Queen of the Damned sat on Warner Brothers’ shelf for a year and was set for a direct to video release when its female star, R&B singer Aaliyah was tragically killed in a plane accident. So, the studio suits decided to cash in on morbid curiosity and released the film into multiplexes. If you saw this film in the theatre then you have my deepest sympathies……

This is a terrible film, there is no way to skirt around the issue or sugar coat it, Queen of the Damned is as bad as films get. Poorly written, acted and directed, what you essentially get is a feature length music video and not a good one either.

I’ve never read any of the ‘Vampire Chronicle’ novels by Anne Rice, but I was a huge fan of ‘Interview with the Vampire’. I just can’t see how that excellent film and this travesty could come from the same source material. Aside from the name Lestat and the whole vampire thing there is nothing at all to connect the two. Whilst the first film was a dark, brooding vampire tale, Queen of the Damned is a camp, scare free zone with a completely ridiculous story that never holds any water and unintentionally has you in fits of laughter.

I recall an uproar when the first film came out about the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat, but compared to Stuart Townsend, Cruise was the best thing ever. Townsend is a moderately talented British actor whom I enjoyed immensely in the small British film ‘Shooting Fish’. How on earth he ended up in this crap is a story I would like to hear. He is hopelessly miscast and his Lestat comes of as whiny, overly effeminate and about as threatening as Barney the Dinosaur. Townsend should take some solace from the fact that he isn’t the worst thing in the film…. Just.

No, that honour goes to Vincent Perez. The ‘star’ of the not-much-better-than-this-crap ‘The Crow: City of Angels’ returns to irritate English speaking audiences with his hammy overacting and indecipherable broken English. Perez plays Marius, Lestat’s sire and a vampire who is nearly as camp as Lestat. Also poor is Marguerite Moreau as the love interest and vampire investigator Jesse. She wanders about in half a daze for most of the movie, seemingly wishing Lestat to turn her. She learns her lesson thanks to some brutality from Lestat, but ends up being turned in the end anyway. So, what was the point of her character arc again?

Lena Olin shows up as Jesse’s aunt, Maharet. She has a tiny scene near the beginning of the film and then she is not seen again until she pops up out of nowhere in the final twenty minutes, by which time we have forgotten all about her and more crucially we really couldn’t care less. The two people who come off best from the film are the forgotten Dr. Who, Paul McGann and Aaliyah. McGann has scant screen time, but manages to impress with a straight, non-hammy performance. Believe me, with the crap that is surrounding him it makes him look like De Niro in ‘Raging Bull’.

Given that Aaliyah has what is basically the title role she ends up having very little screen time. Which it turns out is a bit of a shame as she had shown previously in ‘Romeo Must Die’ that she wasn’t that bad an actress and had a fair bit of potential. Here she has little dialogue, but the way she moves and her mannerisms suggest that she is a being of immense power and she is actually pretty convincing. It’s a real shame that this film would end up being her last.

The problems with the film are not exclusive to the shoddy acting. Director Michael Rymer should take a large portion of the blame. His shooting style is all over the place. Time lapse, slow motion, wire work and other tricks are used. Normally I like this kind of work in a film, but here it’s just handled really badly. The wire work is pathetic, the slow motion is used in the completely wrong places and that blurring effect they use for the vampires movement is just….ugh.

The best thing about Queen of the Damned is the films music. Written and performed by Korn front man Jonathan Davis, the songs that pepper the film are of the hard rock variety and were right up my alley. Davis even has a cameo, trying to scalp tickets outside Lestat’s final gig. Depressingly he gives a better performance than most of the ‘actors’ in the film.