The Addiction

Chronologically, this precedes The Funeral by about a year. Both were scripted by Nicolas St John after the death of his son. Both were shot quickly, on limited budgets, by much the same crew, and feature Walken and Sciorra, and a Catholic priest, Father Robert Castle. Finally, both are philosophical/religious ruminations, in genre form, on the nature of sin and redemption. The Funeral, though, is the far more accessible, even conventional drama. By contrast, this is one wild, weird, wired movie, the kind that really shouldn't be seen before midnight. Taylor is commanding as New York philosophy student Kathleen Conklin. Dragged into a back alley, she's vamped by Sciorra's voluptuous Casanova. Soon she starts obsessing on images of My Lai and the Holocaust, name-dropping Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidegger, and taking a syringe to a vagrant's artery for a late-night snack. Shot in b/w, with an effectively murky jungle/funk/rap score, this is the vampire movie we've been waiting for: a reactionary urban-horror flick that truly has the ailing pulse of the time. AIDS and drug addiction are points of reference, but they're symptoms, not the cause. Ferrara's chiaroscuro imagery is as striking as anything in Coppola's Dracula, while the voice-over narration often recalls Apocalypse Now. Scary, funny, magnificently risible, this could be the most pretentious B-movie ever - and I mean that as a compliment.