Caribbean vampire, Maximillian (Eddie Murphy), travels to New York to find a half vampire woman to be his bride. The woman, Rita (Angela Bassett), is unaware of her vampire heritage. She’s a police officer with a partner (Allen Payne) who wants her for himself. Maximillian, with the help of his new ghoul (Kadeem Hardison) must persuade her to accept him.
I’m sure this looked good to someone in a business office, but anyone with an understanding of film would see the problems before the project began. Horror that is also funny is difficult. Add in romance and it approaches impossible. Wes Craven had shown no ability to integrate the three and Murphy only knew Comedy and romantic comedy. The script, primarily under the control of Murphy and his brother, demonstrates that the Murphys had seen some old vampire films, but not they they understood how to create frights or avoid clichés.
Little of Craven’s influence works. The empty ship crashing into the dock is an old-time vampire film gimmick and it’s never looked better. Briefly, I was lulled into thinking I was in for a respectable retelling of the standard vampire story, but only briefly. A crucifixion is the only other successful horror image.
The humor is uneven. Kadeem Hardison’s decaying zombie is amusing in an embarrassing way, but doesn’t fit into a film with either horror or romance. It’s broad, slapstick silliness. John Witherspoon comes off as a 1930s film stereotype and not something I would have expected in a film made outside of KKK control in the ’90s. Murphy’s extra characters (a thief and a preacher) are feeble even when compared to his dress-up roles in Coming to America. The preacher could have been funny with some additions, but as is, the routine goes nowhere.
What works best is the romance, but only from Murphy’s end. He makes a surprisingly good, debonair vampire. As Maximillian is the character we follow, here is where the film could have really succeeded. Unfortunately, while Murphy’s playing for light flirtation, Angela Bassett thinks she’s in King Lear, flailing about with intensive anguish and anger every time she’s on screen. Allen Payne, as the third side of the triangle, is also in Lear, but as “Guard Number 2.” He also intense, but in a way lacking any interest. Whenever Bassett and Payne are on screen, it feels like I’m watching another film, and it’s not a very good one. It does, however, contain a lot of shouting.
The Anne Rice school of vampires hadn’t taken over the screen yet in ’95 (Interview with the Vampire had come out only the year before) so Murphy and Craven were still thinking of the vampire as the villain. They should have known better. As a romance with Maximillian as the protagonist, this could have been a landmark film.