1995's HBO Stars of Tomorrow Suck Your Blood

Kathleen (Lili Taylor): What's gonna happen to me?
Peina (Christopher Walken): Read the books. Sartre, Beckett. Who do you think they're talking about? You think they're works of fiction?

Film Experience is hosting a vampire blog-a-thon in honor of Halloween, so I'm going to give a round up of links to articles online about my favorite vampire movie: The Addiction, directed by Abel Ferrara and written by Nicholas St. John. The Addiction follows Kathleen, an NYU grad student prowling the East Village and Bobst Library (with its infamously hypnotizing floors) in search of the meaning of life when she's turned into a vampire by Annabella Sciorra. Kathleen wants to know what she's become, and the result is a metaphysical, ontological, philosophical and theological exploration into the deepest recesses of existence and evil. The superb supporting cast includes Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, and a great Kathryn Erbe (she from "Law and Order: Criminal Intent") and the ending manages to do my other favorite Ferrara, Ms. 45, one better. The two films stand as a pair, both with violated heroines in trouble with language. Thana can't speak at all, where Kathleen is afflicted with the kind of logorrhea particular to doctoral candidates. She can't stop trying to explain the unexplainable; much like Hamlet, she's burdened by her self-awareness. As she puts it, "To face what we are in the end, we stand before the light and our true nature is revealed. Self-revelation is annihilation of self."

Caryn James wrote in her New York Times review said that "the film questions how people resist evil, embodied by the vampires."

Deep Focus says: "Abel Ferrara is on the record saying that he originally thought making a vampire movie was "a stupid idea." Presumably, then, the idea came from his longtime coconspirator, screenwriter Nicholas St. John. It's a good decision..."

Desson Howe at the Washington Post called it "macabre and provocative, yet wonderfully restrained."

Slant Magazine: "[Taylor] is a foot soldier, helping to build an army with other HBO Stars of Tomorrow (among them Edie Falco) to preserve the integrity of a Big Apple that had more personality when it was a little more rotten."

Back in February (of 2006? probably not), Minneapolis residents were treated to the opportunity to view a double feature of The Addiction with I Shot Andy Warhol. That's some intertextuality, as they say at NYU.

Emmanuel Levy thinks that the dialogue is unintentionally campy.

And that's it, really. There were a few capsule reviews (1-2 paragraphs) that weren't reallly worth mentioning, but there's a real dearth of real critical writing on this, my favorite vampire film and favorite Abel Ferrara film. Perhaps it's because it's not out on DVD. Anybody want to start a letter-writing campaign?

This post is part of the Vampire Blog-a-Thon.

(By the way, this links thing is kind of hard. I have to give props to David Hudson at GreenCine Daily for doing this so well every single day.)

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1995's HBO Stars of Tomorrow Suck Your Blood

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