In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, Anne Rice didn’t like Queen of the Damned and most Interview with the Vampire fans won’t either — unless they were big Korn fans in the early 2000s.
Queen of the Damned
I find the ongoing TV series Interview with the Vampire to be utterly addictive, the recent second season topping an already solid premiere with complex and dangerous main characters, lush production design, and plenty more sex appeal (and outright queerness) than most modern-day romantic dramas. And oh boy, season three is going to rule so hard, adapting Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat as it shifts focus from Jacob Anderson’s doleful and more sympathetic vamp Louis to Sam Reid as the flamboyant, bloodsucking rock star Lestat de Lioncourt.
To sink my teeth into that upcoming season’s storyline, I made the mistake of watching 2002’s Queen of the Damned. It’s incredibly entertaining, to be fair, as an abortive sequel of sorts to the 1994 Interview with the Vampire movie, which sadly failed to bring us Tom Cruise in Rock Star Lestat mode. It’s also delightful for its obvious Australian-ness, with Melbourne standing in for Los Angeles and Death Valley (more on that later) and a bunch of homemade talent in silly fang-and-pleather getups (Matthew Newton, I see you and I have no comment to make).
Primarily, though, Queen of the Damned is a two-fold musical tribute act of sorts — to the tragically thwarted screen career of RnB superstar Aaliyah, and to the maligned genre of nu metal. Raise your goddamn lighters to the sky.
The film begins with a dormant Lestat being awoken by the strains of a local crustpunk act, their melodic nu metal leaving him with no choice but to re-enter the pathetic human world. It’s hilarious that our guy would’ve slumbered through musical movements as revered as grunge, rap, punk, disco, new-wave, the liberation of 80s pop and the revolutionary artistry of the goddamn Beatles et al, and then decided that this was the right time to resurface. Korn’s Jonathan Davis writes and sings each of the laughable dirges that the resurrected Lestat puts out, their eyeliner-ringed emo cred instantly rocketing him and his fleshbag band to international success.
Stuart Townsend’s Lestat is introduced to his band as he reclines atop a speaker stat, hollering out a long and high note with his eyes rolling madly to the back of his head. It’s just not cool. Not sexy or alluring. One wonders if any of the other performers pitched for such a commanding and glamorous lead role, such as Wes Bentley (!), Josh Hartnett (!!) or our own Heath Ledger (!!!), could’ve survived the embarrassment in store for this character, teleporting about and preying on groupies as he does. Feeling high off his own MTV-broadcast supply, or perhaps a little suicidal from some underdeveloped loneliness, Lestat issues a directive to all the world’s vampires to come out of hiding and confront him at his band’s first ever performance (huh?), held at a Burning Man-esque Death Valley gig.
Padding out the lead-up to this big ol’ show, Australian director Michael Rymer struggles to generate any hot blood in lengthy flashback sequences, showing Lestat’s horny and tortured past being investigated by the mysterious Talamasca organisation. This is a supernatural FBI of sorts from Rice’s extended vamp universe, which my beloved TV show frequently threatens to dwell on too heavily. Marguerite Moreau plays the Bella Swan-esque naif seduced by Lestat’s story, but once Aaliyah’s ancient vampire Akasha is mentioned it becomes impossible to care about her measly human desires.
Aaliyah wears the hell out of some skimpy bejewelled outfits and struggles a little more with a mysterious, “old timey” accent and a mouth full of fake fangs. Her swaggering introduction scenes in the movie are strong, first showing her breaking out of hibernation as a marble statue and then seeing her slay a barful of weaker creatures of the night in a bloodlust rampage. These bits made me psyched for Akasha’s inevitable appearance in the AMC show, and also left me devastated at the role’s ultimate underwritten smallness, a sad portent of bigger and better performances the late star Aaliyah would never get to deliver. She’s the titular character! Ditch Lestat, kill all the humans and rule the world as you deserve, Akasha!
Queen of the Damned is oddly structured, seemingly building to a big concert showdown where Akasha rescues Lestat from swarming hater vamps and briefly wins him over to her plans for world domination before she’s easily slain. Before that disappointing denouement, though, we are treated to Lestat and his band’s big Woodstock ’99 show, a performance too silly and whimsical for true nu metal-heads to take seriously. It’s the musical equivalent of buying a graffiti top that says “rock ‘n roll gurl!” from Supre with your pocket money.
To pack the crowd of this nonsensical show, the production bussed 3,000 goths drawn from internet forums and Melbourne nightclubs to a quarry in Werribee. Anne Rice herself might’ve scorned this sequel as “a bad idea, and basically a doomed project”, but I can’t think of too many other scenes for which I’d sell my blood to be involved as an extra.
