Vamps is, at time of writing, the most recent film by Amy Heckerling, a woman with an… odd reputation. She is, at once, a very important film maker and also a massive hack. She was director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Clueless (1995), also writing the latter. She also inflicted upon the world, in both writing and directing capacities, the Look Who’s Talking franchise. So… swings and roundabouts?

Still, this is the first film I’ve put up here that I’m definitely sure earns the elusive Triple-F Rating! Boxing Helena and Ruby Sparks might qualify, but that third ‘significant female roles’ criteria is hard to quantify which is why that one doesn’t get a tag on the sidebar like I’ve given the writer and director ones; as important as those films’ title characters are to their narratives, I do feel the two films are ultimately about the men which gives me pause. Draw your own conclusions, ‘cause I can’t be bothered.

Anyway, Vamps! It’s popularly labelled as horror-comedy, or, you know, the same words in a different order, but frankly this is probably misleading. A more honest description would probably be that it’s a romantic comedy with vampires in it. I suppose such a descriptor somewhat calls to mind Shaun of the Dead (2004) and its professing to be a “romantic comedy with zombies”, but Vamps skews a lot more heavily on the romantic comedy angle. Goody (Alicia Silverstone) and Stacey (Krysten Ritter) are a pair of bright young things living in New York, except for the young bit. Stacey is about to turn forty, and Goody is pretending to be the same sort of age rather than a good century and change older because she assumes her party girl friend won’t want to hang out with her if she finds out she’s a goddamn oldie. Still, they’re vampires, so they’re largely stuck, physically, at the age they were when they got vamped up, which is totally like university student sort of age and not early-to-mid 30s. By night, they work at exterminators, whence they drink the blood of rats and that; attend the vampiric equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and bizarrely late university lectures; and go out partying. Barring the occasional summons by their sire (Sigourney Weaver), a vain and self-absorbed woman who demands that they model the clothes that she’s bought for herself because she can’t see herself in the mirror, life is pretty OK. Unfortunately, the good times are about to end, as Van Helsing (Wallace Shawn) is in national security now and the Patriot Act is being used to track down suspected vampires. To make thing more complicated still, Stacey has found herself a new serious boyfriend at uni, Joey van Helsing (Dan Stevens, not even attempting an American accent)… and she’s up the duff!

So, yeah, the vampires are like a metaphor or something. That’s, you know, nothing new, though quite what they’re a metaphor for in this context isn’t wholly consistent nor does it always quite scan. It seems like it’s largely going for ‘vampires equal minority’ or refugees or some such with some ‘vampirism equals drug addiction’ thrown in. The latter is pretty tried and tested as metaphors go, the former feels rather iffier. The idea I think is that the vampires are, like pretty much any group, mostly benign though perhaps inevitably there are some bad ones, but I’m not sure it quite works how it’s portrayed here… then again, it does vaguely say something about prejudice, I guess? We do see more (vampiric) characters who attend the vampire AA meetings than (vampiric) characters who don’t.

…And the idea of baiting vampires by summoning them for jury duty and giving them tax audits is pretty great.

Quite how that plot thread is going to turn out is pretty predictable after Goody runs into an old flame from the ‘60s (Richard Lewis) who has gone on to be a lawyer working for the American Civil Liberties Union. Indeed, it rather peters out around the end of the second act, never really exploring the full potential of idea and generally pulling its punches on the elements that it does. That, one assumes, is because it is more of a romantic comedy (with vampires) than a political satire (with vampires), but it feels weird to make so much of it if you’re then not really going to do anything with it.

Indeed, the thing does seem like it might want to do a bit much. To go with that, and rom-com element that I haven’t really gone into yet, and the horror element that’s largely a part of the latter, the film also has a bunch of meditation on the nature of aging, and on love and loss, and, oh, god, it’s all trying to cram quite a bit into ninety-ish minutes and inevitably something is going to have to give. I suppose it makes a change for a modern film to actually be too short for everything it wants to do rather than padding the thing out with a metric ton of dead weight, but it does give the impression that something should probably have hit the chopping block, and frankly the thread of national security and government bureaucracy as means of vampire hunting is the most superfluous, even if it is conceptually one of the most fun and rich ideas in the film. (Mind you, considering Heckerling’s previous film included a wince worthy political parody rendition of Alanis Morissette’s ‘Ironic’ aimed at the then imminently departing George W. Bush, maybe we dodged a bullet with her not digging too deep into her views of post-9/11 American domestic policy here.)

So, yes, instead the romance between Stacey and the scion of the Van Helsing clan is probably the main drive of the film. Well, it’s cute. The plot actually manages to avoid most of the obvious pitfalls that the set-up seems to be pointing towards; there’s little in the way of star-crossed lovers gubbins or angst related there to. Shockingly for a film, it generally manages to clear up misunderstandings and that by having the characters actually talk to each other rather than construct elaborate webs of lies and schemes. Not good for dramatic tension perhaps, but refreshing to see and neatly allows us to skip a lot of bullshit. It helps that Ritter and Stephens are a fairly amiable screen couple (even if the latter’s introduction which I think was supposed to make him seem immediately charming instead, in a fit of poorly calculated writing, made me want to punch him in smack bang in the face… he improves after that). The thematic throughline here is about aging; Goody and Stacey are trapped in a terminal youth wherein they don’t have to grow up, but as events occur they find that they want to move on to new stages in their lives only for them to realise that to do so might require them to extricate themselves from these trappings. These trappings taking a physical form in that of Sigourney Weaver’s character, a rather literal embodiment of hedonism and self-interest with whom the pair are entwined and whom they must slay if they’re ever going to succeed. And that’s where the horror element comes in in something resembling earnest. Weaver has the actual bloodlust, but never really feels like much of a threat even as she racks up the highest body count of the cast; it’s kind of hard to take her as that much of a force to be reckoned with when it punctuates a scene of her having massacred a Chinese restaurant with cracking the oldest, hackiest joke about Chinese food imaginable. You know the one. Perhaps it’s meant to highlight her disregard, but instead it’s just lame.

Essentially, if you’re going into this expecting actual horror shenanigans, you’ll be disappointed. The film doesn’t really take the horror element of itself with any real degree of seriousness. There are elements of pastiche; the effects go all Harryhausen at times (yes, there’s a skeleton); but it doesn’t really do enough to feel like it’s even particularly interested in the horror angle. It’s broadly affectionate in its ribbing of classic horror, but like a lot of things it doesn’t really do enough to elevate itself as an homage. Instead you get a fluffier, nicer version of The Hunger (1983) spliced with a less angry and self-righteous (though admittedly generally justified in being so) version of I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007), the previous Heckerling joint alluded to earlier.

…Speaking of, a late-thirties Paul Rudd is in that film playing a twenty-something toy boy, looking more-or-less the same as he did in Clueless and as he continues to more-or-less look to this day, because he bathes in virgin’s blood or has a cursed painting or something. How is he not in this film? Heckerling clearly has an in, SO MAYBE IT’S TOO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH!