Editorials
How Does ‘Godzilla’ Stack Up Against ‘Pacific Rim’?
A few days back a good number of readers took issue with my review of Godzilla, which was the kind of thing I would have hoped they would do after they had actually seen the movie. I stand by my review, but I want to point out one thing – it was mixed down the middle. The 2.5 out of 5 score was very deliberately meant to indicate that there was still just as much to like (for me) as there was to dislike.
In the comments, I was asked how this film compares with last year’s Pacific Rim. Good question. Both are giant Kaiju movies. Both are Legendary/Warner Bros. films. And both get a lot right. Mainly, they get their Kaiju right. As I noted in my Godzilla review, the new movie’s treatment of the big guy is fantastic. Not only are his scale and appearance imposing and powerful, but there’s a lot of strong character work going on in the pixels that animate him. You get what his objectives are and you can even understand his battle plan. Gareth Edwards does such a good job of getting you on his side that there are several moments during the end battle that will make you want to stand up and cheer, regardless of your feelings on the rest of the movie.
Edwards also does a fantastic job of setting Godzilla himself up. Seen only in fits and starts, from a series of fins protruding from the water to brief full body glimpses, he retains a satisfying sense of mystery up until the end. There, the film goes whole hog on the full body shots as Godzilla and one of the MUTOs wage war in San Francisco. Godzilla might wear you out with its human characters, but there’s no monster or battle fatigue.
Pacific Rim, on the other hand, wears you down a bit on both fronts. I believe that Rim would benefit from perhaps one less robot on Kaiju battle scene, just as I believe that the film suffers from a huge missed opportunity when it comes to developing its concept of “the drift.” The final version of the film explores surprisingly little in the way of character possibilities offered up by that conceit. It’s the perfect scenario to make the chances of overcoming external obstacles contingent upon the triumph over internal obstacles. There’s a little bit of that with Rinko Kikuchi’s character, but the movie could have gone full (as a friend once suggested) Strictly Ballroom here, with Hunnam and Kikuchi learning to work together – to dance – in a way that fuels their ultimate romantic entanglement.
While Pacific Rim has hugely broad characters, they almost sort of fit in with the old fashioned innocence of the film. It feels like Guillermo del Toro engineered the movie as something of a futuristic riff on those old WW2 propaganda reels, so the broadness feels earned (even if I personally find some of it grating). The characters in Godzilla are broad in a different way – they’re ciphers. There’s nothing cartoonish or exaggerated about them, which puts them miles away from the Pacific Rim universe. They are fairly bland. However, if the intent was to reduce their function to POV access points, they get the job done superbly. Since much of Godzilla is built around a slow, Jaws-like reveal, it helps to have plenty of different characters on the ground who can gape at his majesty without giving away the money shot every 5 minutes.
Pacific Rim boasts a higher quantity of Kaiju with varying designs and sizes. Its beautiful rainswept neon environment keeps them at arm’s length from our current reality. The destruction brought upon us by Godzilla and the battling MUTO’s feels much more recognizable, the terror more relatable. As I’ve said before – the monster stuff in Godzilla is fantastic. The set pieces are alternately suspenseful and grand and they don’t overdo it. The only fatigue you’ll feel from this movie is from the half-baked exposition that threatens to destroy all of the human scenes.
As far as preferences go, I’d have to see Godzilla again before I decided. While my review demonstrates a degree of disappointment, there’s enough praise coming from people I respect to warrant a second look. As it stands now, Pacific Rim beats it out for me as a movie – but the character of Godzilla himself is better than any single element of GDT’s film.
Maybe it comes down to this. If you like your Kaijus as beautifully anonymous cannon fodder, Pacific Rim wins. If you want them to be characters you can root for, Godzilla stands triumphant. Either way, if you like big lizards, you’ll probably be fine.
College kids, strippers and vampires—those were Donald P. Borchers’ only requirements when he approached Richard Wenk about writing and directing a movie for New World Pictures. As requested, Wenk cooked up Vamp (1986), a tailor-made blend of the decade’s teen movie craze as well as its horror boom.
Grim and earnest stories were still very much a part of the ’80s horror landscape, yet Vamp is something of a comedy. One difference between it and, say, Saturday the 14th, though, is the former avoids using schtick. Wenk’s movie proves that horror comedies also don’t have to subtract thrills from their recipes. Of course, it takes a minute before reaching that point; college antics and culture shocks preface this one macabre misadventure.
Vamp‘s initial setup is apt for a typical college-set, sex-driven comedy; to bribe their way into a fraternity house, two pledges (Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler) go looking for some adult entertainment. Without wasting time on any further exposition, the characters embark on an all-in-one-night trip that quickly detours into terror.
To procure their elusive MacGuffin—a stripper willing to gyrate for some frat boys—Keith (Makepeace) and AJ (Rusler), plus a third wheel named Duncan (Gedee Watanabe), trade the safety of their remote college campus for the seediness of some unnamed city. The setting is recognizably L.A. by day, but as soon as night falls, downtown, along with the characters, slips into a kind of surreal universe. Director of photography Elliot Davis gave this early entry on his prolific résumé an unusual yet distinctive look; that Mario Bava-esque, magenta-green lighting is omnipresent, so much so that it’s almost its own character.
Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler in Vamp
The faint comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are merited, although not just because of Vamp’s distinguishing nighttime aesthetic. Save for the primary characters, the supporting roles in Wenk’s movie are also quite colorful and transactional in their behavior. The difference here, though, is the additional urge to ruin Keith and his friends at every turn. Some of that harm is humorous and tolerable enough, whereas the moment Vamp dishes out its first fatality, it’s abundantly clear how this movie qualifies as horror.
