Queen Of The Damned Review

Let's see if I can get the basic story of "Queen Of The Damned" correct before talking about anything else.

We have one Vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend) who has spent the last 40 years sleeping in his crypt, apparently waiting for the right time to awaken and rejoin the planet.As my astute readers will point out, sleeping alone in a crypt for 40 years could get boring after a while, and sure enough, Lestat decides to bust a move and chooses now to become a rock star. Why rock, you ask? I don't know. Perhaps Lestat isn't happy hiding in the dark and sucking the blood of innocent people; he wants to be adored and to be out in the open, sucking the blood of innocent people.

While Lestat gets his wish and becomes the biggest thing since sliced bread, the rest of the vampire nation is pretty cheesed off. Stick with me now, because it gets a little creepy here. There's this girl Jesse (Marguerite Moreau) who works for a group that watches the underworld, but never gets involved. There is something in her past that makes her want to know the vampire world, and attracts her to Lestat. Then there is Queen Akasha (Aaliyah), who was the Queen of all vampires many years ago. She's been sleeping all this while too, and now awakened, she wants nothing but the blood of everyone, human and immortal alike.

Vampires around the world want to stop Lestat from telling all the humans about them, while Akasha wants Lestat for her new King, so the two of them can rid the world of everything. Jesse wants to become a vampire, and walk the Earth with Lestat forever.

Queen Of The Damned has one particularly annoying aspect - the special effects. Everytime the vampires do anything super-like, they literally leave a blurring effect behind them, and this gets on your nerves after a while, especially when the screen seems filled with blurring vampires doing... well, blurring things.

Most of the acting is mediocre. Aaliyah gives an impressive performance as Queen Akasha - slinking like a snake when she moves and hissing like one when she talks. The humans in the film, though, are ludicrously bad, and this includes Jesse, who comes across as dumb and witless.

But acting aside, the main problem with the movie is that it has no sense of flow or narrative. The characters are never really allowed to bloom. And so, when the final confrontation occurs, there is no sense of tension because we haven't been given time to care one way or another about either the human or the vampire world.

An important element of a horror film is the music, and on that count, the background scores are definitely well-conceived. While the music itself isn't bad, there simply is too much of it, and at the end of it all, I had a migraine the size of Asia.

This film is an adaptation of an Anne Rice novel ("The Vampire Chronicles"), but I cannot possibly tell you if this was faithful to Rice's novel or not, since the closest I've been to anything involving Rice is eating it out of a bowl. If you can ignore the somewhat schizophrenic and disjointed story, somewhere in those 100 minutes is an almost watchable movie. For all the vampires out there, this could well be a movie worth sitting through. Mere humans, on the other hand, are not losing much if they fail to catch this flick. Take a pledge if you must, but it is always best to let sleeping vampires lie.