Fangs baring! Eyes casting seductive glances! Rock 'n roll blaring! Blood dripping! If this is all you require from an evening's entertainment, "Queen of the Damned" is hands-down your best bet for sheer entertainment value. Anyone expecting anything more would have more fun impaling themselves on wooden stakes than sitting through this dreck.
"But is it really that bad?" you ask. Yes. "Queen," the follow-up to "Interview With the Vampire," is that bad and then some. Words cannot describe the sheer agony of the first hour and a half of this film. It becomes remotely watchable in its last half hour, but it's too little, too late.
Alright, here's the story: The vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend) is tired of staying in his coffin. Oooh, yeah, he wants to be a big bad bloodsucker in the spotlight! So he joins a rock band in New Orleans and they magically become superstars with a band called - get this - The Vampire Lestat!
The world's vampire population is none too happy about one of their own kind going public and revealing their secrets. So they plot to kill him at a concert. Plus, his music awakens the original queen of the vampires, Akasha (Aaliyah).
Jesse (Marguerite Moreau), a girl working for a covert supernatural investigation organization, the Talamasca, meets Lestat and makes him feel sympathy for humans. At the same time, the vicious queen seduces Lestat and tries to convince him to join her in an ultra-violent quest for world domination. Her mission: destroy all mortals along with any immortals who stand in her way.
Trust me, it sounds a lot cooler than it plays out. Anne Rice handled this story just fine in her two books "The Vampire Lestat" and "Queen of the Damned," which are combined here.
Honestly, screenwriters Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni do a decent job adapting the story to the screen. With the exception of a few idiotic lines, it's a solid piece of work. It's no easy task to condense over a thousand pages of Rice's text into a two-hour film.
Since the writers can't be faulted, who's to blame for this travesty? It's gotta be stuck on the director and cast, who totally blow key scenes and can't maintain character credibility for more than a few seconds.
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As Lestat, Townsend is just terrible. Fans whined endlessly about Tom Cruise (though Rice herself stated that she loved his performance once she finally saw "Interview"), but he could at least act. Townsend's Lestat is pompous, irritating and, above all, a stereotypical one-note performance. Cruise could hit at least two notes with his much more complex, conflicted and menacing bloodsucker portrayal. Townsend just snarls and casts seductive glances at everyone in sight and seems to think this is what makes a vampire a vampire.
Aaliyah is okay in her final film performance. Her every movement is reptilian, slithering to the left and right and striking when least expected. Her costumes are great, but her accent is a problem. She's supposed to be an ancient Egyptian, but she talks more like Bela Lugosi circa "Glen or Glenda?"
The music is also problematic. Never for a moment does Lestat's singing voice sound like anything but Jonathan Davis. That's right. They chose to give Lestat the voice of Korn's lead singer. He co-wrote all the film's music (and it's playing almost constantly in the foreground or background) and sings it as well.
This may give "Queen" appeal for Korn fans (Davis even shows up in a dumb cameo as a ticket scalper). But honestly, after the god-awful "Issues" and the new Fieldy solo album "Rock and Roll Gangster," how can anyone care about Davis or Korn anymore?
Any vampiric personality or energy that could have been carried in the music is defeated by the fact that it just sounds like a bunch of Korn songs. Some of it is moderately effective, but considering how important a role the music plays, it would have been wiser to have a lesser-known singer perform vocal duties. This film makes it impossible to separate Lestat from Davis.
Director Michael Rymer displays one flashy camera move after another and there are a couple of moderately effective moments (the rock concert decapitation is memorable). But overall, he royally botched this project and should hang his over-stylized head in shame.
"Queen of the Damned" has a lot in common with its title character. Both suck, they're both utterly lifeless, and their mere existence represents a menace to mankind.
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