob Clark had turned the water up to boiling so gradually that I didn’t notice until it was too late.

John Saxon as Lieutenant Ken Fuller.

John Saxon as Lieutenant Ken Fuller.

Wait, Bob Clark – that Bob Clark? The one who directed A Christmas Story just nine years later? Yes, and the one who made Porky’s (1981) right before that. Clark was a chameleon, shying from the auteur label. Like a studio director of old Hollywood, Clark adapted his style to best suit the material. But he wasn’t from Hollywood; he was a Canuck, and Black Christmas was one of a large number of “Canuxploitation” films with an eye toward becoming a hit at American drive-ins. It wasn’t his first horror film, either. He had previously made Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Deathdream (1974), and by now he had a sure hand at balancing strong performances and ratcheting tension. One of the most striking things about Black Christmas is how well directed it is, the camera movement acting as a storyteller just as in a Hitchcock film. Notably, the opening sequence is shot from the killer’s POV, stalking outside the windows and climbing a trellis to invade the sorority house of Pi Kappa Sigma. But on this viewing I noticed a different scene where Clark breaks from the main characters to observe them through a window, their dialogue muted; it’s a moment that’s not necessarily the observation of the killer, but instead a reminder of the threat which hovers over them, to keep you on edge. (It also, efficiently, removes extraneous dialogue. We know what they’re saying, so we don’t even need to hear them say it.) More frequently, we see the potential victims while the killer is standing above them on the upper landing, sometimes perfectly exposed if they would only turn around; the ideal device to get the audience screaming advice at the movie screen. This technique was fairly new. Psycho and Peeping Tom pioneered the voyeuristic aspect of horror in 1960, and when the shower curtain is opened on Marion Crane, she’s screaming straight at us, her killer. Mario Bava’s seminal slasher A Bay of Blood (1971) and other giallos, including Dario Argento’s, further developed voyeuristic, POV murders, both sadistic and fetishistic. Black Christmas takes key elements of those films and makes a formula of them which feels like a revelation. It was largely overlooked on its release in 1974, but it had a big fan in John Carpenter. As Clark told it, it was Clark who suggested to Carpenter the premise of a teen slasher film set on Halloween, to be called “Halloween,” an off-hand idea for a Black Christmas sequel which Clark had no intention of actually making. Carpenter ran with it, and even borrowed the idea of opening the film from the killer’s POV, though Carpenter’s take is much more ambitious, prolonged, and attention-grabbing. Ultimately, Halloween (1978) is its own film, but would it have ever happened if it weren’t for Clark’s earlier, Christmas-set slasher? Clark’s film came and went, but Halloween made an impact crater – and sent ripples through the horror genre for a decade.

Jess (Olivia Hussey) waits for the killer's phone call.

Jess (Olivia Hussey) waits for the killer’s phone call.

But here’s what Black Christmas doesn’t share with all the slasher films to come. Though it takes place in a sorority house, surprisingly there’s no T&A – neither a gratuitous shower scene nor a lingerie slumber party. The future director of Porky’s isn’t interested, because it would contribute nothing to the story or the suspense. All the girls stay fully clothed, often in layers (it is winter, after all). This feels not like a male fantasy but a real sorority house, from the girls’ somewhat forced pretense of adulthood – best embodied by Margot Kidder’s character, who is always drinking or smoking or talking about sex – right down to the R-rated posters on the walls, which cause deep embarrassment to the father of one of the missing girls when he comes knocking. There’s also very little blood and gore, certainly nothing of the Friday the 13th variety. Only two scenes featuring blood come to mind, one of which – a stabbing with a glass unicorn – is a showstopper more notable for its cross-cutting and the use of a Christmas carol than the explicitness of the killing (it isn’t explicit at all). So why do slasher aficionados hold Black Christmas in such high regard? Because everything Clark has assembled works in harmony toward one purpose: shaking the audience up good. Most of this is achieved using a simple telephone. “Billy,” the stalker and killer, has a habit of phoning up the sorority girls. In the opening minutes we watch as his call interrupts a holiday party, and the young women gather to listen to the latest diatribe from “The Moaner.” The sorority sisters are played by Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet), Kidder (who had recently starred in Brian De Palma’s Sisters), Andrea Martin (pre-SCTV), and Lynne Griffin (Curtains). The call is disturbing for a number of reasons. Billy’s explicit come-ons feel like a violation in context of the hushed “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” playing in the background and the expressions of shock and fascination from the girls. And his voice keeps changing shape, like a broadcast of a gibberish radio play from the abyss. When Clare (Griffin) questions whether it could just be one person, Kidder’s priceless response is, “No, Clare, that’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing their annual obscene phone call.” To pull off the disturbing calls, Clark used Nick Mancuso for the voice of Billy, but also about five other actors. It’s Norman Bates arguing with “Mother,” squared. In later scenes, each of Billy’s phone calls is accompanied by jarring sounds from Clark’s go-to composer, Carl Zittrer. It pushes you to the edge of your seat.

Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) plays reluctant host to Mr. Harrison (James Edmond) when he comes looking for his missing daughter.

Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) plays reluctant host to Mr. Harrison (James Edmond) when he comes looking for his missing daughter.

As Billy begins offing the sorority sisters, we follow Jess (Hussey) and her deteriorating relationship with possessive boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea, 2001: A Space Odyssey). (Another tradition is established here: the bodies of the victims remain hidden, all building up to a big “reveal” to jolt the Final Girl.) Jess discovers she’s pregnant, and she wants to have an abortion; Peter wants to keep the baby. Peter, a pianist in the conservatory, begins behaving erratically and violently. This leads to the film’s big question: is Peter really Billy? Some of Billy’s remarks on the phone drop hints that they’re one and the same, and it’s not like there are a lot of candidates, if we have to pick from the cast: the other one, perhaps, would be Clare’s boyfriend Chris (Art Hindle, Invasion of the Body Snatchers). But Clark keeps the film’s story as simple as possible, so that it plays like a dark fable for the holidays. There’s an admirable purity at work. The film’s second half is focused on the attempts by Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon, A Nightmare on Elm Street) to trace one of Billy’s phone calls. Jess sits by the phone, waiting for it to ring. Fuller sits at his desk in the police station, where his phone has been set to ring simultaneously with the phone in the sorority house. A telephone technician is at the ready to trace the call, which is a physical workout – he needs to actually run down corridors of phone switches to finally arrive at the conclusion that we all know is coming. Finally, there’s the twist ending, which really shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it works gangbusters. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t answer all your questions. You expect a neat resolution – even the giallos solved their twisted mysteries – and you don’t get one. Those calls, so strange and inexplicable (who’s Agnes, anyway?), never receive a clinical explanation from Psycho‘s psychiatrist. This is how you do it. The latest home video release of Black Christmas is another of Scream! Factory’s grand gestures at the ultimate edition: the first disc features a new restoration based on a 2K scan of the negative, and a second disc houses far more special features than the back of the box suggests. This is the equivalent of a course syllabus on the late Clark’s horror classic. Required viewing for horror fans.

Black Christmas

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Innocent Blood (1992)

Posted on December 10, 2016 at 10:24 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Innocent Blood

In 1981, John Landis, a comedy director best known for Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), decided to make a horror film. It would essentially be a Wolf Man movie, a tribute to his monster kid roots. The result, An American Werewolf in London, has a reputation as a horror-comedy, but I’d qualify it as a very serious horror film that captures the absurdity and black humor within a very bleak premise (you’re a werewolf, you’re killing people every night, and the only way you can stop it is to die). The film was a hit, but it would be a full sixteen years before it received an official sequel, the disappointing An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), which was made without the involvement of Landis. I’d like to think that movie never happened, and that the true American Werewolf sequel be recognized as the Landis-led Innocent Blood (1992). (According to the IMDB, the Australian title was A French Vampire in America. Not bad, but I’d specify A French Vampire in Pittsburgh.) If it doesn’t have the same formula as the 1981 film, that’s because the variables have been nudged a few degrees in different directions. The screenplay by Michael Wolk (his only writing credit) changes the setting to a chilly Pittsburgh by night, with snow falling from the sky and piling in empty side streets. Because the plot deals with Italian-American gangsters, the film begins like a straight-faced Goodfellas spin-off before supernatural horror turns the gangster drama into a parody: imagine The Sopranos with Tony’s posse turning into vampires and you’ll get the idea. And despite the buckets of blood on display – this is a very gory film – it feels lighter than American Werewolf. That’s because Innocent Blood is, at its heart, an old-fashioned romance, albeit one with kinky sex and lots of neck-snapping and throat-ripping.

Anthony LaPaglia and Chazz Palminteri.

Anthony LaPaglia and Chazz Palminteri.

The vampire at the center of this story is Marie, played by Anne Parillaud, who had become an international star playing the lead in Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990). Landis wisely keeps her French accent intact, so that Parillaud is playing a foreigner in every sense of the term, an immigrant and outsider isolated in an apartment in the middle of Pittsburgh, surrounded by enough candles to support a Meat Loaf video. She’s survived only by being clever and resourceful. Like Dexter, she only kills those who deserve to die (by her estimation), and she makes sure they’re dead: in an early scene, she uses a shotgun to blow her victim’s head off. “My second rule,” she says in voice-over as she pulls the trigger, “always finish the food.” The first rule is invoked when she meets Joe Gennario (Anthony LaPaglia, Summer of Sam), a cop. The two are immediately attracted to one another, but she tells herself: “Never play with the food.” Each goes their own way on separate assignments, Joe to continue his undercover work embedded in the Pittsburgh Mafia, Marie to kill members of that mob because, as she frames it, she’s hungry for Italian. Innocent Blood has a dream cast, and one look at the gangster lineup proves it: Robert Loggia (Scarface), as psychotic mob boss Sallie “the Shark” Macelli, is backed by Chazz Palminteri (A Bronx Tale), Tony Sirico (“Paulie Walnuts” from The Sopranos), David Proval (Mean Streets), Kim Coates (The Last Boy Scout), Tony Lip (Goodfellas, The Sopranos), Rocco Sisto (Carlito’s Way), and – last but not least – Don Rickles as his lawyer Manny. (Rickles seems to be auditioning for his future role in Casino.) Working against the mob is district attorney Angela Bassett (What’s Love Got to Do With It) and cops Luis Guzmán (Boogie Nights) and Leo Burmester (The Abyss). This being a John Landis film, a number of directors and cult icons are also given cameos, among them Frank Oz, Sam Raimi, Dario Argento, Tom Savini, Forrest J. Ackerman, Linnea Quigley, and others. (Another Landis trademark is also present: there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marquee advertising See You Next Wednesday.) Of these, Oz gets the biggest and best role, as a medical examiner whose dead subject – Loggia – abruptly rises from the table and pulls out the thermometer that’s been stuck into his belly. As Loggia growls, upends medical equipment, and storms out of the room, the coroner’s assistant says, “Well, stop him!” Oz answers, “You stop him!”

