Coming to DVD May 15
Cast:
Clare Kramer as Lisa
Matt Keeslar as Maxx
Jeremy Sisto as Darius
Adam Balwin as Lenny
Martin Beck as Owen
Neil Jackson as Duke
Tom Lenk as Kronos
Directed by Jeremy Kasten
Review:
Back in the day, we used to have plenty of angst soaked, brooding vampire flicks – many of them loved to draw comparisons with vampirism to drug addiction, and took place in gritty urban environs. Sometimes they starred Lili Taylor. Sometimes they made me so mad that I wanted to dig out my eyes with a claw hammer. I hate âhipsterâ vamp flicks. They avoid scares, the vampires are always good looking, and most importantly and most annoyingly, they just think they are too damn cool.
“The Thirst” plays out like some weird fever dream, narrated to you by a 15-year-old goth kid with more pimples on his dick then brain cells. The movie begins with some unattractive hooker meeting up with a skinny British john in a cheap motel. After the pre-requisite f–k bargaining, she takes off her dress, and then the British guy starts swishing a handkerchief around, and the handkerchief really scares the hooker for some reason. Then the British guy starts drooling all over the place, and rams a lamp down the hooker’s throat. I donât know why he does this, because heâs supposed to be a vampire, and Iâm not sure how stuffing furniture down hooker’s throats is going to bring him closer to that sweet bloody goodness.
Moving on from the completely incomprehensible opening “teaser”, we meet our hero Maxx (Matt Keesler) an ex-junkie who likes to ride around on his motorcycle and stare off into space intensely. His girlfriend Lisa (Clare Kramer), has cancer, and in order to cope with the terrible disease she wears a silly blue wig, and those fake nautical star tattoos that all the little mall rats seem to love these days. She also works as an exotic dancer. Every once and a while the cancer interrupts her seductive gyrations… and she vomits blood onto her adoring audience. Most of the time she bickers incessantly with Maxx.
She ends up coming to the same conclusion that the audience has already come up with – she is completely worthless and should probably off herself, so in a really over-blown ’80s music video moment, she slashes her wrists while her boyfriend races down the highway on a motorcycle and tries to get there in time. He doesnât. She dies. Yadda, yadda, thereâs a funeral, and Maxx starts putting all of her belongings in plastic bags. I donât know why he does this, and its never explained. He also grows a gigantic and completely fake looking beard.
Later, his lame friends (one of them played by a perpetually mugging Erik Palladino) drop by and, in an attempt to cheer him up, take him to the gayest night club Iâve ever seen in a movie. Can we finally move on from trying to portray goth dance clubs as mysterious and edgy? Lingering slow motion shots of an over-weight dominatrix, and gay leather boys squinting awkwardly at the camera is stupid and boring.
Anyway, at this totally fucking gay nightclub, our hero spots…his girlfriend! She isnât dead! Apparently, she was bit by a vampire at some point, and now sheâs part of a pack of obnoxious vampires, and one of them is Adam Baldwin, and the other is Jeremy Sisto, and it’s really the worst acting of their careers.
So, the hero joins this ‘tard squad, and instantly starts chowing down on every human in sight. At first, everything is great, really fantastic. But then his vampire girlfriend tells him that its wrong that heâs chowing down on people, even though she does it, and even though she is the f–king one that converted him into the vampire world anyway, and now sheâs ragging on him to go cold turkey. So they do. Both of them go cold turkey, and end up facing off against their old bad acting vampire friends in order to save a school bus of retarded Christian children. Iâm serious.
“The Thirst” has no idea how to maintain any consistent tone. Some scenes with the goofy vampire clan seem like they were meant to be “darkly comic”, but instead come off as confusing and ridiculous. Other scenes really play up the whole, vampires as junkies thing, with the poor actors pumping up the melodrama. At times it seemed like a less focused version of “Modern Vampires”, or a much campier take on “The Addiction.” Both of those films are pretty intolerable, but this thing takes it to new levels.
On the purely exploitive side of things, “The Thirst” is pretty packed with tons of hot chicks, and a shit-load of gore. Now, I love those two things just as much as the next guy, but in this filmâs case, if you really have a hankering for either one, maybe watch the film with the volume on low [editor’s note: with that poor of a sound mix it doesn’t really matter.] and the fast forward on half-speed, you might sort of possibly enjoy this on some level.
