Don't let that title set your expectations too high
Five years before Sarah Michelle Gellar and company made her well-known (and - gasp! - respected) as a late-90's television icon, Buffy The Vampire Slayer was an ill-received big-screen attempt at merging horror and comedy. I don't watch the TV show much, admittedly, and it's mostly Gellar's fault, because she's really overexposed and that super-fake modeling-contract smile of hers is starting to really get on my nerves. But it has managed to outshine the film that spawned it, though watching it again today, it's hard not to appreciate just how easy that must've been.
Kristy Swanson stars as high school cheerleader Buffy (do high school cheerleaders still exist?), and she's a long, long way from the Buffy you might know from TV. She's rude, shallow, vapid, stupid, vacuous, not too different from every other resident of that deserves-to-be-killed-by-vampires town she lives (well, shops) in, but at least she spends most of the movie wearing spandex. One day, she's approached by a creepy stranger (Donald Sutherland) who tells her that she's The Chosen One, the latest in a long line of fearless vampire killers. She reluctantly agrees to be trained by him in the art of vampire slaying, honing her gymnastic abilities into lethal maneuvers (the similarities between this movie and Gymkata are difficult to ignore). Just in time, too, because an ancient bloodsucker (Rutger Hauer) and his assistant (Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens) have decided that now's the time to make their move.
If you're gonna watch this one, keep your eyes peeled because you'll see a lot of familiar faces. Hilary Swank plays one of Buffy's (somehow) more twit-ly friends, and Ben Affleck can be spotted as a cowardly basketball player. Stephen Root (much thinner than his days on NewsRadio) plays the high school principal. David Arquette gets a none-too-subtle Salem's Lot homage. And remember that silly late-night show "Studs"? Well, the host of that show, Marc DeCarlo, plays the new-agey basketball coach ("I am a person, I have a right to the ball").
Certainly, the biggest things this movie had going for it to my mind when I saw it in 1992 were an irresistible title and a soundtrack that roped me in instantly, with some cool rare tracks from Ozzy, The Cult, and Rob Halford's first post-Priest recording. The commercials sure weren't gonna rope me in, combining bad valley-girl comedy (haven't we seen enough?) with some pathetically unmenacing-looking vampirism.
I was a little surprised to find that the valley-girl comedy actually wasn't bad, screenwriter Joss Whedon throwing in invented slang like "Get out of my facial!" (it's like Clueless, but with vampires, and it's not based on the worst book ever) Of course, the vampire angle sucks, both as horror, and comedy. I don't know what it is about vampire comedies; the people making these things always seem to get the wrong idea about what makes them ripe for parody. Yeah, pit 'em against mall chicks, that's inherently hilarious (rolls eyes).
Swanson herself is energetic in her role and is clearly having a lot of fun with it, even when you're sitting there thinking that Buffy desperately needs a personal tragedy or something to teach her a much-needed life-lesson. Hauer is, sadly, stiff and distant, not exactly putting everything he's got into this role, even though he gets a scene were he eats a kitten (offscreen). (Anne Rice, who apparently makes a habit of modeling her characters after real-life actors, once said that she based Lestat upon Hauer...had she only seen him here first, she'd have based him on, uh, Pete Steele) And then there's Luke Perry as Buffy's romantic interest. It astonishes me that Hollywood still expected us at the time to accept this guy as a teenager, even though he was seventy-two at the time of filming. His look-at-me-I'm-a-bad-boy swagger is guaranteed to make you want to barf.
On the plus side, Sutherland adds a touch of class to this whole affair, seeming pained, exhausted, and perplexed at the necessity of having to undertake this Buffy project (and I'm talking about both him and his character here). Most surprising of all is Reubens, the only vampire in this movie which ever exudes a whiff of menace. He gets a pretty undignified exit, and maybe it's eight more years between this and the infamous porn-theater fiasco that makes me less likely to giggle childishly when I hear his name, but he's quietly creepy and manages to inflect a hint of actually meaning it when he says his one-liners.
No, I wasn't enjoying this movie much for most of its running length, but it did start redeeming itself toward the end. Buffy herself started, well, growing up. Laughs became a little more frequent (especially one biker's hilariously inept response when Buffy steals his motorcycle). And astonishingly, the head vampire is NOT killed with sunlight, surely the oldest vampire cliché on the books (though the climactic sword vs. flagpole duel is pretty tepid).
Still, I'd only recommend this to people who are big fans of the series and somehow have never managed to check out the movie, they'll get a kick out of it. And they'll probably rip it to shit with all of the inconsistencies between the two, but I'm not gonna get into that, because I'm in a poor position to do so. Like I said, I don't watch much.
Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, who never directed again.
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