Queen of the Damned

"Queen of the Damned," the latest adaptation of Anne Rice's wildly popular series of vampire novels, will be Aaliyah's last film. Someone overloaded the small plane she and her crew were flying back from a video shoot in the Bahamas last fall, and the plane crashed and took the lives of all those in it.

It's especially tragic considering that "Queen of the Damned" shows us a side of Aaliyah we hadn't seen before. Previously, she had sung pretty, slinky songs in a light soprano, and her movie roles had been much the same: pleasant and memorable, but hardly stirring. As Akasha, the title character and the incarnation of evil among vampires, however, she truly bares her fangs. She bites off her lines with unceasing rage, she works her hips with such suppleness and ferocity as to seem half-serpent, her eyes gleam with the rapacious hunger that stops the breath of a theater full of moviegoers, and she can set people on fire whenever she wants.

It's quite an impressive performance, something to make horror cinephiles lament her passing. Too bad it had to come in what is otherwise an amazingly lame movie.

Although Akasha is the mother of all vampires, dating back to ancient Egyptian times, adapters Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni pay no respect to the elders and concentrate instead on relative newcomer Lestat (Stuart Townsend), who was an eighteenth-century French nobleman before he got sucked into vampiring. It seems Lestat isn't down with the vampire code of blood-sucking anonymity, and rather than incrementally push out the boundaries of the code, he decides to become a rock star. This draws the attention of Jesse (Marguerite Moreau), a black-arts enthusiast who decides to keep putting herself in Lestat's way until she can get the insider's perspective on the undead.

Akasha, unfortunately, was turned to living stone after a similar spree of vampiric self-promotion long ago. Lestat's devil music proves just the siren song to wake the ancient Akasha, who realizes that age ain't nothing but a number between two like-minded vampires. She finds her one in a million and invites him to join her in ruling the world and killing all humans who stand in their way, or anywhere near them, really. Lestat finds himself ambivalent about the "killing all humans" plan, especially since he sort of likes Jesse, and the stage is set for a final showdown between the tremendously powerful Akasha and a bunch of player-haters.

Townsend sneers and swaggers just as we would expect a multi-platinum rock star vampire to do, and he's got the heroin/undead pallor and snarky good looks too. However, Townsend just doesn't project the grotesque yet inspiring self-confidence and irresistible charisma that one suspects such a beast would have. This is unfortunate, since most of the screenplay is devoted to an absurdly lengthy and nearly eventless exposition concerning Lestat; the parts with Akasha, though they are by far the coolest, are short and shoehorned in at the end of the film.

In addition, only Akasha generates any great sexual tension, just because she's such an irresistible force; thus a mitigating pleasure of many mediocre vampire films is lost to us. Director Michael Rymer has apparently decided that vampire fights should be poorly edited to reflect the combatants' undead status, so they don't register at all. Besides filming the entire thing in fluorescent-aided PallorVision, Rymer doesn't have any visual ideas, either; you'd think all that blood shed in this film couldn't possibly be so boring, but you'd be wrong.

So "Queen of the Damned" is a vampire movie that, except for Aaliyah, is not scary, sexy, violent or interesting. Her death at 22 feels even more tragic after you watch this film. Playing an undead character posthumously, Aaliyah proves in this film that she could have become a queen of the silver screen; too bad she had to prove it in such a damned awful movie.

WORDPLAYA NO MORE

When I started the tradition of including gratuitous Aaliyah puns in movies which starred the young singer, I had no idea the tradition was going to be so short-lived. She was one of the few wildly popular R&B singers whose music I generally enjoyed, and as this film proves, she was getting to be a nice presence on camera, too. So it is with great sadness and regret that I say to you now: Check out the gratuitous Aaliyah puns. RIP.

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