Vampire’s Kiss is an American dark comedy film released in 1989. It was written by Joseph Minion, who also penned Martin Scorsese’s darkly humorous After Hours, and stars actors Nicolas Cage, Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Ashley.
The title might make the viewer expect a traditional vampire story, but Vampire’s Kiss is not that kind of movie. It is the story of Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage), a driven yuppie literary agent, who is slowly but inexorably going insane.
Loew plays the consummate businessman by day, and club hops by night, with little in his life of any importance but one night stands and the pursuit of money and prestige.
As the film opens, Loew tells his therapist (Ashley), whom he sees frequently, about his latest sexual conquest. During these sessions at the psychiatrist’s office, the watcher is first introduced to Loew’s declining mental health through a series of increasingly bizarre rants that eventually begin to scare even his psychiatrist.
Early in Vampire’s Kiss, Loew meets Rachel (Jennifer Beals) at a night club, and takes her home. It is never made clear whether the encounter with Rachel is real or solely a figment of Loew’s deranged mind, but she pins him down, reveals vampiric fangs, and “feeds” on him. At home, Loew’s fits of rage gradually reduce his apartment to shambles. Throughout the movie the apartment’s decline mirrors the protagonist’s own increasingly chaotic mental state. In one scene, perhaps the film’s most infamous, Loew catches and eats a cockroach in his apartment. Soon thererafter, Loew begins to believe that he is changing into a vampire. He stares into a bathroom mirror and fails to see his reflection; he wears dark sunglasses during the day; and, when his “fangs” fail to develop, he purchases a pair of cheap plastic vampire teeth and uses them to attack a woman at a nightclub. All the while, his sexy vampire girlfriend, Rachel (possibly) visits him nightly to feed on his blood.
A subplot concerns a secretary working at Loew’s office, Alva Restrepo (Maria Conchita Alonso). Loew torments her by forcing her to search through an enormous file for a 1963 contract. When she fails to find the contract, he at first browbeats and humiliates her, then visits her home when she calls in sick to avoid him, and finally attacks and (possibly) rapes her. The movie spends some time showing a small slice of the lives of the working poor immigrant through Alva’s character.
At the film’s conclusion, Loew is so far gone he is one of New York City’s walking crazies; wandering the streets in a blood-spattered business suit, talking to himself, and using his now disastrous apartment as a vampire’s cave where he hides from the sun by crawling under an upturned sofa. He may have murdered someone the night before, and he may have raped his secretary: although he mentions both “achievements” to his therapist, who isn’t really present, Loew has by this time become so deranged that it’s difficult for the viewer to separate fantasy from reality. Alva, however, also believes she’s been raped, and the film ends with Loew’s fitting yet curiously pitiful death at the hands of her brother.
The Twins Effect, also known as The Vampire Effect in the United States, is a 2003 Hong Kong film directed by Dante Lam. The movie was derived from the famous Cantopop duo, Twins, starring both Gillian Chung and Charlene Choi, and co-starring actors Edison Chen and Ekin Cheng, with a special guest appearance by Jackie Chan.
