Donald P. Borchers discusses the challenges of first casting and then producing Grace Jones in "VAMP" (1986).
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• Grace Jones in "Vamp" ...
Two college students, Keith (Chris Makepeace) and AJ (Robert Rusler), want to hire a stripper to buy their way into a campus fraternity. They need wheels and they borrow a Cadillac from lonely rich student Duncan (Gedde Watanabe), who insists on coming with them to scope out strip clubs in a nearby city.
The three boys head off, and come across a rather sordidly dark neighborhood. After a run in with a nasty street gang, led by albino thug Snow (Billy Drago), they find themselves at the After Dark Club in a shady part of town, and after being impressed by a surreally artistic stripper, Katrina, the trouble begins when AJ gets a personal encounter with the fetching dancer. AJ visits her dressing room to convince her to come strip for their college party. Katrina (Grace Jones) seduces AJ, then pins him down, killing him with a fatal bite to the neck.
Keith becomes concerned at his friend’s delay and gets help from a waitress, Amaretto (Dedee Pfeiffer), who says she knows him. They search the neighborhood, and Keith is separated from her while trying to escape from both a psychotic albino street gang, as well as from vampires throughout the area. While hiding in a dumpster, he finds AJ's discarded body, but when he calls the cops and returns to the club to accuse the owners, the vampires have preempted him by bringing AJ back to the club as undead. AJ confesses to Keith that he's now a vampire, and after realizing that Keith will not kill him and is willing to die for him, AJ stakes himself with a piece of broken furniture.
Keith, Amaretto, and Duncan flee the club, but find their escape hampered not only by countless members of the undead, but also by Snow and his fellow gang members.After their car is rammed by vehicles driven by vampires. After escaping, they realize that Duncan has been turned to a vampire, and they abandon him in a burning car. The pair attempt to escape through the sewers, as Amaretto breaks down and tells Keith that her real name is Allison, and she knows AJ from a game of spin the bottle when they were classmates in fifth grade. While they flee through the sewers, they discover and burn a nest of vampires, but Allison is grabbed and held hostage by Katrina. After an arrow to the face and being staked in the chest with a pipe fail to stop Katrina, Keith kills her by opening a grating, allowing the sunlight to destroy her. Before they can escape to the surface, they are trapped by Vlad (Brad Logan), Katrina's vampire consort, until Vlad is staked from behind by a revived AJ, who sheepishly notes that the stake he tried to kill himself with turned out to be formica.
As Keith and Allison climb to the surface daylight, AJ remains in the sewers calling out to him his ideas to go to night school, or work a job on a graveyard shift.
A 1986 American black comedy horror film directed by Richard Wenk, co-written by Wenk and Donald P. Borchers, and helping out that tenor of mischievously neurotic air is Jonathan Elias' spiraling, steamy music score.
Filming began on January 28, 1986, the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Elliot Davis stylishly floods the seedy locations with magenta and green lighting for ample effect, and the singular angle photography gaudily displays a sinisterly lingering and nocturnal atmosphere.
Grace Jones gets top billing, despite no dialogue and little screen time. Her naturally imposing dominance comes from her luridly effective physical actions and appearance. Especially those eyes!
The bizarre human-like chair Grace Jones performs her striptease on was made from a body cast of her then-boyfriend Dolph Lundgren, then painted by late grafitti artist Keith Haring. Grace Jones' body paint in the dance sequence was also done by her dear friend Keith Haring.
Billy Drago actually has very dark hair. He bleached his hair white, including his eyebrows, in order to portray the albino gang leader, Snow.
But the actor who steals the show is the late, great Sandy Baron as Vic the seedy nightclub owner. You've definitely seen his mug all over TV in minor roles that always stole the show (on Seinfeld he was the cranky retiree who gave Jerry the "astronaut pen"). He definitely steals the show in "Vamp" as the lovably sinister old timer who just wants to get to Vegas, even if it means selling his soul to a clan of bloodthirsty vampires. Sandy even has a few dramatic monologues which add depth to this otherwise silly romp. When he proselytizes about his "service" of ridding society of the dregs, the wanderers and the losers, and he punctuates it with a toothy Cheshire-cat grin, it sends a chill right down your spine.
During the fraternity fake hanging scene at the beginning, the "executioner" is lip-synching a speech from a cassette tape. The voice of the speech was provided by Christopher Plummer.
9 сен 2024
