Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 6, 2012, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Neither Jack & Diane nor Vamps (both in limited theatrical release and available on VOD) is specifically a horror film, though they each offer takes on supernatural beings—a humanoid id monster in the former, bloodsuckers in the latter—that work within their own genres.
While it opens with glimpses of its visceral content—a deformed creature created by Gabe Bartalos and hair-and-organs stop-motion by none other than the Quay Brothers—Jack & Diane is first, second and third a portrait of the emotionally troubled romance between two very different teenage girls. Diane (Juno Temple) is a tremulous, waiflike Britisher with a penchant for nosebleeds, first seen getting lost in New York without a cell phone, and wandering into a clothing store where the far more street-smart and forthright Jack (Riley Keough) works. Sparks are struck and a night is spent together, and the attraction seems instinctive rather than intellectual—an animal connection, one might say.
Which is not to suggest that this is another film equating lycanthropy with adolescent hormonal urges. Despite its early descriptions as a “lesbian werewolf film,” Jack & Diane doesn’t showcase a recognizable metaphorical beast but rather a misshapen being that, like other visual cues and dialogue, represents the consuming nature of love. Jack and Diane aren’t always good at articulating their feelings—positive and negative—toward each other, and the snatches of grisly imagery express feelings of fear and danger bubbling under the surface of their passion.
They don’t appear all that often, though; for much of Jack & Diane, the girls deal with more prosaic threats to their togetherness, from Diane’s disapproving aunt (Cara Seymour) to her impending departure to attend school in Paris. The horrific stuff is just one small element of writer/director Bradley Rust Gray’s exploration, which is most dependent on the chemistry between his two leads. He often pushes the camera in close on them, isolating them from the rest of the world, and the actresses are up to such scrutiny; in roles that sometimes see them challenged to express themselves, Keough and Temple make their feelings clear and palpable. They carry the film through situations that are occasionally precious or oblique, and a setting that feels vaguely out of time (it looks like the New York of the present but sometimes feels like the New York of a couple of decades ago). As messy in spots as young love itself can be, Jack & Diane is engrossing and confounding in equal measure.
There are no such peculiarities in Vamps, which also deals with the bond between a pair of young women in Manhattan—even though, a couple of Times Square scenes excepted, it was clearly shot somewhere else (Detroit). This film is a bright, cheery, straightforward comedy about a couple of party gals who just happen to be vampires. Goody (Alicia Silverstone, charmingly reuniting with director Amy Heckerling from Clueless) has been a girl of the night for a couple of centuries, while her BFF Stacy (Krysten Ritter) was more recently turned, and they’ve both adapted well to living among humans. They hold down nighttime jobs as exterminators, providing them with rats to sup on, as they’ve renounced feeding on humans; they’re even part of a support group called Sanguines Anonymous, whose members include a reformed Vlad Tepish (Malcolm McDowell).
This is, obviously, far from the first movie to connect vampirism with other forms of addiction, or to present them as a persecuted minority; here, torches and stakes have been replaced by modern processes like audits and jury-duty summonses intended to get the vamps out into the daylight. If bureaucracy is a new enemy in Heckerling’s world, technology is a fresh annoyance for Goody, who longs for the simpler times she has left behind and is exasperated by communication devices that have usurped actual personal interaction. Heckerling, who also scripted, is clearly channeling her own frustrations about this phenomenon through Goody’s character, and makes a running joke out of the ubiquity of cell phones and texting, the highlight being a hilarious throwaway sight gag in a hospital hallway.
Throughout Vamps, Heckerling indulges in different kinds of nostalgia of her own, casting a couple of actors from her Fast Times at Ridgemont High—one, amusingly, as the same character—and having Stacy attend a film class where she watches surrealist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Un Chien Andalou. It’s here that she meets Joey (Dan Stevens), a nice guy she begins to fall for—and who happens to be the son of the modern Van Helsing (Wallace Shawn). Meanwhile, Goody reconnects with a boyfriend from the ’60s, a former activist now aged into an ACLU lawyer (Richard Lewis). Their relationship supplies some unexpected heart among a series of sight gags and in-jokes, some of which land stronger than others. Vamps’ success lies in its generosity of spirit; you can sense Heckerling loves her characters, and the cast responds in kind. Everyone involved is clearly having fun in their roles—including Sigourney Weaver, camping it up as vampire queen Cisserus—and that sense of fun spreads to the audience too.
