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« on: September 12, 2008, 09:41:13 PM »
I don't agree with Vasquez, and it sounds to me as if he should be playing video games, not reviewing movies.
In the original Lugosi Dracula film, he had those wonderful lines: "To die... to be really dead ... that must be glorious!" The theme of the reluctant vampire with a ruthless streak continued in the underrated Dracula's daughter, and one could recite a long litany of vampire films that have spun out the notion of the vampire's divided nature with endless juicy variations.
I do agree that there has been a lot of ripping off of Miss Rice in recent years. IMO that's not necessarily a bad thing--I thought the 1990s show Forever Knight showed that her ideas could be incorporated in a modulated form to produce compelling story-telling, and from what I heard from friends, many folks thought the same about Moonlighting. I'm not familiar enough with the Buffy/Angel franchise to comment upon that. Despite its excessively pretty lead actor, Blood ties struck me as an example of watered-down Rice that badly needed an injection of fresh inspiration.
Critiques such as the one Vasquez is offering up are very thick on the ground in the blogosphere these days. While amusing (perhaps) to read, they hardly do justice to the films and shows with which he's making free.
I am not up on the new "Twilight" book series and films, so am not really commenting on that. The notion of vampires as mindless killing machines seems to owe more to "Night of the Living Dead" and its endless barrage of sequels than it does to traditional literary or folk images of vampires. (It's worth noting that the Romero franchise has had a sweeping impact upon how people think of zombies these days--the old zombies of the Val Lewton films and 1950s and 60s "voodoo melodramas" are seemingly gone forever. In their place, we have a rather dull army of flesh-munching robots with eyeballs on detachable springs.)
cheers, G.