Near Dark [DVD] [1988]

I saw this years ago late one night as a teen and absolutely loved it. Up until then I had thought The Lost Boys was one the gems of 80s vampire flicks but when I saw this I realised how wrong I was.

Don't get me wrong Lost Boys is great but Near Dark is exactly that, dark. It doesn't have any of the hollywood gloss that some movies have, it strips the genre down to it's bare bones and shows a brutal but still likeable side of life as a vampire. It isnt some big budget affair with tons of effects but that's what makes it so great. It has humour, atmosphere and a good dose of violence for good measure but it isn't over the top and fits in with who the characters are. The scene in the bar is one of my favourites...If you love vampires you will love this movie

Katherine Bigelow reportedly wanted to create an old-fashioned Western movie... mixed with a vampire romance. The result was something that could have been a disaster.

Instead "Near Dark" is a deeply underappreciated little cult movie, which demonstrates that talent and originality in vampire movies isn't quite gone. Bigelow smoothly intertwines eerie otherworldliness with a grimy, gritty Western flavour, and spreads the resulting atmosphere over a clever, tightly-written script and some solid acting from Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright.

Small-town boy Caleb (Pasdar) encounters an ethereal young woman named Mae (Wright) on the street one night. They seem to be shyly hitting it off... until she bites him and leaves.

Before Caleb knows it, the sun literally causes his skin to burn, and he's been yanked into the RV of a gang of vampire drifters -- Mae among them. They're a pretty mean bunch, and even their leader Jessie Hooker (Lance Henriksen) gives him only one week to prove himself. But Caleb refuses to give in to "instinct" by drinking blood and killing his victims, which causes some problems.

Meanwhile, Caleb's father (Tim Thomerson) and the local police are searching for the missing young man -- and when Caleb manages to save the vampires from the cops, they finally accept him. But then one of them develops a crush on Caleb's kid sister Sarah, and Caleb finds himself torn between his strange new life and his family's safety. Even if he can somehow be cured of his vampirism, can he hope to destroy an entire bloodsucker gang out to kill him?

"Near Dark" is one of those cult movies that doesn't have a big enough cult -- it gets overshadowed by other 1980s vampire movies like "Interview with the Vampire" and "The Lost Boys," despite having little in common with them. The vampires in it are dirty, amoral, trashy and casually cruel as only human beings freed from mortality and law can be ("Remember that fire we started in Chicago?") -- which is an all-too-probable result if someone were to become a vampire.

And Bigelow gives the movie a unique atmosphere, setting it in the grimy, dusty small towns of Oklahoma and filling it with blood, guns and nighttime streets -- in fact if it didn't have vampires, you'd think it was a coming-of-age tale about falling in with a bad crowd. But there are also a number of sweet romantic scenes, which are all the more striking because they don't get over-the-top or cheesy.

And there's a quiet, understated visual power to Bigelow's directing style, whether it's Caleb tottering across a field with smoke pouring from his clothes, or an erotic blood-drink against a pumping oil rig on a lightning-filled night. And her script is a pretty solid one as well, with excellent dialogue ranging from the quietly beautiful ("... I'll still be here when the light from that star gets down here to earth...") to macabrely funny ("It's finger-lickin' GOOD!").

Pasdar is intense and gutsy as a nice young country boy who has the misfortune to get turned into a vampire against his will, and Wright is wispily endearing as the only vampire who sympathizes with him. Some of the supporting vampires get kind of 2-D and over-the-top at times, but Henriksen does an outstanding job as their weary, battle-scarred leader, and Joshua John Miller does a good job as a vampire trapped in a little boy's body.

"Near Dark" is a darker, grittier brand of vampire movie, and while it's blessed with solid acting, brilliant direction and snappy script, the unique slant on vampires is one of the best parts.

I mean - title says "2 disc special edition". Yet, nothing really special here. Just one 47 minutes documentary, one deleted scene, trailer - all stretched on 2nd DVD. With good compression, they'd be able to get it on one disc (as it appeared recently in Poland). Regardless, great movie, with unique atmosphere and lots of climatic scenes.