The Thirst, with or without the article, is far from the most original title for a story involving vampires, so some preventative clarification may be in order.
The film we cover today is totally unrelated to Thirst, a 1979 vampire movie starring Chantal Contouri that this reviewer savaged in this venue some time ago.
It is also totally unrelated to another vampire movie filmed in 2006, also named The Thirst and starring Tony Todd and Jason Connery. That one's an unknown quantity around here. Feel free to wander into uncharted waters.
This The Thirst is about Lisa (Kramer) and Maxx (Keeslar), a pair of recovering substance abusers who become bloodsuckers themselves.
Lisa is a professional stripper who so loves her Day-Glo wig that she even insists on wearing it while being rushed to the emergency room on a gurney following an onstage collapse. Maxx thinks she's hiding a fresh round of drug abuse, but she reassures him. It's just terminal cancer. His compassionate response to this involves blowing up and storming out. Nice, supportive guy.
Not long after that, Lisa dies, an apparent suicide. Maxx spirals into despair. Two pals from his 12-step program, seeking to cheer him up and restore his faith in a better tomorrow, drag him to a hard-rock S&M club of the sort occupied by rubbery fetish fans whipping each other to ribbons in dark corners. Well, we're all cheered up by different things, I guess. Maxx's reaction to this place is best described as bemused, until he spots a girl he's certain is Lisa—very much alive, or, if you prefer, given the special nomenclature required when discussing vampires, mobile.
It isn't long before the vampire family, a bloody, mass-murdering lot that includes, among others, Darius (Sisto), Lenny (Baldwin) and a pair of babbling twins whose brains seem to have been totally fried by the bloodsucking lifestyle, accedes to Lisa's wishes and allows her to turn Maxx into one of them. He's quite happy with the thrills of bathing in arterial spray. But Lisa sees vampirism as just another addiction, one even more insidious than the habits she and Maxx managed to kick in life. She's determined to enact her own 12-step program, one that will include "stay out of sunlight" and "slay the monsters that made us like this."
Embracing bloody parallels
A prior review quoted on the DVD box calls this film "Requiem for a Dream meets Near Dark," an evocative summary that, accurate enough in terms of subject matter, places a heavy burden on our expectations. If it's even half as good as either of those worthies, it's a keeper.
We need to report that it doesn't come close to Requiem, which this reviewer considers one of the few Great-with-a-capital-G films of the past decade. Perhaps that's too high a standard. But it approaches Near Dark territory, up to and including a number of scenes that look as if they were staged and edited with the prior film running in continuous loop on the director's laptop. Some of the parallels are that close. Check out, for instance, the scene where the vampire family storms into a bar, with the express purpose of terrorizing and murdering everybody in it, while the recently turned protagonist is pressured to join in. Am I referring to Near Dark or The Thirst? Well, yes. And that's not the only parallel. Remember the scenes in Near Dark where bullet holes admit shafts of sunlight, burning besieged vampires where they hide? Remember them using duct tape on car windows, or fleeing the terrors of daylight with blankets over their heads? Am I referring to Near Dark or The Thirst? Again, yes. Some of the dialogue rings awfully familiar, too, if not in specific words then at least in the characterizations achieved. One suspects that the people involved with this may have seen Near Dark too many times.
That said, the film is a keeper. It possesses its own special kick that carries it well past any troubling concerns over its originality. The vampires are a nasty lot, so far removed from concerns of humanity, or conscience, that the glee they take in their own evil is downright stunning. There's a scene where they caper and cavort around an elderly couple that they have held captive and abused, perhaps for days. It is vicious and it is inhuman, in ways more horrifying than the gouts of projectile blood that paint these creatures scarlet every time they rip the throat from another victim.
So is the casual madness embodied by those two crazy vampire sisters, who babble with sensuous glee in between launching themselves at fresh victims. We're assured that you can understand what they're saying if you listen real close, but there's no reason to want to. They're animals, plain and simple, far removed from the tortured Byronian aesthetes who always made me want to give certain other well-known vampire-mongers a hard smack. The same is true for the rest of them. Sure, they take a sensual pleasure in bloodletting. The movie makes that damn clear. But there's nothing about it that the rest of us should find romantic or sympathetic. They're downright vile. They're also messy eaters, and much of the action, not to mention much of the sex, takes place in puddles of steaming plasma. It's this that makes our two rebelling protagonists sympathetic, even after they've committed atrocities themselves. At least they want to stop.
The movie's better attributes include a dark sense of humor, best illustrated in the sad fate that befalls a pair of unfortunate housecats.
About that blood. There's an awful lot of it, and none of it looks quite real. Sometimes it's outrageously fake. You can take this as a production failure or as a kindness. I'll vote for kindness.
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THE THIRST