The Hunger (1983)

The sleek and sexy opening scenes in which vampire couple Catherine Denueve and David Bowie hunt for victims in a New York City rock club, complete with Bauhaus playing on stage, and then get busy together in the shower is the best part of this molasses slow movie that encourages us to take bloodsuckers seriously. The gore comes in brief flashes, but when Deneuve sits down for some quiet contemplation while classical music plays, that’s when director Tony Scott suddenly takes his sweet time. When you’re just about to fall asleep wondering if anything else cool is going to happen, Deneuve and Susan Sarandon begin searching for the next page of the script in each other’s pants and that perks you up a bit. Still, it’s one of the least thrilling vampire flicks of the 1980s. After the first scene, Tony Scott is done with the action, for the most part, and now wants only to put across a sultry mood that almost resembles a restrained Hollywood take on 70s Euro-trash vampires-and-lesbians movies. Even so, the makings of Scott’s future as an ultra-commercial industry player (his next project was Top Gun) are all over the place here. The film’s look is Slick City, decked out in smoke and urbanity. Then there’s the editing, which is rapid-fire in parts, much like Scott’s later blockbusters. The difference is that in his Tom Cruise vehicles, the fast cutting is there to keep things snappy; here it’s used to disorient us on our quick ride through a vampire’s wild night.