Vampire's Kiss

Saw Vampire's Kiss, a ridiculous Nicholas Cage movie.  It follows a strange, valley-accented, vapid, psychiatrist-visiting publisher (Nick Cage) who stars unravelling after he imagines a hookup with a vampire.  The film is billed as a dark comedy, so there's a lot of high strangeness about and a lot of surprising cruelty.  It's basically not a great movie, but there's a few amazing scenes which I quoted for a few days.

One of the hits, in this hit-and-miss movie, comes near the end, when Cage's vampire-obsession is reaching a fever pitch.  He tries to buy fangs, but can only afford the white plastic Halloween fangs.  Using these, he does a shot-for-shot imitation of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu in a night-club.  The image of him, pop-eyed and staring with a mouth full of plastic and slobber is hilarious.  Ditto for the following scenes of Cage accosting random (actual, non-actor) strangers on the street, gesticulating and slurring "I'm a vaam-piah!  Kill meee!"  There's a lot of Cage-inflected insanity which is worth the price of admission.

Alas, there are some misses as well.  Particularly, one of the ways he's unravelling manifests with him tormenting some poor secretary.  There's one or two scenes involving this which are fun, but I have too much sympathy for the secretary and a lot of it is just awful.  This poor woman should have quit after verbal abuse session number two at most.  Good lord.  A window into the hiring conditions of the 80s I guess.  All of that stuff is fairly unpleasant.

The film is hit and miss.  It's making fun of its own characters, so feel free to join in with an MST3K quip.  It picks up steam, but it starts off sort of a slog and even the frenetic ending is marred by the business with the secretary.  I want to either feel bad for the main character or laugh at him, but the film wants me to do both, and it's hard.

Random fun fact: Christian Bale allegedly based Patrick Bateman's weird manic/formal behavior on Nicholas Cage in this movie.