The opening three iconic bass notes of Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead, with its lead singer stood in a gothic place behind bars and smoke billowing through the scene, should have made this film a fun watch. Instead, after this rather iconic opening scene, we have a movie that was rather a slog to get through.

As above, the opening credits are a great starter and really does make you excited to see what’s ahead. This quickly deflates when the editing of Bowie and DeNeuve in a taxi going home is cut very bizarrely with the music. Instead of the music playing whilst showing both the club and our two characters, the music promptly stops when showing them in the car, and starts playing abruptly again once the club is showing. All this is interspersed with monkeys in a similar cage to Bauhaus, becoming quite aggressive. It’s all very jarring.

After a taxi ride and a prompt fondle with two extras that Miriam (DeNeuve) and John (Bowie) bring back to an apartment, this is when we discover that Miriam and John are…killers? If I hadn’t known the premise of them being vampires before watching, the locket with a knife that they pull out to kill people with would have made me think they were serial killers, not modern day vampires! However, I do find the ambivalence intriguing. Maybe if I hadn’t known I would have enjoyed this scene better. 

What follows next is around five minutes of flowing bedsheets and curtains and nothing really in particular to drive the plot. After this artsy compilation we find out that John (Bowie) is starting to age, which is unheard of for vampires and that Miriam has had past lovers who have had the same experience once she becomes bored of them. Bowie sees Dr Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) on the television discuss her findings in monkeys of decreasing aging process so naturally, he goes to see her. 

As Sarah of course doesn’t believe that someone can age that rapidly, she makes him wait in her office until he gets bored and leaves. It’s unknown how long he stays whilst there’s a too long scene of her and her colleagues discussing why the monkeys she’s working on have become aggressive, but he ages a lot. The effects of Bowie’s aging are fantastic and I am surprised that this isn’t talked of more, especially for the standard of 1983. She comes back and sees the decrepit Bowie leaving, she realises she’s made a mistake and tries to chase after him.

Before Bowie succumbs to old age, he is visited by a young girl called Alice, who Miriam is going to make her next lover (hopefully when she comes of age) when John dies. In a fit of jealousy over knowing that he is being replaced, he kills her. John now becomes so old that he cannot do anything and so Miriam picks him up and puts him in a coffin, in a room full of other coffins. And yes, this is the last time that Bowie makes an appearance on our screen. As a Bowie mega fan, the lack of Bowie is appalling to me!!

Now with her lover and new lover dead, Maureen is alone. Sarah visits the house wanting to speak to John and Miriam says he has gone to Switzerland, presumably to imply that he has gone for assisted suicide to take Sarah off the scent. Sarah and Miriam become fast friends. Over the course of time, Sarah and Miriam begin a sexual tryst (a quite graphic one too for same sex relationships in the early eighties!) where Miriam bites Sarah on the arm.

Sarah starts to not be able to eat normal food and her body acts as if it is fighting off an extreme infection. Her colleagues and partner take a sample of blood and find that the ‘infection’ has spread and that she doesn’t have much time left before it takes over her. She ends up at Miriam’s again and finally succumbs to becoming a vampire. I did enjoy Susan Sarandon’s acting of her becoming a vampire, it gave a real unnerving sense of her death from a disease she cannot fight off. She kills her partner. One thing this did right is the uncomfortable feeling I had when Sarandon had killed her partner. She walks into the room where Miriam is with blood all down her looking very content, quite terrifying!

Next is a scene I’m still very confused on, Sarah is understandably miffed that she is now part of the undead clan. In blind anger she goes to stab Miriam with the locket, however it’s actually Miriam that’s got the knife and stabbed Sarah. What makes this confusing is the way it’s edited, I still don’t really know how it happened or what happened. Miriam carries Sarah upstairs to put her in a coffin, but the skeletons of her past (quite literally) awake and run after her in the house. She falls down the stairs and ages extremely until she is a skeleton. A pretty mediocre death for the ‘villain’ of the story.

We find out in the last scene that Sarah lived and is now in Paris, having taken on a lover in the same way Miriam did.

While I applaud this film’s attempt at an artsy gothic style, I feel it should have started this from the outset, rather than tempt us with Bauhaus and a funky club. The tonal shift was too great for me to enjoy. I have issues with the editing and the addition of certain things, including the monkeys, because there is no pay off to why the monkeys are so important. The acting and special effects are the main good points and I cannot fault any of the three main people, they added to the film’s gothicness, even if editing did fail them. A crime I cannot forgive though is the lack of Bowie! The worst crime of all though is Sarandon’s hair! 

Talking to my partner who watched this with me he pointed out a couple of things. The film comes across as trying to be edgy and artsy, but the strange editing lets it down. It shouldn’t have tried to be so clever. He also said that the cinematography was very similar to Michael Mann.

Overall I’d give this film a 2 1/2 out of five, I’ll not reach for this flick again unless it was on the television and there was nothing better on.