“I haven’t misfiled anything! Not once! Not one time!“

Justin’s rating: Does this bite or does it suck? That’s up to you to decide.

Justin’s review: Nicolas Cage is a legend. He gets a whole lot of flak and jibes for his indiscriminate role selection and goofier moments, but I feel that he also isn’t appreciated nearly enough for his all-in acting style and incredibly wide range. You can laugh at him, love him, and admire him — sometimes all in the same movie. Mock him if you must, but I dare you to point to any actor with such a diverse acting resume.

Today I’m cranking the Nic Cage wayback machine to the decadent ’80s with Vampire’s Kiss, one of his sillier early outings. I mean, if you want two hours of unhinged overacting that isn’t somehow related to bees and bears, this will fit the bill quite nicely.

Cage stars as Peter, a narcissistic yuppie who is consumed by loneliness despite coming into orbit with four different women. There’s his sympathetic therapist who tries to untangle his mind, a new love interest named Jackie, his browbeaten secretary Alva, and a vampire who may or may not be real named Rachel.

Like American Psycho, Vampire’s Kiss is the product of a self-obsessed jerk who’s also an unreliable narrator. Early on in the film, Peter takes Rachel to bed only to have her feed on him — but then the movie insinuates that the next morning she’s nothing but a figment of his imagination.

Real or not, Rachel leads Peter down a path of transformation, either to become a real vampire or merely a mentally disturbed weirdo who can’t cope with the relationships around him. I’ve even seen the theory that the bat at the start of the film transmitted rabies, causing all of his symptoms. In any case, he’s a raging jerk to women and is hard to care about as he falls apart.

Yet this dark comedy became somewhat notorious, not for its ambiguous tale, but because it’s a platform for Cage to overact in ways that theater coaches forbid their students from ever doing. He’s truly over-the-top weird in almost all of his scenes, a meme generator with plastic fangs.

Clearly, Vampire’s Kiss isn’t meant to be taken seriously or at face value but rather as a commentary upon loneliness and mental illness. Peter latches onto vampirism as a cause for his state because that’s easier than admitting that he’s completely alone and is responsible for that. Every scene where he goes outside in New York City, he’s the only solo person, as everyone else is a couple. Subtle, this film is not.

It’s also not that fun. I was hoping for a lot more humor and actual vampire adventures, not some guy working through his issues. It satisfied my curiosity about the memes, but I would’ve rather had a cool story to go with it.