INNOCENT BLOOD

INNOCENT BLOOD (Directed by John Landis. Starring Anne Parillaud, Robert Loggia, Anthony LaPaglia, Don Rickles)

John Landis, whose combination of camp humour and spectacular horror in "American Werewolf In London" set the tone for much of the tongue-in-severed-cheek genre of the eighties, returns to the arena (if not quite to form) with "Innocent Blood", which could be subtitled European Vampire In Pittsburgh.

Having established herself as a truly lethal femme fatale in "Nikita", Anne Parillaud combines her gamine charm and coiled violence to deal more death in her American debut, as a Vamp with a heart of gold, only feeding on the bad guys. Being in Pittsburgh, this means eating Italian, specifically the mafia.

But it all goes horribly wrong when the local Don (Robert Loggia) comes back from the dead and, quickly realising the criminal possibilities of vampirism, sets about turning his mob into an army of the undead. Parillaud hooks up with a lonely undercover cop (Anthony LaPaglia) to try and put a cap on the Cappo.

It may sound like The Godfather meets Dracula but we're in the hands of jumped up B-movie addict Landis, not the operatic Coppola. As usual, Landis can't quite find his tone, and the film lurches between pastiche, homage, romantic comedy and gore fest. He adopts the contemporary perspective on vampirism, treating it as an almost existential disease of lonely outsiders and dwelling on its eroticism, but he bypasses any AID analogies for his low common denominator slapstick and shocks.

"Innocent Blood" has enough wit and energy to pass for entertainment, but not enough conviction to get under our skin. After Coppola's "Dracula", we were threatened with a veritable invasion of bloodsuckers and vampires were declared the monster of the '90s, but, as our fancy turns to dinosaurs, on this evidence the undead already appear on the verge of extinction.