"Innocent Blood" was actually quite a pleasant surprise. To be honest, I had to fight the urge to burst out laughing at two in the morning while my parents were sleeping. And the best part is, I wasn't laughing at the movie, but *with* it.
Quick debrief: this is a 1992 horror-comedy directed by John Landis. It follows a vampire named Mary who is dealing with some serious guilt over her lifestyle, so she decides to only hunt and feed on criminals. On top of that, Mary lives by two specific rules:
1) Never play with your food. In practice, this means no sex or socializing with the victims.
2) Always finish your meal. There’s a scene where she explains this off-screen—a woman drinks the blood of a mobster, then pulls a small derringer out of her fashionable handbag and puts two bullets straight into his head. Talk about following the rules!
Alas, circumstances don't allow Mary to apply that second rule to a mob boss, who wakes up confused and angry in the morgue, having no idea what happened to him. Meanwhile, Mary teams up with a young cop who spent three years working undercover in the mafia. Hillarity ensues.
The film is a cocktail of crime, horror, and comedy. If I didn't know the plot and hadn't seen the prologue (which, by the way, features a naked woman—ah, those classic American B-movie tropes where actresses have zero inhibitions about stripping on screen!), I would have thought this was just your run-of-the-mill mob flick. That is, until the woman—who clearly wants to hook up with one of the mobsters (the one who just lost his head to a derringer)—screams in his car, her eyes turn into red traffic lights, and she proceeds to bite FUKKEN HALF OF HIS FACE OFF. By the way, Sinatra is playing in the background with lyrics along the lines of "you put me under Your spell." Heh, nice touch that one.
To me, "Innocent Blood" was far better than Underworld. Sure, Underworld has a decent concept, but it doesn't really lean into it, leaving it with nothing but a pretentious style. This movie might not be spectacular, but it is funny and quite successful at achieving what we sci-fi freaks call "suspension of disbelief." The film starts off totally normal, the characters react naturally to the chaos, and Mary's vampire powers are presented in a relatively understated way. I mean, hell, there's a scene where she jumps from a FUKKEN church tower onto a cop's car and dents the roof, but we don't watch her jump in slow-motion like Kate Backinsale accompanied by an ultra-intense techno soundtrack; instead, we see the cop in the car screaming about what on earth is happening.
I'm not sure how to best convey how much I enjoyed this. I'll just mention two things, and please don't get mad if I spoil the film by quoting exact scenes!
The first thing I loved was the take on vampires. In Resident Evil, about ten main characters spend their entire lives acting like they're living under a glass dome because none of them realize their opponents are hellish zombies that can't be stopped by just a couple of shots to the body. In this film, it takes the young cop about ten minutes to figure out what the deal is. While talking to the coroner examining the body of the mobster who is about to become undead, the officer comments on why there's no blood around the guy.
Coroner: "Look, considering the first corpse we found was the same way, and seeing as this guy has no blood at all and has a FUKKEN bite on his FUKKEN neck, one could probably guess what happened here."
Officer: "And? What happened?"
Coroner: "Look, I wouldn't dare say something like that out loud."
Officer: "Aha! I get it."
And so it goes. Later, the guy unhesitatingly turns his car toward a motel when the woman says, "Look, it's almost morning and we need to find somewhere dark to hide." The guy—which is something I felt was totally missing in Underworld—reacts to the vampire in a way that feels completely believable. He calls her a monster without hesitation and sarcastically tells her she looks dehydrated and probably needs a drink. When the woman charms his colleague, the officer mutters under his breath, "Look how she's tearing into him!" The guy remains genuinely nervous around her. There's a scene where they sit on a loveseat—she's at one end, practically naked, and he's at the other, fully clothed. He smokes cigarette after cigarette, and when she shyly says, "But you don't have to be afraid of me! I won't hurt you!" he simply replies, "Yes, that's nice, but just stay the fuck away from me."
On the flip side, the mafia boss clearly hasn't heard a word about vampires, which actually made his character much easier to swallow. Because he doesn't know what he is, the scenes where he discovers his supernatural abilities end up being totally bizarre and hilarious. You have this guy rummaging through a dresser with a bottle in hand, shouting, "I need a drink! Someone give me something to drink!" Later, he's sucking on a raw slab of meat and sleeping during the day in a walk-in freezer using a deli platter as a pillow.
Also, related to that, > doesn't suffer from the same issues seen in > or >: he doesn't try to rationalize vampires with light allergies, mutating viruses, or whatever else. A vampire is just a vampire, period: drinking blood, super strength, regeneration, the whole nine yards. What those powers actually are or where they come from remains a mystery.
Another thing I loved was the concept of the female vampire. She isn't some "cool" girl. She isn't some "hot babe." She’s this tiny, slender woman with a heavy foreign accent who acts incredibly timid and shy. Yet, she possesses this massive charisma that makes it impossible for anyone to resist her despite her bashfulness. At the start of the movie, she starts flirting with a cop, unaware that he's working undercover. They chat for a bit, and she thinks to herself, "He looked perfect. He looked like he tasted perfect... but he had such sad eyes," and lets him go. But then, out of nowhere, another mobster nearly runs her over at a crosswalk. Initially annoyed, she slams her purse against his car:
Mobster : "Hey, watch it! What are you doing to my car? Huh? Wanna piece of me? Ha? Ha? Ha?"
Female Vampire: "You could really pay more attention when people are crossing the street."
Mobster: "And I could beat you up a little, you know!"
"Now, this one was truly perfect."
Suddenly, she completely shifts her persona and begins speaking shyly:
"Oh, you know, I'm just totally new to this city. I'm actually a foreigner, and I was so terrified when the car almost hit me at the crossing. Especially because the driver was so... *large*."
The mobster's ego immediately inflates by three sizes, and he tries to charm her. This leads to a scene of him losing his mind in the car, followed later by someone using a magnifying glass on him. Heh, there goes your libido, macho man!
And she maintains this "Please sir! I'm just a poor foreign girl with a funny accent, sir!" vibe for practically the entire film! When she and the cop try to get into a nightclub, the bouncer starts messing with the lock, threatening to deny them entry. She walks up, rips the > lock and the entire door frame right off, and just gives a shy little smile before walking into the bar. The cop is the only one allowed to follow her inside. Right before getting into the main crime boss's car, the guy tells her things like, "I'm the king of this city! I could kill you just by snapping my fingers! HAHA, I clean my teeth for breakfast with girls like you!" To which the woman says off-screen, in that sweet, timid voice with a French accent: "I should have turned away then... But he was so annoying," as she climbs into the boss's limo while all the thugs around her laugh arrogantly.
MASTERPIECE! A MASTERPIECE OF A FILM!
