“Normally this would be one of those tales of gore and homicidal urges,” says 170-year-old vampire Goody (Alicia Silverstone) in the opening narration of Amy Heckerling’s Vamps, “but I’ve always looked on the bright side.” Goody’s upbeat attitude infuses writer-director Heckerling’s 2012 horror comedy, which reunites her with Clueless star Silverstone for another delightful story about an exuberant young woman finding her place in the world.
Of course, Goody only looks young, although she’s a child compared to centuries-old vampires like her “stem” Cisserus (Sigourney Weaver), the vampire who made her. Goody keeps her youthful energy thanks to her friendship with her roommate Stacy (Krysten Ritter), another of Cisserus’ vampiric creations. Stacy was turned in the 1990s, so she’s still marginally in touch with modern trends, although she adorns her coffin lid with pin-ups of heartthrobs who are way past their prime. “Jeans mark your age more than a birth certificate,” Stacy tells Goody, and while Vamps isn’t as creatively colorful as Clueless, it has its own distinctive sense of era-blending style, courtesy of Clueless costume designer Mona May.
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It takes a while before Vamps introduces much of a central conflict, which is eventually resolved just as breezily as it’s introduced, but the movie is so enjoyable as a hangout comedy that it doesn’t really matter if Goody and Stacy lack the angst and paranoia of typical movie vampires. There’s a vampire-hunting Van Helsing here, but he’s played by Wallace Shawn, so there’s only so much menace he can project. His son Joey (Dan Stevens) is the Van Helsing with the most screen time, engaged in a sweet romance with Stacy.
Stacy and Joey have a meet-cute in a college film class as they’re watching Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and Heckerling fills Vamps with clips from silent-era films, including Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The movie becomes a celebration of pop-culture history, whether that’s German expressionism or Gothic fiction or pop-punk bands. When Cisserus stalks her prey, she casts a Count Orlok-like shadow on the wall. “We never drink … mojitos,” Goody and Stacy respond when offered cocktails at a club, in a variation on Dracula’s famous line that Tod Browning could never have envisioned.
Goody has a picture of Edgar Allan Poe in her box of photos of former boyfriends, and she futilely asks the clerk at a video store for posters of James Cagney, Jack Lemmon and Paul Newman. Heckerling voices some hackneyed complaints about modern technology via her characters, but she also keeps them cheerfully open-minded. Goody frequently reminisces about the history of various New York City landmarks, with a mix of nostalgia and optimism that the movie shares.
Goody and Stacy are still engaged in human activities because they’ve never been at odds with humanity, preferring instead to subsist on animal blood. They attend a support group for vampires who choose not to drink from humans, but there’s none of the brooding that comes from resisting the lure of human blood for vampires like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Angel. Goody and Stacy work night jobs as exterminators, so there are plenty of rats for them to feed on. They pop straws into the vermin like Capri-Suns, and they’re all set.
Nearly all of the vampires in Vamps are so affable that it’s hard to see why Van Helsing wants to hunt them at all. His interrogation of Stacy is closer to typical protective-parent behavior anyway, as he angles to involve himself in the personal life of the son who finds him exasperating. “You plan to suck the life out of him?” Van Helsing asks Stacy. “No more than any other girlfriend,” she blithely responds. She’s annoyed that Van Helsing serves her garlic soup, not because it’s dangerous to vampires, but because she’s never liked garlic.
Stacy and Joey have an endearing dynamic, as does Goody with her long-lost 1960s boyfriend Danny (Richard Lewis), who now looks old enough to be her father. Stacy and Joey seem destined for each other, but Goody never tries to interfere with the life that Danny built for himself after they broke up, acting more as a vampiric support system than a rival to Danny’s sick wife (Marilu Henner). Even in their love lives, Goody and Stacy take care not to damage any humans.
The emotional core of Vamps is in the friendship between Goody and Stacy rather than their romantic relationships, and Heckerling finds some surprising depth in the connection between the undead besties. The challenges they face from external threats are pretty minor, and there’s a sense that they could go on just dancing at nightclubs and accruing college degrees for a few more centuries, as long as they have each other. Silverstone and Ritter have fantastic chemistry, and Heckerling is an expert at depicting positive, enduring female friendship.
This is still a vampire movie, so eventually there has to be a big bad, and Weaver fits the bill as Cisserus. She gives an entertainingly hammy performance as the reckless vampire who doesn’t care about hiding her homicidal activities. Even the onetime Vlad the Impaler (Malcolm McDowell) now spends his time knitting and hasn’t fed from a human in more than 300 years, but Cisserus orders pizza so that she can snack on the delivery guy (a cameoing Taylor Negron from Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High).
In the movie’s somewhat belabored lore, the death of a stem means that every vampire they ever created will revert to human form and immediately age physically as they would have chronologically. So when Cisserus becomes a major threat to the undead community, defeating her carries real risk for Goody and Stacy. The spectacle of Weaver’s severed head bobbing around on top of a Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion skeleton is amusing, but there are also genuine stakes for the characters in taking her down.
Heckerling never lets things get too scary or serious, ending the movie on a bittersweet note that centers the power of friendship and the possibility of new life. Vamps is such a warm, vibrant, funny movie that it’s a travesty that its commercial and critical failure marked the end of Heckerling’s career as a feature filmmaker, at least thus far. The director behind iconic teen comedies brought that same sensibility to vampires in the city, in a movie that’s just as charming and fun to spend time with as its main characters.
