行尸走肉

Title: Flesh for Frankenstein Year: 1973 Genre: Horror, Sci-Fi Country: Italy, France Language: English, French Director/Screenwriter: Paul Morrissey Composer: Claudio Gizzi Cinematographer: Luigi Kuveiller Editors: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi Cast: Udo Kier Monique van Vooren Joe Dallesandro Arno Jürging Dalila Di Lazzaro Srdjan Zelenovic Nicoletta Elmi Marco Liofredi Liù Bosisio Rating: 6.5/10 English Title: Blood for Dracula Original Title: Sangue per Dracula Year: 1974 Genre: Horror Country: Italy, France, USA Language: English Director/Screenwriter: Paul Morrissey Composer: Claudio Gizzi Cinematographer: Luigi Kuveiller Editors: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi Cast: Udo Kier Joe Dallesandro Vittorio De Sica Maxime McKendry Arno Jürging Milena Vukotic Dominique Darel Stefania Casini Silvia Dionisio Eleonora Zani Gil Cagne Rating: 7.4/10 Title: Blade Year: 1998 Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Horror Country: USA Language: English, Russian, Serbian Director: Stephen Norrington Screenwriter: David S. Goyer Composer: Mark Isham Cinematographer: Theo van de Sande Editor: Paul Rubell Cast: Wesley Snipes Stephen Dorff N’Bushe Wright Kris Kristofferson Donal Logue Udo Kier Sanaa Lathan Kevin Patrick Walls Tim Guinee Eric Edwards Arly Jover Traci Lords Kenny Johnson Rating: 7.1/10 Title: Swan Song Year: 2021 Genre: Drama, Comedy, Biography Country: USA Language: English Director/Screenwriter: Todd Stephens Composer: Chris Stephens Cinematographer: Jackson Warner Lewis Editor: Spencer Schilly, Santiago Figueira W. Cast: Udo Kier Jennifer Coolidge Michael Urie Linda Evans Ira Hawkins Stephanie McVay Annie Kitral Tom Bloom Eric Eisenbrey Thom Hilton Justin Lonesome Shanessa Sweeney Bryant Carroll Jonah Blechman Rating: 6.7/10 A cult figure in the world cinema, Udo Kier (1944-2025) was an actor on the opposite spectrum of being finicky, acting in over 220 films, such prolificacy determines that he was a character actor most of the time, oftentimes slumming it in umpteen thankless roles, but when given a leading role to play, he is able to knock it out of the park with a sophistication that seems inborn to him, whose presence could make a quiet scene dangerous, and a chaotic one strangely elegant. Like in his one-two punch Andy Warhol’s Italian productions reimagining two horror perennial monsters: FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN and BLOOD FOR DRACULA, both directed by the late Paul Morrissey (1938-2024) and filmed at Cinecittà in Rome, which put Kier’s name on the map. FLESH is a film that looks, at first glance, like a midnight-movie prank cooked up in a haze of audacity and questionable substances. Yet Morrissey - channeling Warhol’s Factory spirit in a European production context - constructs something more peculiar than parody, more pointed than exploitation. The film’s voluptuous colors, its deliberate artificiality, and its outrageous sexual transgressions elevate it into a spectacle where everything seems woodenly off-kilter (“To know death you have to fuck life in the gallbladder”). The sets resemble aristocratic dollhouses: the costumes look rescued from an opera company in urgent financial distress, the lighting seems determined to flatter absolutely no one. But all this visual bravado serves a larger satire: behind Kier’s Baron Frankenstein, drunk on Nietzschean fantasies and surgical impunity, stand the real targets - totalitarian ideologues, aesthetic purists, and self-appointed engineers of the “perfect” human (sabotaged by his manufactured male monster’s incuriosity towards the opposite sex, much congruent with the team’s queer streak). Kier, who plants himself at the center of this carnival of the grotesque with the conviction of a man performing Shakespeare in a haunted abattoir. His line deliveries - equal parts melodrama, tyranny, and unhinged scholarship - turn every scene into a camp aria. Yet he is only as striking as the film around him, a work whose style mimics the decadence it condemns, and whose shock tactics, despite their cartoonish nature, critique the way power manipulates bodies like raw material. If the guts fly toward the audience, it is not to repulse but to awaken. Still, Kier alone could not have balanced such madness without the counterpoints offered by his cast-mates. Dallesandro, the cover boy of Warhol’s Factory, with his laconic charm and rock-solid physicality, plays the “normal” man in the story with an air of nonchalance (his comfort zone) if “normal” means wandering into an egotist baron’s laboratory of cadavers and slapping a high-toned nymphomaniac. Van Vooren brings a gleeful wickedness as the Baroness, a kind of proto–real housewife whose detachment makes the gore somehow funnier (let alone the overt incest admission, she and Baron are