Queen Of The Damned

Despite boasting a cast that included Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas and Brad Pitt, the dismally disappointing Interview With A Vampire utterly failed to replicate the dark sensuality of Anne Rice’s writing. What chance then for Queen Of The Damned and Stuart Townsend? Well, fuck all really.

By comparison with this bloated monstrosity, Interview begins to look like a masterpiece. Not so much a sequel to the 1994 offering as a mix-and-match of Rice’s bloodsucker novels, The Vampire Lestat and Queen Of The Damned, the result is an embarrassment on every level.

Soulless, heartless, deafeningly loud, and polluted throughout by a hideous neo-Goth soundtrack courtesy of Korn’s Jonathan Davis, Queen Of The Damned is visibly aimed at the sad-and-morbid Marilyn Manson fringe of teenage tossers, the sort of souls who consider self-mutilation the height of glamour and character expression.

The unfortunate Townsend stars as brooding vamp Lestat, who’s just awakened from his coffin after a hundred years (well, the soundtrack would wake the dead) and decides to become a rock-star, lead singer of a noxious band whose planned gig at Death Valley forms the backdrop to the increasingly ridiculous bloodsucking shenanigans that pass for Queen Of The Damned’s plot.

Ghoulish as the whole affair undoubtedly was in the first place, it has been lent an added whiff of decay by the appearance in it of the late Aaliyah. The singer/actress, who expired last year in a tragic plane crash, is undoubtedly the least worst thing about the whole horrendous mess, turning up roughly halfway through as the 4,000-year-old bloosucker queen Akasha, and providing what few traces the film possesses of bite (sorry!) and intelligence.

Otherwise, abandon hope all ye who enter here. If a combination of Velvet Goldmine and Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows sounds appealing to you, your dream has just come true.