Undead mob boss Sallie "the Shark" Macelli (Robert Loggia) rises to greet forensic pathologist Frank Oz.

Undead mob boss Sallie “the Shark” Macelli (Robert Loggia) rises to greet forensic pathologist Frank Oz.

Much of the story alternates between LaPaglia’s investigation and Parillaud’s vampire Marie, who’s feasting on Sallie the Shark comes undone when she’s not given the chance to “finish the food.” Joe and Marie finally team up when Loggia begins building a vampire mob – although Rickles doesn’t last long, meeting a spectacular demise when a nurse opens the curtains to let in the morning sun. (Kudos to Rickles for enduring the makeup and practical effects work for this sequence, which earns comparisons to Fright Night.) Landis has fun both playing genre clichés and tweaking them, as gangster saga and vampire movie collide. Loggia, perpetually drenched in blood, is oblivious to the way his men recoil when he offers to promote them to “made men.” Rickles is particularly good as Loggia’s increasingly anxious attorney, urging his deranged, undead client to not murder LaPaglia on his front lawn, but delighted that Loggia’s not-living status provides a legal loophole for their illicit activities. Others, like Bassett and Palminteri, deserve bigger roles, but they weren’t household names just yet; Palminteri, at least, gets one great scene as he succumbs to the seduction of Parillaud to the soundtrack of Frank Sinatra. But the film primarily belongs to Parillaud and LaPaglia as Marie and Joe, spending much of the film in pursuit, then circling one another warily before checking into a motel, as Marie takes shelter from the sun. They stare at one another. Marie is interested. Joe is interested but terrified. The dance of seduction begins at opposite ends of a couch – Joe hilariously squirming against the arm rest, his body doing all but fleeing – and ends with handcuffs. Innocent Blood comes from the era of heightened safe sex messaging, but Landis has fun with the notion of what safe sex with a vampire could possibly mean. The condom that Joe nervously opens while Marie tries to go down on him seems somewhat insufficient. When she volunteers cuffing herself, he finally gets the confidence to join her – though in her passion she breaks the cuffs apart with ease. The sequence isn’t just sexy; it’s non-puerile and adult in ways that almost 25 years later still feel refreshing and rare. (That may have something to do with the fact that the movie celebrates the joy and intimacy of sex. Sex is not followed by punishment, as so often happens in American films, horror films in particular.)

Anne Parillaud as the gangster-hunting vampire Marie.

Anne Parillaud as the gangster-hunting vampire Marie.

Parillaud’s Marie is really the main character, and she can hold her own, with eyes that glow different colors (red while she kills), and the savagery to tear holes in the throats of her “food.” (The vampires here don’t follow all the traditional rules, and Landis treats them not too differently from his werewolves.) If she acts the frail flower, shooting a flirtatious smile, it’s usually to lower the defenses of her victims. In the climax, we learn just how efficiently and naturally she does this. “I’m just a girl,” she says to one gangster before smashing his face with a baseball bat. Her only weakness proves to be Sallie the Shark’s garlic breath. More often than not, she’s the one saving Joe, and her goal has nothing to do with him: she simply wants to stop Sallie from spreading vampirism. “He’s a cold-blooded killer,” she says to Joe, words he turns against her. But she’s already aware, even self-loathing – when she sees her blood-smeared reflection in the mirror, she smashes it. Initially she craves sex – she says so in the film’s opening, as she walks nude through her apartment, but she begins to realize that she also wants companionship, a partner and an equal. That separates Innocent Blood considerably from American Werewolf, but it still makes for a worthy companion film. Like Werewolf, its central character is in conflict with the killing instinct of an inner monster. But just as the gender of the protagonist has been flipped, so has the balance of the genre elements, creating a more comedic and optimistic monster movie in the process. Wouldn’t you rather have your sequels give you something new? Released, dismissed, and largely forgotten, Innocent Blood deserves a resurrection.

innocent-blood-poster

 

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