Vamp falls into that category of horror movie that reveals its genre with a scream rather than a series of whispers. The opening scene can function as a hint of what lies ahead—things are not at all what they appear to be—but otherwise, Wenk is more than happy to hold off on the horror. When that time does come, though, it catches the viewer off guard. In addition to the pure shock value is that sudden decision to upend the movie’s foremost feature. Or so it would seem.
If afraid of major spoilage, those new to Vamp would be wise to stop reading here. There’s just no skirting around the fact that the central fellowship in this buddy movie hits a serious snag when AJ is killed. That development causes the story to become more of a “long, bad night” journey for Keith and his romantic interest. So while Wenk scores points for subverting expectations, there is also a touch of sadness in his decision. Because if Vamp does anything well, it’s making the characters likable.
Something that comes easily to Vamp—and other teen horror movies from this same era—is its ability to invent young characters worth caring about, or at the very least, are interesting and not so immediately off-putting. More impressive is how Wenk did all this without actually fleshing out those characters. Still and all, Keith and his kind are a grade above cookie-cutter, and in some cases, aren’t completely devoid of growth.
Grace Jones in Vamp
Vamp appeals with an assorted cast of characters. No two are the same, nor are they operating on the same wavelength. The cinematically extroverted AJ, whose actor conveyed charm and vulnerability in near equal amounts, comes alive when he’s at his most undead. Makepeace then makes the chronically cautious Keith a sympathetic fellow, even as he’s more and more affected by the night’s bizarre events. Meanwhile, Duncan is indeed the designated loser of the whole bunch, but Watanabe still manages to humanize him. As a bonus, the role didn’t require him to pull a Long Duk Dong.
As for Dedee Pfeiffer, she is plain adorable as the mysterious After Dark server nicknamed “Amaretto”. She spends all night fixing her dress strap while at the same time trying to get Keith to remember how he knows her. As their offbeat romance grows, it becomes another highlight of this movie. Whether or not Pfeiffer’s character is really a vampire also creates some welcome tension in the story.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, Vamp went on to become a bit of a cult classic. That current status is determined by several factors, but without a doubt, the casting of Grace Jones is the most considerable. The image of her writhing on that unique-looking chair, a Keith Haring original, springs to mind whenever this movie is brought up.
Chris Makepeace, Billy Drago and Paunita Nichols in Vamp
Prior to that first display of unequivocal horror, local vampire queen Katrina (Jones) took to the stage and delivered a strip show like no other. One would expect nothing less from that renowned model and performance artist. By now reports of Jones’ tardiness on set are no secret, yet it’s also hard to deny her commitment to the part of Katrina. It was, in fact, Jones who took charge of her character’s appearance—on top of Haring painting her body and that now-iconic chair, she had Andy Warhol handle her costuming. And not too many actors could seize a room’s attention without saying a single line of dialogue.
In 2022, Vamp received a retrospective novelization from Encyclopocalypse. This literary union of preexisting source material—Wenk’s original screenplay—and new ideas from author Christian Francis amounts to a more comprehensive visit to the After Dark Club. The basic story there is no different than what’s shown on screen; however, Francis gets creative with the characters’ origins and designs, and he enhances a number of key scenes.
The novelization expands on the urban and social decay of the main setting, and supplies a background for the After Dark Club. Sandy Baron’s character, Katrina’s emcee and familiar, is given ample motivation for sticking around; up until the fiery end, he is loyal to his friend and former business partner “Squeak”, who looks like he was “fed through a combine harvester, and left as nothing more than a heap of mangled remains”. Then there is Billy Drago’s character Snow, the leader of a street gang called The Dragons. His reason for menacing Keith and AJ is more altruistic than in the movie; he and his peers act tough to scare off any potential food for the vampires.
Lisa Lyon in Vamp
If not for all the backstories, Francis’ Vamp would be a hell of a lot shorter. Instead, this tie-in read dives into how AJ met Keith—the orphaned Anthony Joseph hailed from a broken home back in Brooklyn—and how their friendship flourished over the years. Keith’s archership is no longer just an assumed part of his entire being; it’s a confidence-building extracurricular for a boy who got picked on before coming into the protection of the new kid in town. These supplemental, in-depth looks at the protagonists, plus their close connection, are maybe unnecessary. The movie already did a fair and concise job of addressing their platonic intimacy without the need for flashbacks and insights, specifically in that scene where AJ lays it all out as he sacrifices himself.
Where the novelization gets off course is its approach to the minor characters. Intermittently backstorying the likes of Katrina’s indentured servants, Seko (Leila Hee Olsen) and Vlad (Brad Logan), ends up disturbing the flow of the writing. Was it absolutely essential that readers know Vlad was the Grand Duke of the House of Romanov, or how Snow’s accomplice Maven (Paunita Nichols) became so dentally challenged? No, not really. However, one’s mileage with these random biographies may vary.
The novelization is a more substantial experience, but for a movie like Vamp, less is more. And as plentiful as they are, it never simply coasts on its campy charms, either. The character work sits comfortably in that realm between cursory and meticulous, the script is sharper than first realized, and Greg Cannom’s vampire makeup is straightforward yet effective. Most of all, the movie didn’t squander its out-of-the-box concept. Richard Wenk made his vision of a “comic nightmare in which just about anything that can go wrong does” come true, and it is very enjoyable.
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