both siblings and spouses). Even Juerging, as the Baron’s loyal but sexually inexperienced assistant Otto, contributes an essential nervous energy, reminding us that every great mad scientist requires a terrified man at his beck and call. Less serviceable is Zelenovic’s male monster, a supreme breed of Serbian extraction, a total dud in terms of appeal, still he is more “alive” than Di Lazzaro’s female monster, routinely objectified, eviscerated and mortified by the act of necrophilia. A year later, BLOOD arrives like the melancholic sibling to FLESH, painted with the same brush of satire but in softer, almost painterly strokes. It is shot with lush attention to texture - the gleam of marble floors, the tremor of candlelight, the heavy air inside decaying villas. In this environment, Kier’s Count Dracula, pointedly dubbed as “the weakest Dracula” ever in the history of filmmaking, becomes less a blood hunter than a terminal patient desperate for a cure - a virgin girl’s blood, languishing in a world that has been too insalubrious to his kind (as vampire is a depreciating metaphor of the aristocracy, weakened by the daylight, not necessarily lethal), as virgins become as rare as hen’s teeth in a world impinged on by a modern view on sex liberation. De Sica (in his final silver screen appearance) and McLendry (a Warhol’s confidant) are the two hard-up aristocratic relics, who are perfectly at ease to marry their daughter off for the lucres promised by Dracula. Among their four daughters, Dracula mistakenly chooses two the most eligible ones for his bride and suffers from the blood-vomiting consequences, not once but twice (which lends the film an anticlimactic comic feel above all the gory happenings). Were he to pick the most obvious choice, the eldest spinster Esmeralda (Vukotic, who seems miffed to be shoehorn in an undervalued role and seeks every opportunity to attest tat she could’ve been the real deal) at the first place, the film would’ve end up in a more sanguine light. Dallesandro appears again in another cushy role, this time as the earthy, exuberantly virile farmhand whose vitality becomes a weapon against a parasitic nobility. The film’s humor is dry and relentless (including a juicy cameo from Polanski as a gaming bumpkin). Morrissey skewers not only the aristocracy but also the fantasy of moral purity: the very notion that a body could be untouched, unsullied, waiting to rescue a dying count, is revealed as absurd and grossly dated. Yet beneath the satire lies real sorrow. Kier’s Dracula, with trembling hands and pleading eyes, embodies the fragility of a class clinging desperately to its illusions. When he speaks, his voice wavers between entitlement and despair; when he bleeds - spectacularly, copiously - he bleeds for an entire system collapsing under its own mythologies. Morrissey’s diptych is Warhol’s bold, subversive mockery to the ossified heteronormative standard on monsters and eroticism, and that mission lives and dies with Kier, who splendidly hokes up almost every line with an intensity that runs thwart to his less impassioned costars. This twofer also marks Kier as an icon of a very special cinematic moment: the intersection of art-house daring and grind-house provocation. Yet Kier never remained in one orbit for long. Fast forward to 1998, and he stands amid strobe lights and chrome architecture in BLADE, a film that takes comic-book adaptations out of their timid adolescent phase and hurls them into muscular adulthood. Directed by Norrington with the swagger of a man determined to make a superhero movie that didn’t apologize for its genre, the film’s open gambit is the now-infamous blood-rave - a sequence so kinetic and gleefully macabre that it announces, in one splatter-heavy minute, a revolution in tone. Snipes, in his prime, moves through the film with balletic lethality, blending martial arts, stoicism, and a faint undercurrent of tragedy. His Blade, a vampire-hunter who himself is a half-vampire, aka. "daywalker”, is a hero forged in trauma, driven by duty, and armored with impeccable sunglasses. Kristofferson, as Whistler, provides the grizzled mentorship the genre thrives on, grounding the Gothic-modern fusion with weary authenticity, and an apprehensive feeling of becoming a jaded casualty. Then there is Dorff’s Deacon Frost, a villain whose youth-driven rebellion against the old vampire order introduces a facile political dynamic. Frost is ambitious, stylish, contemptuous - a creature of the new millennium only too eager to tear down the old guard. Which is where Kier’s Dragonetti, suitably as a vampire elder, enters the tableau, every inch the aristocrat the modern world is trying to replace. While his screen time is limited, his presence is distilled elegance. Kier plays him like a vampire who has once sat for a Frans Hals’ portrait