Country: United States
Genre: Action/Horror
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Year: 1987
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
From the opening moments of Near Dark, you know you’re in good hands. The first thing you hear is a buzzing, and you think, “It’s a fly,” and then you get the image - a closeup of a mosquito with it’s probiscus buried in an arm. A hand squashes the mosquito, leaving a smear of blood. “Bloodsucker,” remarks Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a hunky young man in a cowboy hat. The soundtrack rhythm and bass track is straight out of Country & Western music, but the synthesizer is eerie. Inside of a minute, director Kathryn Bigelow has nailed the tone of the picture.
Caleb is bored and restless, the way young people often are, and you can imagine that this tendency is only exacerbated by living in the rural Southwest. When he spies distraction in the form of lithesome cutie Mae (Jenny Wright), he makes a beeline for her. Caleb romances her in the clumsy way common to most young men, but Mae has other things on her mind, like immortality. It turns out that Mae likes Caleb, which is lucky for him.
You see, Mae belongs to a ragtag extended family of vampires, roaming Texas in a Winnebago. Caleb ends up bunking with the tribe for an extended sojourn.
Writer Eric Red makes a bold decision regarding the vampires. Many times vampires are depicted as being wealthy. After all, they have all eternity to invest and make money. In Near Dark, they’re itinerant drifters. It kind of makes sense. If vampires are nocturnal, how are going to make money if all of the business is done during the day? Then there’s the question of putting down roots. If they stay in one place, the locals are going to start to notice people missing.
Eric Red follows the logic all the way through and Near Dark ends up being just as much about outsiders and gypsies as it is about vampires, which enriches the tale considerably.
Near Dark also asks some very interesting questions, such as, if you were bitten by a vampire and you were turning into one, what would be going through your mind, especially if you didn’t know you had been bitten by a vampire? What would you think about being able to smell blood on someone’s bandage, and that the smell made you ravenously hungry? What if you got terribly sick if you didn’t feed? Most people are reluctant to take another life. How would you handle that? The way vampirism is presented in Near Dark, it’s almost like having an addiction.
Finally, writer Eric Red has gone to the trouble of creating indelible characters. It can be tough to write young people — witness all of the bland, boring kids on the WB — but Eric Red avoids that stumbling block. Caleb may be callow and horny, but he has a core of decency that gives him dimension. You know that someday, Caleb is going to grow into an estimable man. Mae may be a vampire, but she’s got the romantic soul of a dewy young woman. Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen) and Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), are the parental figures among the vampires. They make a convincing couple, generating palpable heat between them. Homer, the vampire man inside a boy’s body, is a fine creation, but actor Joshua Miller can’t quite pull off impersonating an adult. On the human side, Eric Red somehow manages to make the basic decency of Caleb’s father (Tim Thomerson) interesting. The weakest link is Severin (Bill Paxton). His nastiness seems put on rather than genuine. Alone out of the characters, he comes off as an artificial construct. The actors return the compliment of Eric Red’s full-blooded characterizations, bringing them vividly to life.
Director Kathryn Bigelow does her part, giving the nights a metallic sheen and the days a dusty red glow. She conveys the Southwest in bold, economic strokes with iconic images such as 18-wheelers, oil derricks, and windmills atop barns. The action sequences are lean and mean, oozing with style.
As good as it is, Near Dark isn’t perfect. There’s the bogus notion that vampirism can be cured with a blood transfusion. And given how careful the filmmakers have been to be ruthlessly logical throughout Near Dark, the ending doesn’t make as much sense as one would hope.
But these are minor imperfections. Near Dark is one of the best and most original vampire movies ever made.
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