Nobody chews scenery like Nicholas Cage when he decides to go ‘over-the-top.’ Strange non-sensical accents, lots of hand movement, head shaking, body convulsing, etc. are all par for the performance. With a fairly aggressive output of films over the past few years, some people are exhausted of Cage doing his thing and the abject nuttiness of Neil Labute‘s The Wicker Man remake may have been the breaking point. (And we have The Bad Lieutenant remake on the horizon which looks like Cage is attempting to set the all time scenery chewing performance in mockery or homage of Harvey Keitel!)
Yet, I offer this overlooked gem of a film, Vampire’s Kiss as the one of the best applications of Crazy-Cage. Particularly because watching him play an wealthy, effete New York literary agent/broker in the middle of a pretty extreme melt-down, it plays very much like the precursor to American Psycho. I would like to believe that either Christian Bale or Mary Harron caught Vampire’s Kiss somewhere in the late 1980s when it was (unbelievably) marked like a farcical romantic comedy. Few saw the film at that time, but over the years it has built a modest cult following. In the days of True Blood and Twilight, it is the antidote to the romanticist notion of the Vampire.
Cage’s character, Peter Leow, early on in the film while picking up a lady (a young and gorgeous Kasi Lemmons, now a film director) in a bar takes his one-night stand back to his place where a large bat has made it into the apartment. After successfully fending it off (and still scoring the gal), he is on to the next conquest, where in Jennifer Beals (playing against her Flashdance fame) literally vamps it up as a bloodsucking femme fatale that bites him on the neck. Over the next hour and change, you see Loew slowly disintegrate into a vampire state, yet the film is pretty clear that it is all in his head. While he spirals downward, sleeping under his overturned couch and devolving into Max Schreck mannerisms (made all the more comical with his dime-story plastic vampire teeth), he inexplicably takes the most passive aggressive behavior towards his secretary for whom he has tasked with finding an old contract for the firm. (The gag is that Leow goes ape-shit over all of this, when the actual client says ‘no rush.’)
Here is one of the best (excepting his his role as Sailor in Wild At Heart) uses of over-the-top Nicholas Cage, where still seething at his secretaries failure to produce the hard-copy of the contract from the archives, he vents out to his psychiastrist on the ABCs of filing documents. Like many a director, I’m sure, the poor shrink has no idea how to take the meek-to-explosive executive. The film is like that as well, you never really get a read on Loew, and this is actually to the service of the story and tone of the film, which, if it is in fact comedy (I laughed out loud several times), it is of the twisted, dark variety. Yet Vampire’s Kiss is quite compelling and entertaining – the central performance is perhaps the distillation and ultimate example of the prolific actors’ method of madness.
Did I mention he eats a live cockroach?
hmm… I recall Cage having his moments but that film itself was a mess. I last saw it at age 19 or so when it was new on VHS, so… perhaps I should revisit it with a *cough* wiser eye.
Watch it again, Michael, wow, its a surprisingly original piece of work that, for me, was pretty darn good at what it did, and doesn’t hold back (in all the right ways).
Not too many films like this break out the “C”-word so brutally and casually. The sub-plot with Maria Conchita Alonso is amazing, and in hindsight, as much as it evokes AMERICAN PSYCHO and with all the Nosferatu references, it really does play A LOT like THE BAD LIEUTENANT too….which should make for some symmetry when Herzog’s film comes out.
I’m allergic to Nicolas Cage. What the hell accent is he trying to do?
Accent is “Cage-ish” – his own brand.
See also, Forest Whitacker in A LITTLE TRIP TO HEAVEN.
That was a glorious scene…Best alphabet recitation ever.
Glancing at the director’s IMDB credits, it doesn’t look like he did another feature film after this one (mostly TV work). I’m now terribly curious to see this.
Take the plunge Bob, it’s well worth the effort. I love how the film delights in off-putting its audience constantly, yet achieving its own hypnotic rhythm nonetheless. This is a good piece of work.
From the Imdb’s TRIVIA section of Vampire’s Kiss on Nic Cage’s accent in the film:
“Peter’s strange accent is supposed to be a fake accent used by the character because he thinks he sounds more “elegant” and “smarter” (hence the literary agent job). The accent comes and goes throughout the movie and is more prominent when trying to impress people, and less in scenes with people like the psychiatrist.”
Heh. Sounds like a retcon to me because Nic Cage can’t hold an accent. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt – does sound like it’d make sense for the character, just based on what you’ve said.
Wow, can we retire that phrase, retcon. I’m exasperated with its overuse around here lately.
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was overused here in particular (maybe because I usually tired out reading the comment threads somewhere around the 20-comment mark). It’s a holdover from old BtVS boards for me…
Another one: Over The Top
It’s used all the time and lost all meaning.
To truly go “over the top” is a goal that many aspire too but few succeed.
Highly appropriate in a thread on Nic Cage though!!!
I recommend replacing over the top with nic cage-esque.
cage-o-licious.