and never fully recovered. He brings history to a film obsessed with futurity: the past in a suit, glaring at techno-fueled insurgency. The contrast between Dorff’s sleek ambition and Kier’s icy gravitas infuses their scenes with tension - generational, philosophical and irreconcilable. Only his doom is a tad simplified for the sake of plot development, which marks the death of not just a character but an entire cinematic tradition of aristocratic vampires. It is almost poetic that Kier, once the fragile count in BLOOD, becomes the emblem of the ancient order being swept aside. BLADE also boasts a manful heroine in the person of Wright’s Dr. Karen Jenson, although au fond, her weight in the story is negligible, a mere participant on the sidelines who doesn’t have much of an agency to be essential, no matter what a steely face Wright manages to put on. Even Lathan makes more splash in a small role as Blade’s turned mother, who fits the tired tradition of a child’s parricidal urge. BLADE is a sleek, mature adaptation and cleverly keeps the climax neat and clean (a more monstrous and cosmic one is shot but vetoed after a poor preview reception), and calisthenically pleasing, although it neutralizes the brouhaha of summoning an almighty deity. And then, decades later, as though gathering all the past selves he had scattered across genres, Kier returned with SWAN SONG, a film that feels like an apposite coda - and a validation of his real nature (Kier is openly gay). Directed by Stephens with a handful of tenderness and gentle mischief, the film casts him as Pat Pitsenbarger, a retired hairdresser coaxed out of seclusion for one final job. It is a small-scaled road film based on a true story, but with a large, beating heart, as Pat must reconcile himself with some long-established grudges of his past before death catches up with him. The soft-hued, sedately-paced SWAN SONG is tinged with a melancholy of towns where their glory days have long passed, and is suffused by a personal meditation on queer history, aging, and the private mythologies we build to survive. Kier, in turn, avails himself of a rare chance to strut his stuff - nuanced, funny, nonplussed, frail but defiantly alive. He can transform a nursing home, a convenient store, a cemetery, a small-town saloon, into stages of personal resurrection, punctured by his fitful remembrance of a fulfilled past, the palpitations of reaching the end of the road. Kier is joined by Coolidge, who plays his protégée and rival hairdresser with the kind of deadpan shrewdness that she rarely has a chance to emote; Evans (incredibly, her first film role in 40 years!) as the deceased client whose final request sets the plot in motion; and Urie, a soft-centered gay man whose own coming-out story is beholden to Pat. But SWAN SONG is Kier’s film from the ground up, an elegiac valediction to a man who doesn’t take any concession about his distinct otherness even in senility. Approaching this quartet as a collective odyssey reveals not only Kier’s unique charisma but the way his presence alters the cinematic environments around him. Morrissey’s grotesque operettas become more emotionally charged because Kier plays their absurdity straight. Norrington’s action epic gains texture because Kier brings a century of vampire lore in his posture alone. Stephens’s intimate drama is elevated by Kier because he encapsulates decades of undimmed queer spirit into a relatable, poignant specimen of marching to a different drummer. Most astonishingly, Kier isn’t shying away from exposing vulnerability, whether in a small part or a leading part. He achieves something subtler but essential: he becomes the connective tissue - fitting, for a man whose first iconic role involved a great deal of stitching - between exploitation and art, horror and humor, camp and contemplation, a jack of all spades but not exactly a protean one, as in the core, Kier always manifests a certain degree of pain and suffering, like a perpetually tormented entity one can never fully comprehend. Thus, if we wish for a final image worthy of him, it is not Frankenstein’s crazed mania, nor the fragile Dracula at the mercy of his victim’s blood, nor the somber Dragonetti presiding over a doomed council. It is Pat Pitsenbarger kit out in his Sunday’s best, the flower-adorned fedora, the olive-color suit with a foulard, staring at death with a faintly perturbed presence of mind: no one shall forget he once lived and breathed in this mortal coil. referential entries: Jim Sharman’s THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975, 7.8/10); Kathryn Bigelow’s STRANGE DAYS (1995, 7.3/10); Werner Herzog’s NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979, 7.9/10); Robert Eggers’NOSFERATU (2024, 7.6/10); Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles’s BACURAU (2019, 7.3/10).