Movie Reviews : ‘To Die For’ Misses Its Mean Little Mark

“To Die For” (AMC Century 14) is a vampire movie for the age of AIDS. Close, mean and claustrophobic, it suggests that modern promiscuity will lead to death and destruction. Its vampires are cold-blooded, charming seducers in an arid Los Angeles wasteland of loose morals, psychopathology and conspicuous consumption.

Director Deren Sarafian and writer Leslie King try to play the material as if the vampire legend were true and contemporaneous, as if Dracula had infiltrated an afternoon soaper or a John Cassavetes movie. A sexy Los Angeles real estate agent named Kate (Sydney Walsh) leaves her staunch lover, Martin (Scott Jacoby) for a magnetic foreigner named Vlad (Brendan Hughes), who detours temporarily into a liaison with Kate’s roommate, Celia (Amanda Wyss), who goes crazy and leaves her studious fiance, Mike (Micah Grant), while Vlad’s savagely grinning, flirtatious pal, Tom (Steve Bond), prowls around in shades and chin-bristle. Meanwhile, blood-drained bodies accumulate across Los Angeles, in crunched cars with smashed windshields.

Is Vlad the true historical model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Is Tom some wigged-out brother-monster? Is Kate the image of the woman they both loved centuries ago? Beneath the supernatural teasers and the increasingly grotesque violence, there’s a pathological sexual round-robin. Both the camera and the characters fixate obsessively on each other, locked in an airless, closed-off terrain. When lusts finally explode, flesh rots off bones and skulls explode into acrid dust plumes.

It’s not a very good movie, but, occasionally, it has something. Sarafian, the son of Richard Sarafian (who does a cameo as a bartender) and the nephew of Robert Altman, has noticeably improved from his underwrought horror debut, “The Falling.” The actors--especially Hughes, Walsh, Wyss, Jacoby and Bond--play the whole movie at white heat, with unusual passion and spontaneity for this kind of film. (In a smaller role, Julie Maddalena steals a scene with some charmingly brash gum-chewing and telephone juggling.) The camera, tracking them in unbearably tight closeups and middle shots, barely leaves them room to breathe.

The movie doesn’t have any new ideas, doesn’t avoid the inevitable vampire camp. It’s easily forgettable and it builds up far too grisly a set of nauseating, bloody climaxes for any audience but case-hardened modern horror fans. By the end, it’s just one ghastly, infernal knockoff after another, a Roman-candle daisy-chain of gruesome bloodlettings and charnel knowledge. But it’s gripping as you watch it: the most effective moments coming not from the violence, but the cagey sex games, shifting alliances and betrayals. In trash as in anything else, the more air you let in, the better the view.