Your Daily Dracula – Eddie Murphy as Maximillian, Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)
Vampire in Brooklyn opens with an eerie and apt rethinking of one of the strongest sequences in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dramatised in the 1979 John Badham film, as a ship crewed by corpses eerily arrives in a new world, and a vampire escapes from it in the form of a dog. The effect of the hulk crashing into the Brooklyn docks is one of the current film’s strongest visuals, but is undermined by the bickerings of a couple of comedy black characters out of Sanford and Son, who squelch the mood with laboured chatter. Unfortunately, this sets a tone which oscillates between effective and inept both as comedy and horror with all the wonkiness expected of a script originated by a superstar’s brother and rewritten in spurts until it can satisfy all the creative participants without considering the big picture.
Strangely, Eddie Murphy’s Maximillian (undead cousin to his Third World Prince of Coming to America) is allowed a measure of creepy dignity as he rips out hearts or makes golden eyes at the heroine, but this makes room for Kadeem Hardison to flounder along in the singular role of Comic Relief character in a Murphy Vehicle. Early on, Hardison’s Julius complains about Maximillian’s ‘Blacula shit’, which may or may not be an acknowledgment that an almost identical streetwise dude-cum-vampire’s minion was played by Richard Lawson in Scream, Blacula, Scream in 1973. Too much goes beyond the archetypal feel of the Dracula-esque opening and seems like a pillaging of earlier sources: the plot hinge that a semi-vampire can be saved if their master is destroyed before they have killed is from The Lost Boys, the infallible seductive power of dancing with a vampire comes from Fright Night, and even the gimmick of Murphy’s disguise as a white Italian-American hood is reminiscent of Lenny Henry’s act in True Identity.
Wes Craven, whose see-sawing between innovation and hackery continues to make his filmography sometimes pleasingly unpredictable, is an interesting choice for director, not least because of his underrated contributions to black-themed horror in The Serpent and the Rainbow and The People Under the Stairs. However, his background is in the modernist conventions of Night of the Living Dead, and has only the most tentative relationship with the vampire-style Hammer horror this film wishes to play riffs on. Without the distracting need to dollop in tiresome comedy and an even more tiresome romantic triangle, Craven might have something to add to the overworked vampire sub- genre, especially in the light of his appropriation of gothicisms for The People Under the Stairs. As it is, this is a collection of shallow but entertaining skits (Murphy’s turn as a preacher, encouraging his congregation to sing “Evil is Good”) and scares hung on a feeble plot thread about Maximillian’s search for a mate that is no sooner resolved than it is contradicted by Julius’s punch-line transformation.
(first published in Sight & Sound)
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