Queen Of The Damned Full Soundtrack

[Cecile Lilien]

Themost pressing, unforgivable issue is that LaBute took a folk horror classic and turned it into more of his signature Neil LaBute misogynist bullshit, in which Summersisle is now a matriarchal society in which the women are duplicitous monsters who enslave and even kill men in service of their community. One suspects that when Cage slugs a woman dead in the face during the climax of the film, the audience is supposed to cheer.

I judge people\u2019s \u201Cworst movie I\u2019ve ever seen\u201D choices far more than their best. If you choose something harmlessly mediocre, like The Rise of Skywalker, I\u2019ll just assume you\u2019ve only seen that and The Godfather. Choosing a movie like, say, Sharknado is even lazier, because none of the movies in that series were ever made to be taken seriously. It\u2019s like saying a gas station hot dog is the worst meal you\u2019ve ever had \u2013 I mean, what did you expect? It takes some thought and measured comparison. It must be applied to a movie that desperately wanted to be perceived as \u201Cgood,\u201D even \u201Cgreat,\u201D and then failed on every single count, where you suspect that even the food served in the commissary while filming was loaded with salmonella.

For over the past decade, my worst movie I\u2019ve ever seen is Neil LaBute\u2019s remake of The Wicker Man. While I certainly enjoy the many memes spawned from it, it is my textbook definition of a movie that fails in every possible way. The playful, cheeky tone of the original is gutted in favor of something dour and humorless. The enhanced horror could have saved it, if it wasn\u2019t done so poorly. It features what is easily Nicolas Cage\u2019s worst performance, and this was before he did a long stretch of direct to DVD/streaming movies in which his hairpiece did most of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, every other actor, either unwilling or unable to go toe to toe with Cage, sleepwalks through their roles, playing it all very seriously, even when Cage is screaming about bees getting in his eyes.

The funny thing is that I\u2019ve seen Queen of the Damned before, a couple years after it came out. I remembered the same two things that everyone remembers about it, (a) the glaring lack of Tom Cruise, and (b) the fact that Aaliyah is in it much less than the trailers would have you believe. Nothing at the time stood out about it from any of the other hundred or so forgettable vampire movies I had watched by that point. Then I watched it again this past weekend as part of a group watch with friends, and its flaws (which in this case is every single thing that occurs from beginning to end) became far more noticeable.

Have I just gotten more critical and difficult to please in my old age? Quite the contrary: I think I\u2019ve actually become more accepting of less than perfect movies, judging them largely on if I still find them entertaining. If anything, I\u2019m even more forgiving of vampire movies, because there\u2019s a certain level of expectation that they\u2019re going to be poorly acted, or unintentionally campy, but as long as I come away from them feeling like I had a good time, then it was worth my time.

Queen of the Damned, while definitely poorly acted, isn\u2019t unintentionally campy. In fact, it\u2019s trying very hard to be campy, but in a way that feels like it was written by people (in this case Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni) who are making fun of the source material. Compare this to Neil Jordan\u2019s adaptation of Interview With the Vampire, which was very campy, but in a way that doesn\u2019t feel forced and deliberate. I hope this makes more sense to read than it does to write.

Tone is far from this movie\u2019s only problem, however. Among the many, many mistakes that were made was trying to condense two of Anne Rice\u2019s books in her beloved Vampire Chronicles series, The Vampire Lestat (560 pages) and The Queen of the Damned (480 pages) into a single one hour and forty minute long movie. Rice\u2019s novels are popular because of their exhaustive attention to detail, extensive character backstories and elaborate worldbuilding, in which the vampires\u2019 lineages extend all the way back to ancient Egypt. Here, it barely qualifies as a Cliffs Notes version of either novel, where most of the series\u2019 iconic characters are relegated to standing around in the background, with barely any dialogue, while far too much time is devoted to a romantic relationship between two personality voids.

Its second mistake is in not bringing back Tom Cruise, who defied everyone\u2019s expectations in Interview by playing a delightfully over the top, gloriously queer Lestat. Now, it\u2019s entirely possible that Cruise would have turned the role down, but by all accounts the idea was barely even considered. After a long search for a replacement Lestat, in which front runners included Wes Bentley (the weird neighbor kid who waxes poetic over plastic bags in American Beauty), Josh Hartnett, and Heath Ledger, Irish heartthrob Stuart Townsend, making his major film debut, won the role, entirely to the film\u2019s detriment.

