Anyone with an ear tuned to Hollywood buzz couldn't possibly have anything but extremely low expectations for Queen of the Damned, the screen adaptation of Anne Rice's third installment of her popular Vampire Chronicles (the first became Interview With a Vampire, while Tinseltown completely ignored the second).  There was a rumor that, when principal photography was completed, the studio recognized the film as a turkey, threw their cumulative hands up in the air, postponed its Halloween release and planned on bypassing theatres for a direct-to-video release that wouldn't add a whole lot of unnecessary promotional fees to their tab.

But then something horrible happened.  Aaliyah, the R&B-star-turned-aspiring-actress who plays the titular Queen, was killed in a plane crash, and the studio quickly nixed the direct-to-video thing, believing people would pay to see a bad film with a dead star rather than just a bad film.  Since Aaliyah's character is essentially that of a dead woman who comes back to life, there's a whole parallel with The Crow and Brandon Lee, who died while making that film about a guy returning from the afterlife. Because of Lee's death, The Crow made a lot more money than anyone anticipated, and producers of Damned are probably hoping for the same, even though that film was really good.

My expectations were set as low as they could possibly go (we're talking Battlefield-Earth low) as I walked into the Damned screening, which could account for me being completely shocked at how much it didn't suck.  You can take that as an endorsement if you'd like, but Damned really isn't that much worse than Interview was.  Aaliyah is easily the best part of this film, and I'm no Jonny-come-lately, either.  In my Romeo Must Die review, I said she made "an astonishingly respectable film debut."  Some of you might accuse me of kissing the ass of the dead, but that's not the case here.  Watching Damned is damned sad because Aaliyah clearly had a bright acting career ahead of her.  On a completely unrelated note, John F. Kennedy, Jr. wasn't that bright, and Sonny Bono was kind of ugly.

Damned, which returns exactly zero actors from Interview, is primarily about the vampire Lestat, who, despite being described as a tall, curly-haired blond, was originally played by dark-haired dwarf Tom Cruise.  Here, Lestat's role is tackled by the largely unknown Stuart Townsend (Wonderland), who has a dark but somewhat curly mane (Hollywood must have a thing for dark-haired Lestats because Wes Bentley and Josh Hartnett were both up for the role).  As the film opens, Lestat has been asleep for about a hundred years but is awoken by the obnoxious sound of blaring modern rock. As a vampire who craves the spotlight, he immediately realizes it would take little effort to become the world's most popular modern rock artist (I mean, look at Fred Durst).  He finds a band, changes their name to The Vampire Lestat, becomes their singer and sets the industry on its ear with his first album (his singing voice is handled by Korn's Jonathan Davis).

Most of Damned is set in the days leading up to a huge Death Valley concert being planned by The Vampire Lestat (it's their first).  At a press conference, he dares all other vampires to "come out, come out, wherever you are," despite, as we learn in a flashback, being told to always lay low and stay in the shadows by his "maker," Marius.  Marius is played by Bride of the Wind's Vincent Perez, the actor who took over Brandon Lee's role in the second Crow film.  That's kind of creepy.  Anyone with a bright future should probably steer clear of this guy.

There's another story thread involving a young woman named Jesse Reeves (Marguerite Moreau, Wet Hot American Summer) who is an assistant for a London-based secret society of paranormal experts too scared to actually become involved in anything spooky.  For reasons she can't quite figure out (maybe it has something to do with her fanged aunt), Jesse is drawn to Lestat and starts to stalk him after reading bits of journal, which trigger the flashbacks that set up the background for the story of the Egyptian vampire queen Akasha.

Right.  The vampire queen.  Since her name constitutes the entire title of the film and her presence dominates its trailer, one might assume Akasha would have a pretty substantial part in Damned.  One would be wrong (as they would in assuming Bruce Willis plays Hart in Hart's War).  It takes 30 minutes before we see Akasha at all, and that's just in statue form.  It's another 30 before she's up and about, and then she's gone again.  A lot of folks are naturally going to assume Akasha had a bigger role and the death of Aaliyah forced the filmmakers to scale her presence back, but that's not true. Shooting of Damned was wrapped when Aaliyah's plane went down.

I'm sure I won't be alone in saying Damned would have been much better with more Akasha and less of Jesse's story, which is simply that of the typical vampire flick character who, for some reason, wants to get their neck bitten because they're curious about the whole undead thing.  You know what?  I'm kind of curious about Catholicism, but you're not going to catch me at Sunday mass.  Getting bitten and becoming undead seems kind of extreme just to quell one's inquisitiveness.  Isn't this kind of thing the reason we have the internet?

Anyway, Aaliyah's Akasha oozes ten times the danger and sexuality of Townsend's Lestat, who oozes ten times the danger and sexuality of the midget's Lestat.  Her first non-statue scene is both terrific and the highpoint of Damned, punctuated by a great goth-metal track penned by Davis and former Oingo Boingo keyboard player Richard Gibbs (they provide the score but, sadly, only half of their collaborations appear on the film's soundtrack).  Townsend is mostly better than Cruise, despite having a cheesy Count Chocula accent and, at times, frighteningly bad makeup.  Though the overall film is surprisingly decent, I can say, without question, that Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Joss Whedon could have made a much better film with this kind of budget.

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