During a period spanning the mid-’80s to early ’90s, the surest indicator of batshit insanity in a film was the leering, pop-eyed, clench-jawed face of Bill Paxton (Big Love, Aliens). I’ve always thought of Paxton as the polar opposite of Bill Pullman (Wild At Heart, Independence Day), whose nearly expressionless face always suggested reserves of suffering and emotional calculation. Pullman could change the direction of a scene with a slight crease of one eye. Paxton, on the other hand, had no reserves; every emotion bubbled on his skin and geysered out with each “Yee-hah!” and “Game over, man!” He’s mellowed over the decades, but at the time, the formula was simple: Paxton = crazy.
May I say that Near Dark, one of the earliest efforts from Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), doesn’t disappoint? Near Dark is pretty crazy. It’s also a key piece of the genre, a bridge from the European trappings of Dracula and Dark Shadows to the outlaw vamps of Lost Boys and the current teen romance craze of Twilight and Vampire Diaries. Near Dark is also quintessentially American: lean, stripped down and set almost entirely in truck stops, bus stations and cheap motels, it never mentions the word vampire or spares more than a moment to explore the histories of its characters. What it contains are some remarkable images, some great action set pieces and one of the most horrific scenes in American film.
Adrian Pasdar plays Caleb, a farm boy who drives into town one evening and attempts to pick up Mae (Jenny Wright), a girl inexplicably hanging around in a convenience store parking lot. She takes a shine to Caleb, but opts for gnawing on his neck instead of kissing him. He tries to return home but is half-rescued, half-kidnapped by Mae’s family, a mangy gang of vampires in a Winnebago with blacked-out windows (shades of Spike). Curiously, most of them are played by cast members of James Cameron’s Aliens, with Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton all looking like dumpster-diving bikers.
The film follows Caleb as he attempts to negotiate a romance with Mae and maintain some semblance of humanity, but the vampires are the real attraction. Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red have imagined their monsters as human beings who have slowly grown feral from their isolation and rootlessness. A scene of remarkable violence, in which the gang victimizes and murders a roomful of patrons, speaks as much to their boredom and contempt for the world as it does to any inherent monstrousness.
Near Dark is out on two-disc DVD and Blu-ray. Watch it.
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