Deadly Serious

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead

directed by Jordan Galland

American vampires have huge fangs –– that’s been my beef with the genre for some time. Like, dude, you don’t look like you’re on a liquid diet. Then there’s the roar that accompanies the display, forecasting a carnivore’s lunchtime and followed by a neck-breaking attack. The problem may be that flesh-eating zombies had such an impact as the sole visual innovation in horror films of the last 40 years. (Does anyone remember Tilda Swinton’s jugular-ripping scene in Edward II by Derek Jarman, sans fangs? –– she was my choice for Gabriele, Lestat’s mother.)

Luckily, the blood-drinkers in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead sport rather modest –– proportionate to their skull size –– fangs. Writer/director Jordan Galland seems even aware of the prevalent zombie/vampire confusion. Young New Yorker Julian (Jake Hoffman, Dustin progeny) initially takes the play he is directing to be about the voodoo variation. His best friend Vince, cast by Jake to play Hamlet, witnesses a vampiric picnic and quivers: “Like they were eating her or something!” But no such luck for the gay-acting duo (a ploy to deflect the jealousy of Julian’s ex-girlfriend’s Mafioso paramour). The playwright/star is a deathly pale Eastern European who goes by the name of Theo Horace (John Ventimiglia).

The film opens with a young woman (Bijou Phillips) rehearsing her Jules Feifferesque "interpretive dance" alone in a blackbox theater somewhere on the lower East Side. With fairy wings on her back. That she becomes the first victim of Theo’s bloodlust goes without saying.

While the vampires of old tended to be princely loners, they’ve lately been multiplying like, well, zombies, forming covens, kingdoms and theater companies. Chalk it up to declining infant mortality or something. Soon, Julian’s ex- Anna (the supermodel-turned-Sin City assassin Devon Aoki) is auditioning for the role of Ophelia. And Theo recognizes “his” Ophelia (gee, I’ve heard that before). And a mysterious woman warns Vince that the production is being mounted in order to harvest willing victims (that sounds familiar, too). Is vampirism here a metaphor for the nocturnal habits of the theater folks? For the limbo that actors are condemned to languish in? A poke at Hollywood’s obsession with eternal youth? R & G does not concern itself with such life-or-death trivialities. What it does instead is to flog the dead horse, until it starts limping with us on its undead back.

Shot on the ultra-high-definition red camera, Rosencrantz is at times rather beautiful to look at. Theo’s puffy and powdered visage floats in the darkness of the theater, onstage in a white spot against black drapes. Sean Lennon’s light-hearted score, together with uproarious one-liner act titles, keep things moving. Jake Hoffman has the Keanu Reeves blankness down pat, and it’s gratifying to see that Devon Aoki can act, and well. The two actors who play Rosencrantz (clueless dude) and Guildenstern (acteur) are a howl and a scream. Theo’s vamps supply dead-on glares and flares (nostril).

Add The Da Vinci Code, Raiders of the Lost Ark to the vampire-meets-Shakespeare-meets-Woody Allen-meets-Monty Python, and now enters Charlotte Lawrence (a hilarious Geneva Kerr), the keeper of a 2,000 year-old secret. Instead of a bunch of old men in hoods, this middle-aged woman with a penchant for ridiculous disguises is apparently the sole member of a “secret society.” The names of the title characters become a coded allusion to grail seekers and alchemists in Galland’s Dudist translation. When Anna, believing that Julian had brought her to a dentist’s office, asks “Rosicrucians and Goldenstonians? What’s that?” Julian answers, “It’s ye olde English for root canal and golden crown.”

Charlotte explains the genre conventions with evolution and randomness. They hate garlic, they don't like crosses…with one exception: When vampires are staked, they turn into skeletons, not dust. This rule breaker goes unexplained until we meet the “real” Hamlet –– an annoying blond ham the audience goes hog-wild for –– in the final act, before a disappointingly predictable ending.

Can a single film function as a parody of multiple genres? Does a good parody require devotion to one or two? Galland wisely abandoned the quest and chose anarchy instead. He seems to have gone back again and again into his own script to dig and dissect every line he’s written for more jokes. The result is a chucklefest from beginning to end, about –– a great relief –– itself.

–– Rika Ohara

Disclosure: The editor-in-chief of Bluefat is a descendant of the founding Grand Master of the Knights Templar.