The Hunger | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

The Hunger **

by Ed Gonzalez on October 12, 2004 Jump to Comments (1) or Add Your Own

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It's tempting to read Tony Scott's ludicrous 1983 film The Hunger, like Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky the year before, as a metaphor for the then-bourgeoning AIDS crisis in New York City. Before Whitley Strieber started writing books about his alleged abduction by aliens, he was known primarily for writing popular trash fiction like The Wolfen, The Night Church, and The Hunger, the story of an international vampire priestess who sinks her teeth into a nubile research scientist after her latest companion bites the dust. Though Strieber had no conscious awareness of his communion with aliens when he wrote the novel, the bloodsuckers from The Hunger are not unlike an ancient race of aliens hell bent on human abduction. Both Liquid Sky and The Hunger envision a post-punk New York City on the brink of collapse, but while Tsukerman's 1982 cult classic (about aliens who come to a gender-bending Manhattan for a heroin fix) is truly grounded in the dirt and grime of the era, Scott's film scarcely has its pulse on the encroaching conservatism of the nation. In the end, it's just a shallow lesbian fantasy so aggressively spit and polished as to suggest a 96-minute White Diamonds commercial. Of course, that's not to say that it isn't fun. Truly a product of its time, The Hunger happily signals the death of the city's gothic past with a stunning opener featuring Bauhaus singing their famous "Bela Lugosi's Dead." But the mantra of Scott's aesthetic goes: Out with the punk, in with the pop. Inside the multi-million dollar house owned by Bonnie Tyler, err, Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve), white doves and curtains fly on cue. Dreamily photographed by Stephen Goldblatt and cryptically edited together by Pamela Power, nothing in The Hunger makes sense: After Miriam's lover (David Bowie) of many centuries goes kaput, the older woman seduces Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), an expert in sleep disorders currently investigating the rapid aging process that similarly kills a monkey. The rest is all neo-gothic smoke and mirrors, with scenes of Miriam's seduction of Sarah ludicrously intercut with visions of ancient Egyptian vampire rituals (Ken Russell did this much better in The Lair of the White Worm). Deneuve is hysterical, but it's young Beth Ehlers who steals the show. As the androgynous neighbor from across the street, you may not even notice that the tomboyish Ehlers is a girl until she returns to Miriam's house for a second time wearing a skirt. In the real world, sex leads to pleasure and/or disease, but in The Hunger, like in that ludicrous advertisement for Britney Spears's Curious perfume, sexual desire simply provokes postmodern psychotropic episodes.

Director(s): Tony Scott
Screenplay: Ivan Davis, Michael Thomas
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, Cliff De Young, Beth Ehlers, Dan Hedaya, Rufus Collins, Suzanne Bertish, James Aubrey
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Runtime: 96 min.
Rating: R
Year: 1983

Comments

No-Personality on December 8, 2010, 04:09 PM

I saw this movie at least a decade after Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire. A film like that will set your expectations pretty low for artsy / historical-dramatic vampire tales, but I've actually gotten a lot pickier since (I think). All the serious critics panned this and I'm still waiting to see what they're talking about. I like most of my substance in horror up front and center. I don't like searching too hard to find meaning. Because I want to feel it at a surface level, so that it mixes aptly with the elements trying to elicit fear and revulsion. I thought The Hunger was more about the fear of aging than AIDS. Loss of looks, decline of vitality, etc. I could imagine that being a concern of vampires much more than being a keeper of sexually transmitted diseases- someone who feels the effects of it rather than passing it on to someone else who does after they merely have sex. Troma's Def by Temptation has a scene that directly deals with vampires carrying AIDS- no reading to it, and the rules to most vampire films I've seen suggest that being a vampire makes one immune to suffering from most viruses should one acquire them. But the one thing I can't abide by is people panning this film for alleged AIDS metaphors but praising Carpenter's The Thing or Cronenberg's The Fly for the same attribute when neither of them had it in mind.

Anyway, this time I like the film and don't care what anyone else thinks.