Queen of the Damned Recap

NOTE: This Recap was published on August 11, 2018. The content was as it appeared in the original email from May 2014, although it was edited and reformatted where necessary.

Jamie

Another late one. I’ll try to make this an aberration and not the norm… next week. For now this is late. Deal with it. Last week was Queen of the Damned and wasn’t it a damn good BMT film… you see what I did there? Cause the movie has Damned in the title. Overall though, the film was ridiculous in all the right ways. I’m honestly not sure the film could possibly have been made and released under any other circumstance other than to rescue an expiring property license. A vampire rock and roll star does battle at a giant goth concert against Aaliyah who sets the record for least time on screen for a titular character. Um… really? This is happening? It seems the studio guy in charge of it must have had to say, “You know what? Fuck it, yeah, I’m in on this craziness. Why not? It’s the 90’s.” Cause it was a very 90’s film. Either that or they had to say, “You know what? I do not care what this looks like. We need this train rolling, so let’s get this movie out the door.” Anyway, I’ve talked too much talk, so let me walk the walk by giving you my three favorite things about the film:  

1) The voice-overs! Was the entire film voice-overs? No, not 100%. More like 110%. It was a wonderful example of excessive voice-over in BMT. May as well have been a book-on-tape.

2) Aaliyah! I have a feeling she would have been a favorite of ours with more breadth to her filmography. Just too good. And did I mention that she’s the titular character and doesn’t show up until 45 minutes into the movie and has only 10 lines or so? Just another case where the trailer and poster totally lied to the audience about what the movie would really be about.

3) The set pieces! They were the settiest sets we have set our eyes on in some time. It’s like I was watching a play at some points. I could imagine a stagehand movie the rooms around on wheels.

Phew, well there we go. That’s my three. Let’s see what Patrick thought:

Patrick

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that we made a horrible mistake with this Chain Reaction idea … strike that, we made a horrible mistake with picking Sabotage during week 8 last round. Not only a garbage movie, but its garbage-ness is reverberating throughout BMT for 2 months making it more and more difficult to effectively choose BMT-quality films. I barely know what movie we are doing anymore, and we certainly aren’t linking up with Furry Vengeance next week. With all that being said, we’ve watched a bunch of movies I’ve wanted to watch for BMT and some I never expected to watch (and enjoyed immensely). So weirdly enough things are working out.

Last week was Queen of the Damned. And it was bananas. I haven’t seen Interview with a Vampire, but this was the sequel (well … two sequels mashed into one) and it was crazy. We got rock and roll vampires. Vampire effects. The Blurry super-fast movements and horrid horrid flying effects, very reminiscent of both Twilight and True Blood, I almost want to say this was kind of the origin of it … although I doubt many people watched Queen of the Damned in film school. The costumes were bad, it wasn’t a horror film, and the Queen of the Damned was a cartoon character who was barely in this unfortunately long movie.

I’m making it sound terrible, but it was a delight. I loved this movie from a bad movie perspective. It is like they were checking tropes off. In particular, a dual-voiceover that lasts the entire movie (no joke, I think 50% of this movie had someone talking over it), throw in crazy CGI, terrible dialogue, and an extreme acting tour-de-force by Aaliyah and you have a winner in my book. They got insane set pieces and an audio flashback to boot. I really rather enjoyed it. Big Momma’s House, Romeo Must Die (despite being ridiculously boring) and Queen of the Damned have been a damn fine start to the chain reaction. Let’s see if we can keep it going … although I have no idea how we’re going to solve the Furry Vengeance problem. But I’m going to continue to put that off for a few more weeks. Let’s go.

Conclusion

Lots of valid points. As Patrick pointed out, it’s been a while since we had a film that really hit almost all of the BMT tropes that we love to pick on. This did its job right. Unfortunately the one thing it didn’t have was a MonoSklog. So we can’t really do that one this week.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs