Oct 5 2010
AMAD October 4th: Suck (2010)
PCN Rating: 
In all of the ways vampirism has manifested itself, I’m a bit surprised that it took this long to get a full blown metaphor linking it to the career of the rock musician. Sure, Anne Rice gave Lestat a brief stint as a rock god, and those Lost Boys of the 80s were only a stone’s throw away from punkers, but Rob Stefanuik’s Suck is the first sustained exploration—in film anyway—of what it might be like to be both a vampire and a rockstar. Turns out, it’s sometimes hard to tell the two apart, and being very good at the former is terifficaly helpful for the latter.
More a flat-out comedy than a horror film, Suck tells the story of a struggling Canadian rock band who suddenly find appeal when their female guitarist/vocalist Jennifer (Jessica Pare) gets bitten by the excessively styled vampire Queenie (Dimitiri Coats) one night after a show. At first, her bandmates—headliner Joey (Stefanuik himself), guitarist Sam (Paul Anthony) and drummer Tyler (Mike Lobel)—are suspicious but when she takes the stage and literally glows (not sparkles) with glam intensity, they change their tune. For the first time, they have an audience who actually recognizes they are on stage and isn’t calling for them to get lost.
It’s the shift in their luck, and only Joey—who used to date Jennifer and is feeling jealous over her star status—is objecting. They notice her crappy sleeping schedule and pigmentally exotic complexion, but are chalking both up to a relapsed drug habit. Only the roadie, Hugo ( Chris Ratz) knows Jen’s secret; he walks up while she’s using a slurpee straw to drain a convenience store employee. Now he’s reluctantly chopping up the bodies and hiding the evidence from her bandmates. Eventually, the jig is up, and the whole gang decide to convert. Their sleazy manager (Dave Foley), once on the verge of firing himself, is now clamoring to help them by procuring groupies the band can drain on their down time. Chasing on their tail, looking for Queenie out of matters of personal vengeance, is Eddie Van Helsing, and nothing more need be said about him beyond the fact he’s played by Malcolm McDowell with an eyepatch.
Despite being a low budget affair and Stefanuik’s first feature-length film, Suck looks well polished and visually flashy, boasting amongst its strengths a kind of technicolor pallette that doesn’t so much render the vamps pale as a beautiful, frosty blue. Jennifer looks like she might have hopped directly off the cover of Eerie! Or Tales from the Crypt, still carrying the shades of green ink around her lashes. The set design, which moves us in and out of hotel rooms and dingy Quebec clubs, is also appropriately robust and garish. Suck isn’t much interested in the rot and wreck of the rock lifestyle, but in the silliness and paegentry of it.
Less a mockery and more a goofy homage, it also drops a lot of recognizable rock faces into the mix. Most of those faces are a bit worse for the wear these days, and it drives home the metaphor of a life cheerfully sucked dry by excess. Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop and Moby (who plays a rocker whose fans throw raw steaks at him on stage) enhance the tonge-in-cheek atmosphere and strike a correlation between old-school performance art and old-school horror pop art. When Alice Cooper shows up, first as a bartender and then as a black-winged crossroads demon pitching a killer recruitment, he solidifies that gothic excess. Cooper, surprisingly reflective and mirthful in-person, has a great time digging up his old schtick and I suspect his speech at the end reflects the kind of thing he was hearing from record execs and managers quite a bit back in the 70s.
There’s such a good-natured vibe to Suck that even all of its gory accoutrements—including a bitchin’ bit where a vamp is impaled on the end of a guitar in mid-performance—can’t shake the feeling of, well, almost wholesomeness. Like Cooper and the old guard, Suck remembers a time when both rock and horror were capable of laughing at themselves and spurning their darkness by subtly mocking it. Anyone that has sat through their fair share of silly 80’s horror comedies—Saturday the 14th, Transylvania 6500, Vamp—will recongize a similar bent with Suck. It’s just plain fun, even if it gets its lines crossed and ultimately misses the boat its aiming to catch.
The biggest disappointment here is that Stefanuik, clearly juggling more ideas than he has room for, makes a half-hearted stab (hyuk!) at transforming the film into an out-and-out rock opera. Queenie’s seduction song (Coates is the frontman for Burning Brides) sets up the movie to follow the route of a musical, but after that most of the performances are solely on the stage. In the credits, we see bloopers where McDowell protests the fact he wasn’t given a number. I agree, and think Suck would have achieved the cult status it’s desperately seeking if it had strived harder to give the film a soundtrack it could be proud of, and that audience members could walk out humming. How much cooler would that sequence at the crossroads be if Cooper had a full band and orchestral accompaniment? Sucks jams just fine, but it could have really rocked out. Oh well, maybe next time.
Oct 12, 2010 @ 15:40:56
Not sure about ‘Suck’. You’ve been quite fair, Bart but I read a magazine review which didn’t waste much time sticking the boot in. Mentioning ‘Vamp’ was a good move, that piqued my interest again.
Might give it a go…