Vamp

I'm still in an eighties kind of mood left over from Waxwork, so I decided to pop in my other favorite vampire movie from that time- Grace Jones's Vamp.

A trio of college boys travels into the big bad city to find a stripper for their fraternity initiation. They choose The After Dark Club, a stripper bar run by vampires, with the vampire queen Katrina, played by Grace Jones, as their main attraction.

It's a fun movie, where the director was having a lot of visual fun. The early scenes at the college campus are filmed in a realistic style, then when the trio get to the big bad city, their car is sideswiped into a spin; when they get out- "not in Kansas anymore"- the color palate changes, lots of greens and pinks, like an Argento or Bava movie.

The guys are played by Robert Rusler, Chris Makepeace and

Gedde Watanabe, all actors who seemed to have peaked in the eighties. Dedee Pfeiffer plays a waitress at the club who knows Rusler's and Makepeace's characters but plays coy as to how she knows them. She's fun thanks to her eighties hair and zebra pattern jacket...so, so very eighties.

Of course, the star of the show is Grace Jones- with NO dialogue at all, because she talks with her eyes and her body. The absence of dialog adds to the character, giving her an aura of mystery- compounded by little touches the director threw in- like an Egyptian sarcophagus with Jones' face carved on the lid.