Yet again, we’re going back to the 80s for Day 24 of my 31 Days of Vampire Movies feature, and yes, again, we’re dealing with yuppies. For some reason, vampires really love yuppies. Like calls to like, I suppose, and yuppies were the bloodsuckers of the 80s.
Vampires were once the go-to for softcore porn movies. Blood sucking has been used as a metaphor for sex since Carmilla, at least, and before the internet took over, getting your fix for sex wasn’t just a matter of booting up the computer. Getting past the censors was just one of the hurdles, and the symbolism of a tall, handsome brute coming into a young virgin’s bedroom at night to bite her neck in her bed wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was enough to squeak by. Since the 60s, the loosening of standards (and some may say morals, but that’s an argument for another day) allowed sex to be far more explicit in movies than it had been. But vampires are sexy with or without subtext, and as the motto of the 80s was nothing succeeds like excess, so smashing them together seemed like a no-brainer.
Thus we come to tonight’s movie, The Love Story to Die For.
Dracula, or Vlad Tepish as he goes by here, comes to Los Angeles for a new start after his assets are seized by the Romanian government. Damn those Communists. Anyway, here he meets our heroine, Kate, who is on a business meeting/date with her boyfriend on the yacht of a prospective client.
She meets Vlad’s gaze, and the next thing you know, they are necking on the lower deck of the yacht, boyfriend and witnesses be damned.
Kate is set up as someone who wants more from life. She’s a career woman, but a romantic at heart, and also sort of wishy-washy. Needless to say, showing our heroine cheating on her boyfriend in her introduction to the audience is an audacious move, but I’m not sure its the best one. It’s hard to root for her, even if her boyfriend is a bit of a feckless dork.
From there, the movie shows us Kate and Vlad’s romance, an 80s love story if one was ever made. It’s pretty standard stuff. But its the other movie going on alongside it that’s wild as hell. You see, Vlad has been stalked from the Old Country by an old nemesis (a mullet-wearing, California-accented nemesis, just go with it) determined to make Kate his own and then kill her, the way Vlad killed the woman he loved so many centuries ago. And my God, the tone shift between the two plots is enough to give you whiplash. The love story between Kate and Vlad is played as almost chaste despite the love scenes, and the subplot where Vlad’s nemesis wreaks havoc on the greater Los Angeles area at large and Kate’s social circle is brutal and bloody as hell. The kill scenes and dismemberments and vampire stakings belong in a completely different movie, something more akin to the Evil Dead movies than a vampire love story.
Obviously Kate is the Mina character, but the real standout character is her roommate Celia, played with over-the-top brilliance by Amanda Wyss. You know, Tina from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. She is having the time of her life playing the Lucy character as a meek, timid woman who turns into a violent, shrieking, possessive harpy once Vlad comes into her life.
Also, what Vlad does to Celia makes it incredible difficult to root for him as a romantic hero. He romances Celia, half-converts her, and then throws her aside the moment he makes a move on Kate. Both he and Kate deserve each other, honestly. They are shitty, terrible people to the others in their lives.
It’s a bonkers movie in a way only an 80s vampire movie can be. I highly recommend it, even if its a bit hard to find.