Vamp (1986)

Official trailer

Vamp deserves its 5.5 as a stylish, uneven eighties horror comedy that’s worth seeing almost entirely for one unforgettable element, Grace Jones as a vampire stripper who never speaks a word and dominates every frame she occupies. The film around her is a slight, familiar college-comedy-meets-horror affair, two frat pledges venturing into a seedy strip club to hire a dancer and discovering the place is run by vampires.

It’s minor and dated and not especially good, but it has a strong visual sensibility, real cult charm, and a Grace Jones performance so magnetic that it lifts the film into something memorable.

I go back and forth on Vamp. Whenever Grace Jones walks into frame I sit up, and whenever the film cuts back to the frat boys I start wondering what’s in the fridge. Its reputation rests on style and on that singular central presence instead of on its story. Judged as a complete film it’s mediocre. Judged as a delivery system for Grace Jones and a neon-soaked eighties look, it has real, if limited, appeal.

Grace Jones as the Vampire

Grace Jones plays Katrina, the vampire queen who rules the strip club, and her performance is the reason the film endures. Jones, already an icon of art-pop strangeness, brings an otherworldly physical presence to the role, and the film’s smartest decision is to give her no dialogue at all.

She communicates entirely through movement, posture, and predatory stillness, and the silence makes her more alien and more threatening. She’s less a character than a force, a being of pure exotic menace.

Her centerpiece is an extended performance art striptease, choreographed and costumed in elaborate body paint and wire sculpture, and I think it’s the best thing in any eighties vampire movie. Jones turns the dance into something ritualistic and threatening, a display of power, and I find it more unnerving than anything the makeup department throws at me.

The Neon Style

The film’s other real asset is its look. Director Richard Wenk shoots the seedy underworld of the strip club and the surrounding streets in a strong palette of saturated neon, lurid pinks and greens and purples that give the film a distinctive eighties comic-book quality. The cinematography is accomplished, using color and light to create a heightened, unreal nightscape that’s more interesting than the story unfolding within it.

This visual flair lends the film a cult appeal beyond its modest content.

The neon aesthetic, the elaborate vampire makeup, and the stylized club setting create a world that’s fun to look at even when the plot is going nowhere. Wenk clearly had a strong visual sensibility and a limited script, and the film coasts on the former while the latter lets it down. The style is the substance here, and while that’s a thin foundation, it’s enough to give the film a memorable surface and a lasting niche following.

I’d happily watch Wenk’s neon streets with the sound off. The pinks and greens do more for the mood than any line of dialogue in the script.

The Weak Film Around It

Once you set aside Grace Jones and the neon, the film is thin.

The central story of the two college pledges is generic and the characters are forgettable, standard eighties comedy types going through familiar motions. The comedy is broad and frequently falls flat, the horror is mild, and the film’s attempts to balance the two tones are clumsy. Long stretches without Jones sag badly, and the film struggles to fill its runtime with anything absorbing.

The two pledges lose me. They’re so bland I couldn’t pick either one out of a lineup, and I’d have cut a good twenty minutes of their business to get back to the club sooner.

The film also suffers from a fundamental slightness. There’s no real theme, no ambition beyond delivering some laughs, some neon, and some Grace Jones, and even on those modest terms it only intermittently succeeds. It’s the kind of minor eighties genre film that’s survived almost entirely on the strength of one element, a cult object more than a good movie. Fans of eighties horror comedy and Grace Jones will find enough to enjoy. Anyone else will find a forgettable film with a few strong parts.

Is Vamp worth watching?

Vamp gets its 5.5 as a slight, stylish eighties horror comedy redeemed almost entirely by Grace Jones’s mesmerizing, wordless performance as a vampire stripper and by a strong neon visual sensibility. Jones is unforgettable, her body-paint striptease a high point of cult cinema, and the film’s saturated comic-book aesthetic gives it a memorable surface. It loses real points for a thin, generic story, forgettable characters, flat comedy, and long stretches that sag whenever its star is absent.

I land on 5.5 because I can’t go higher for a film that sags every time its star leaves the room, and I can’t go lower on anything with that body-paint dance in it. See it for Grace Jones and the neon, and bring something to do with your hands during the frat-boy scenes.

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