Shadow of the Vampire
Director: E. Elias Merhige
Year Released: 2000
Rating: 1.5
Intentionally silly, overwrought film that comes up with a strange premise: what if Max Schreck, the star of one of the noted classics Nosferatu, was really a vampire? This slight concept is taken nowhere by Merhige or his screenwriter, and the result is a film that runs on without any real point or purpose - if there's supposed to be a message about voyeurism and the cinema invoking the bloodlust in society I didn't catch it. "Flat" seems to be the important adjective - Malkovich (playing Murnau) and Willem Dafoe (intolerable as Schreck) eat up every ounce of dirty scenery in a contest to out-spit each other, everything else fails to register on a scale of relevance. I can't fathom how anyone can appreciate a movie that is essentially a remake of another movie with brief, pathetic backstage gossip. It's already tiring at the one-hour mark.
