Vampire's Kiss (1988 film) = Finished

Let's be clear:

Vampire's Kiss is a bad movie.

The script and story are a mess. The workplace gender dynamics on display are both regressive, and unfortunately, still all too real. It's a semi-erotic psychological thriller drama comedy about a man with a stick up his ass and raging mental illness who believes that he's becoming a vampire. The soundtrack spins from cool techno to haunting beats to horror strings, seemingly on the turn of a dime.

The fact that this combination has any merit at all (and I believe it does) is entirely due to Nicolas Cage and his absurd performance--despite it being one of his most panned.

Cage's literary agent Peter Loew swings between fluttering pretension, arbitrary cruelty, and sheer, actual madness. Sometimes, you get a bit of all three in the same scene. Bearing an obnoxious laugh and the widest eyes this side of the Atlantic, he lurches from bar to bar, hisses at his secretary, and tears his neat, expensive apartment to tiny pieces. However, without this accented nightmare of a man, the movie would fall over under its own contradictory weight. In many ways, it already does. This heightened performance clearly matches and enhances what wants to be a heightened yet shocking world. And in the end...

Peter loses his mind entirely. After a series of seductions from a vampiric woman who does not exist, he eats a cockroach, chews a pigeon to bits, and murders a woman in the back of a swanky club by sinking his canines into her jugular. He's roaming the streets of New York with blood smeared around his lips and clothes, holding a makeshift "stake" and begging anyone who happens to look in his direction to kill him. He cringes at every cross he sees. Sunlight burns.
He runs to it.

Hallucinations wracking his mind, he finally collapses into his 'coffin' (an upturned couch) with his stake. The brother of the secretary he torments throughout the film enters the room. Cage props up the stake, and the brother drives it down.

It's done.

He's done.

Rather than simply being a mess of a movie (like so many bad movies are), you're left with something sad and weird and pitiful and a little bit lonely. The responsibility for this achievement rests entirely on Cage's heaving, moistened brow.

What a thing.