| SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE BLUNTREVIEW.COM added 01.02.01 HOLLYWOODBITCHSLAP.COM added 01.02.01 Clever But Slight | Ernest Hardy - added 26.01.01 The problem with Shadow of the Vampire is that director E. Elias Merhige insists on playing it straight while the very concept (not to mention some of the casting choices) keeps trying to shatter that staid approach, threatening at every turn to push the film into a realm that is somewhere between camp and tongue-in-cheek farce. If only that had happened. There are moments that are deliciously funny, almost giggle-inducing in their lunacy. But they're neither sustained nor fully exploited. Instead, the film's central conceit remains its only conceit, and the film teeters weakly for most of its running time, in dire need of an injection of ideas that will lift it beyond the realm of film-geek cleverness. The premise of the movie is this: What if F.W. Murnau, in his zest for realism, had cast a real vampire in his classic movie, Nosferatu, without telling anyone else in the cast or crew what he'd done? And what happens when bodies start to pile up, when the creepy leading man, a "method actor," makes increasingly outrageous demands that Murnau, to the bafflement of his production company, can't seem to turn down? While Willem Dafoe (as Shreck, the "actor" hired by Murnau) and John Malkovich have fantastic screen chemistry and are clearly enjoying themselves, the very slightness of the film becomes wearisome after a while. It does absolutely nothing to build upon or stretch that single notion. Some clever and amusing satiric digs at the whole process of making films, and the self-importance it engenders, hit their mark with crisp precision (the vampire holding out for close-ups; Murnau spouting the line, "I'm loathe to admit it, but the writer is necessary," in an effort to keep Shreck from feeding on him), but the momentum never builds from those bits. Merhige keeps trying to pull the film back from the campy/darkly humorous place it wants to naturally go - on the strength of Dafoe's line-readings, with the casting of Udo Kier and British cult figure Eddie Izzard in key roles - and return it to some nondescript, shapeless place that's neither really frightening nor really amusing; it's not really much of anything. Dafoe completely immerses himself in the part - his make-up alone is fantastic - and we watch him play the part with such seamless skill that one thought keeps running in mind: If only this movie were rich enough, strong enough to be worthy of this performance. NITRATEONLINE.COM added 25.01.01 Thriller, 01:24 minutes, Rated R Willem Dafoe is deliciously grotesque as Max Shreck, the real-life actor who played a blood-sucking vampire in the 1922 German film “Nosferatu.” Too bad the rest of the film, which draws parallels between vampires and filmmakers, is so poorly shaped and lacking in energy and momentum. With John Malkovich as megalomaniac German director F.W. Murnau, Eddie Izzard and Catherine McCormack as ham actors and Udo Kier as the producer. -- E. Guthmann, SF Chronicle (added 13.01.01) SPLICED ONLINE added 06.01.01 IGN.COM added 3.1.01 FILMCRITIC.COM added 3.1.01 MR SHOWBIZ 30.12.00 HOLLYWOODBITCHSLAP.COM added 12.12.00 The official SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE site |
