Genre: Vampires
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Country: United States
Availability: Amazon Instant Video
It seems like every time I watch Near Dark I have a completely different opinion about it. The first time I saw it, some 7 or so years ago, I actually turned it off about an hour in - I was bored and the movie was terrible. I gave it a second chance last year and I think my expectations were so incredibly low that I actually found myself enjoying the movie and walked away giving it four stars. Having recently purchased Near Dark I was looking forward to rewatching what I remembered to be a gritty, gory vampire movie that lacked all of the cheesy romantic melodrama that most vampire flicks drown themselves in. Before I go any further let it be said, here and now, that I have a terrible, terrible memory when it comes to movies. It's one of the reasons why I tend to rewatch them so many times because I genuinely don't remember much about them.
So imagine my surprise when my expectations were yet again thwarted and I found myself, mouth agape, at the absolute horrific dialog and over-the-top acting and ridiculous plot. Once again, like in so many movies that want to fit a romance into the story but don't want to dedicate the time to make it realistic, a boy and a girl meet and fall in love in a matter of hours. She turns him into a vampire and he doesn't want to be one. Then her crazy friends come into the picture and things go from bad to worse. And by worse I mean Bill Paxton. I don't doubt than sometime in the 90's Bill Paxton hired an acting coach and became somewhat competent at his craft, but in the 80's he had the power to single-handedly ruin an entire film just by being in it (see Aliens). Then add that dorky strange kid from Teen Witch, Joshua Miller, and you have downright unwatchable scenes throughout much of the movie.
Vampire movies tend to run in trends. Right now the trend seems to be smart, sleek, dangerous and gory. The trend in the 90's was sex, lust and partying. The 60's and 70's seemed to be gothic, mysterious, frightening and ... lesbianism. But the trend in the 80's? Awful. We had vampire comedies and rebellious, rowdy vampires. But what The Lost Boys got right with their rowdy vampires, Near Dark got all wrong. These vampires are not only rowdy, they're obnoxious. They're the loud frat boys at the party that you're constantly muttering "douchebag" to behind their backs. They aren't funny or sexy or charming. In fact most of them don't seem to shower. They're like a pack of wild dogs eating and humping their way across the land. And what's with them constantly losing track of time and then having to race against time to beat the impending sun rise? Seriously, after being alive for hundreds of years you'd think these guys would get their priorities straight and invest in some serious timepieces. And the ludicrous ending was just the icing on the roadkill.
One of the fun things to come from Near Dark (aside from my constant heckling) was that during the bar scene I noticed what eerie similarities there are between The Vampire Diaries vamps Damon and Stefan and the Near Dark vamps Severen and Caleb.
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