Polydipsia

The moviegoing highlight of my blog-free April was undoubtedly the New Beverly's one-time-only screening of Joe Dante's 1968 Movie Orgy, the culmination of a two-week festival curated by Dante. Not a movie as such, the thing's an always enjoyable, often-hilarious (I can't remember the last time I laughed aloud in a theater) medley of TV shows, serials, a couple music videos, commercials real and fake, and whatever Dante and his friends could get their hands on in a spliceable format for addition to their ever-expanding rubber-band ball.

Dante's been relatively silent recently, shooting a couple Masters of Horror episodes and a bit of other TV work since in the five years since he made Looney Tunes, but he's getting back in the director's chair for a remake of Thirst, an underappreciated 1979 Australian vampire flick.

The first 30 minutes of Thirst feel remarkably like a mildly vampiric episode of The Prisoner, and I was tickled to see that director Rod Hardy did in fact helm 19 episodes of that series between 1979 and 1981. Thirst was his feature debut, after which he returned to television directing (working on X-Files, Mission: Impossible, and the new Battlestar Galactica, among many others).

In any case, Thirst is underrated, with solid acting (including from David Hemmings and a couple British imports), that good old Prisoner feel (gets bonus points from me), and a handful of good, creepy moments, including a set piece that better tackles the difficult issue of conveying the real feeling of a reluctant vampire's ineluctable need to feed than any other I've seen. On this note and others, it might make a decent companion piece to George A. Romero's 1977 Martin, another somewhat modernized, deromanticized vampirism pic.

There are other examples to pick from; the 1970s were a fertile time for bringing the vampire into modernity, starting with 1970's Count Yorga, Vampire, and moving on to Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the latter two each boasting a revealing original title: Dracula Today and Dracula Is Dead And Well And Living In London, respectively, but thematic aspects of Thirst kept me much more in mind of Martin.

Thirst, I think, is more intrigued with technologizing vampirism and how that somewhat stark, procedural, white-roomed Kaiser Permanente approach contrasts with the characters' vision of the vampire culture, their respect for a character who turns out to be distant kin of Elizabeth Báthory, and their Martin-like reliance on a prosthetic, which here seems almost more an emotional relic than a practical need.

In extra-good news, Dante is taking over directorial duties from the largely untalented Mick Garris, who can now get back to his important work of rummaging through Stephen King's trash cans.