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Rating: If during your nighttime adventures you happen to hit on a pale blonde who talks to you about the immortality of stars (and her own) and is in a hurry to get home before dawn, start to worry because she might be a... damn it! I realize that throughout the entire movie this word is never spoken, yet it's true, this girl is a vampire and if you let her bite your neck, without her fully draining you, your life will change.
Caleb is a good cowboy of our times who makes the mistake of falling in love and will be forced to leave his family to become part of a new and very strange family, almost punk. "Dad" Jessie and "Mom" Diamondback have lived in their undead condition since the time of the Civil War, "Uncle" Severen is a violent psychotic always thirsty for blood, "little brother" Homer was vampirized as a child and has remained as such. And then there's Mae, a sweet-eyed blonde who could make anyone fall in love. Five beings who travel up and down Oklahoma in a camper with shielded windows to keep out the sun's rays, forced to stop in garages and motels during the day only to go out and commit massacres at night in search of the "red stuff".
But Caleb is a good guy, he can't bring himself to kill victims even though he needs to drink the precious serum to survive, a "habit" he's picked up that he can only satisfy thanks to the love of his personal dealer, Mae, who every night opens the veins of her own arm to feed her boyfriend. Who is always torn between a different kind of love in a monstrous condition and the normality of human family life.
At her debut Katheryn Bigelow directs a film with style that to date remains her best. It's a modern film that uses an ancient theme like that of vampires to discuss love and the risks of love itself. The metaphor of blood infected by a bite alludes to the AIDS crisis, the modern plague transmitted through sexual intercourse or an infected syringe.
In this regard, there are two emblematic scenes. The first is when Caleb, newly infected, flees from the camper to try to return home, dragging himself through immense pain to the bus station, where like an ordinary drug addict with half-closed eyes and foam at the mouth, he must beg for the dollars needed to buy his ticket. The second is when, in a parking lot rendered green and blue by the nocturnal photography that characterizes the entire film, an exhausted Caleb, unable to kill, is forced to accept Mae's offer and on his knees, suck her arm eagerly until reaching a sort of orgasm for both, punctuated by the dark soundtrack of the German Tangerine Dream.
Bigelow proves to be a worthy partner of James Cameron in utilizing the actors (like Adrian Pasdar, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton, none of whom are major stars but are extremely talented) in the scenes of violence. Among these is a dramatic and at the same time ironic one where the entire vampire family storms into a bar on the side of the highway, terrorizing bikers and truckers to the rhythm of a jukebox playing the languid version of "Fever" performed by the legendary and equally monstrous Cramps (...Tarantino and Rodriguez, here’s another of your "thefts"!). But it's also striking when, closed in the darkness of the bungalow, the "family" of vampires is surrounded by police shooting, turning the thin walls into a sieve through which sunlight filters and burns their skin.
In the end, as Master Scorsese taught us in his version of "Dracula", it's always love that triumphs, but Bigelow will never use happy ends again. And she's right because sometimes in this shitty world we need hope.
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