I think I have met my match.
Academia trained me to derive meaning in both everything and also from nothing. An incontrovertible fact can become debatable speculation. Remember when Manning Marable reinvented a book about Malcolm X speculating about his sexuality and fidelity? And then academia excoriated the posthumous Marable for that book’s lack of scholarly rigor? Some say that Marable’s funeral plot is marked not with a tombstone, but with a Pinocchio nose protruding comically from the soil.
Well, Vampire in Brooklyn has stomped me. My training has failed.
After all, Charlie and Eddie Murphy (Maximillian) wrote this movie with the former its star. It features the late John Witherspoon (Silas Green), known for his “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!” gag when referencing to sex, and Dwayne Wayne Kadeem Hardison (Julius Jones) from A Different World. These actors want to solicit laughter.
Yet Wes Craven directed Vampire in Brooklyn. Yes, the Wes Craven, known for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. Then, Angela Bassett (Detective Rita Veder) co-stars with Eddie Murphy as his love interest?
It’s like when I told a kid in HS that two wrongs don’t make a right, and they replied that the product of two negatives make a positive.
Welp, not here.
While I’m familiar with ‘80s movie titles such as Beverly Hills Cop and The Golden Child, never once in my life have I ever considered Eddie Murphy a sex symbol. The notion is comical in itself. Coming to America is a full-fledged comedy, so it gives permission for audiences to chuckle at the idea that Eddie Murphy got pull with the ladies because of his good looks and charm, not his money. Vampiric lore—Vampire: The Masquerade (VTM) best explains it through Presence—explains Eddie Murphy’s seduction of Angela Basset(‘s character). I mean, Bassett probably deserved a Golden Globe for not busting out laughing every time she saw him in that terrible wig.
As my wife explains to me that the horror-comedy genre includes movies like Gremlins and Beetlejuice, my brain short-circuits because those films know exactly what they are trying to do, and are therefore, good. Vampire in Brooklyn remains non-committal in its intentions. For instance, Eddie Murphy turns Dwayne Wayne Kadeem Hardison into a “ghoul,” the equivalent of a familiar or thrall in vampire lore. Wes Craven depicts him as much a ghoul as a goon. The silliest among his bodily deterioration takes place during the film’s climax. One of his eyeballs falls out during a failed attempt to thwart Basset’s rescuer, Allen Payne as Detective Justice. He soon asks the same Payne to help him look for it, and Payne immediately and unknowingly steps on it as a squishy punchline.
Should I be laughing or should I wonder if Payne, or if Basset will be forever cursed? But then Basset saves herself. Girl power?
Again, Vampire in Brooklyn isn’t an encyclopedia of vampire tropes. Yet I wonder, that when Murphy dies, shouldn’t Basset have died with him? Then again, according to this movie, she wasn’t fully turned because she hadn’t fed upon a human. Doubling back, when Murphy turns Dwayne Wayne into a ghoul, he does so by forcing him to drink a few drops of his blood. I’m rusty on the rules of VTM, but I feel like that’s how fellow vampires bond with each other, by drinking each other’s blood? I’m not even going to bother to look this up to see if I’m wrong. I’m just going to roll with it because not sure if serious, right? Actually, I did look it up, and yes. VTM isn’t the end-all, but it’s a fairly well-known source.
I can’t say I’m glad I watched Vampire and Brooklyn, but I’m glad that it exists because Black people deserve to make and participate in bad movies. Notwithstanding, this movie is unapologetically Black Aesthetic, from Maximillian’s pimped out limousine to the decorative etchings on his casket, to Murphy playing as the unscrupulous pastor during his “Evil is Good” sermon taking place outside because he nearly catches fire when he steps foot in a church.
Notably, a voodoo shaman describes a prior encounter with a vampire and warns the protagonists why Eddie Murphy has arrived and how they can go about defeating him. We are long overdue a movie depicting a coven based in the Caribbean. Where is that movie?