Three Films Make A Post: Lust for Blood.

Vampyres (2015): I didn’t hate Víctor Matellano’s remake of José Ramón Larraz’s genre-defining lesbian vampire movie as much as I expected, so put that down as a win. Perhaps Larraz’s involvement with the screenplay (however much here was actually done by him) helped? It’s not as if this were actually better or even vaguely as good as the original: the film is certainly slow going even in comparison with a film from the 70s, the acting’s often ropey in a pretty irritating manner, and even the staging can seem somewhat amateurish for about half of the film. The other half does from time to time reach moments of the kind of intense aestheticization (bordering on the fetishist) of blood and pain that at the very least explains why this remake exists on an artistic level, and while it never comes together as the original did, it does do a bit more than just try to exploit old exploitation fans like me.

The Last Days of American Crime (2020): This abomination financed by Netflix, on the other hand, deserves all the kicks anyone can get in. It’s terrible from start to finish, beginning with the drab, boring and bland design of its near future and certainly not ending with a running time of astonishing 150 minutes that any sane production had cut down to about a hundred in the script stage, while adding something like a throughline to the plot that’s certainly not to be found in the 150 minutes I suffered through. Also generally terrible – as well as drab, boring and bland – is the acting, Edgar Ramírez mumbling and not-emoting through the movie like a sleepwalker, and most everyone else following suite.

As is all too typical for something directed by Olivier Megaton, the explosiveness strictly stays in the director’s name, while the on-screen action has a perfunctory (and yes, drab, boring and bland) quality to it that’s pretty astonishing in what’s supposed to be a professional production made by a man who supposedly specializes in the loud and the dumb. I could go on, but I’ve already wasted 150 minutes of my life on this thing.

The Last Wave (1977): While some of the ways Peter Weir’s classic uses Australian Aboriginal spirituality, setting it against the Western love for rationality arts and philosophy tend to posit (while the Western world acts perfectly irrational), are probably deemed “problematic” right now (though I am too old to be quite as ideologically righteous, I’m never perfectly happy with anything using this particular dichotomy and pitting the spiritually wise brown people against the coldly logical white ones who haven’t a clue myself), it is really hard to argue with the conviction and subtlety Weir uses the reinforce his theme. Nor do I know many other films quite as great at portraying reality slowly dissolving into states of the dreamlike and the supernatural, nor many that structurally use the “as above, so below” dictum with quite so much intelligence.


On a more pedestrian level, one also can’t help but admire any director able to get a really great performance out of Richard Chamberlain in this stage of his career as Weir does here.