To say that Townsend is dead weight here would be unfair to corpses. Whether it\u2019s lack of talent on his part, or lack of direction (and, to be fair, it doesn\u2019t look like much of this movie was \u201Cdirected\u201D), Townsend\u2019s efforts are restricted solely to standing around in leather pants with no shirt on, and occasionally smirking. He couldn\u2019t spare a drop of charisma if two little girls showed up at his house collecting some for the National Charisma Awareness Foundation. I\u2019d compare him to energy vampire Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows, but at least Colin Robinson has a distinct personality. The only actor who\u2019s worse than Townsend is Marguerite Moreau as Jesse, a paranormal researcher who falls into an entirely manufactured for the movie romance with Lestat. Whenever these two bags of sand are on screen together, the film doesn\u2019t just come to a dead standstill, it almost seems to move backwards.

Worse, it contributes to another mistake, which was whittling co-star Aaliyah\u2019s role as ancient Egyptian vampire Akasha down to almost nothing, a curious choice considering she\u2019s the titular queen of the damned. Following her tragic accidental death at the age of just 22, shortly after she completed filming her role in the film, promotional materials for Queen of the Damned prominently featured Aaliyah, giving audiences the impression that she was Townsend\u2019s co-star, rather than a barely supporting character. It\u2019s nearly halfway through the movie before she even shows up, and her total screen time is barely fifteen minutes. Now, granted, she wasn\u2019t the strongest actor either, but she\u2019s trying, and she has charisma to spare, only further emphasizing what bottomless black holes of charm Townsend and Moreau are. More importantly, she looks like she was having a good time, which when you see this movie, you wonder why anyone even attempted to take it seriously.

After Lestat is so taken with this \u201Crock \u2018n\u2019 roll music\u201D that he immediately decides to join a band, Jonathan Davis of KoRn (sorry, I cannot and will not learn how to do a backwards R on this thing) dubs his vocals, and the idea of Davis\u2019s signature incomprehensible growl-shrieking coming out of Townsend\u2019s wee bird chest is the closest this movie gets to entertaining (while still far missing the mark). Lestat tells the band right away that he\u2019s a vampire, which they greet with a nonplussed indifference that the audience is supposed to interpret as \u201Cthese kids today, they\u2019re just so jaded,\u201D but comes off as if they\u2019re not entirely sure what a vampire is. What they do know is that it makes for great PR, and they begin promoting themselves entirely on that (which is good, because their music stinks on ice). \u201CHow would you sum up your music?\u201D a reporter asks, to which one member responds \u201CSex, blood and rock \u2018n\u2019 roll.\u201D Incredibly, not only does the audience not respond to this by throwing rotten produce at them, they\u2019re instantly propelled into stardom.

While in the book Lestat reflects on his past, expressing guilt for having turned young Claudia into a vampire, and pining for Louis, the love of his life, here neither of those characters are even mentioned. Now, newly hetero Lestat mostly just enjoys the carefree life of a rock star, living in a mansion that appears to be furnished with only two enormous leopard print couches, draining the occasional groupie, and giving interviews in which he continuously talks about being a vampire, which everyone treats with \u201Coh sure, we\u2019ve heard that one before\u201D bemusement at best. No one bothers looking into it, or finding out anything about Lestat\u2019s background, even though it\u2019s the 2000s and everyone has access to the internet.

Watching Lestat\u2019s rise to worldwide fame (presumably with the sound off) is the Talamasca, a paranormal research group who\u2019s well aware that he\u2019s telling the truth about what he is. One of the members is the previously mentioned Jesse, who, after reading one passage out of Lestat\u2019s old diary in which he expresses vague regret over having to kill a young woman he meets on a beach in the 1700s, instantly decides that not only is she in love with Lestat, but that she wants to be a vampire too. This plot point is not developed so much as it\u2019s dropped in the audience\u2019s lap: in one scene she reads the diary, and when next we see her she\u2019s flying off to London dressed like a club kid to meet him, and they\u2019re making eyes at each other. Moreau\u2019s droning narration during these scenes does nothing to diminish the suggestion that some pages were lost when the original script was photocopied, and no one bothered to look for them.

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