The Nutty Professor on Elm Street By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) Directed by

The tagline for this movie was “A comic tale of horror and seduction.” My friends, that encapsulates, in one neat, incomplete sentence, just about everything that is wrong with this bizarre film. If that doesn’t convince you, then consider the fact that it was directed by horror master Wes Craven but starred , a comic superstar (though at the time, maybe that star was a little faded) and then put them at odds with each other. And if that doesn’t convince you, then just try watching the damn thing.

No, don’t. Your Movie Orphan has taken care of that for you. Remember, I love you and want to protect you from harm.

Eddie Murphy is a vampire called Maximilian, who tells us that his vampire “people” have been hiding out on a Caribbean island for centuries until recent events have led to their near-demise. Now in order to save his race, he must go to New York where a woman lives, unaware that she is half-vampire. She is the key to saving the race. I don’t know how, exactly, because Max really doesn’t say. I’m not sure if they’re going to have vampire babies or if she’s just going to help him make more vampires, and if that’s all he needs, then I don’t know why he needs to go to all this trouble instead of just making himself a new vampire friend. So I guess they’re supposed to have vampire babies. Anyway no one ever says. This was the plot of , wasn’t it? Only those weren’t vampires; Coming to America was about zombies.

In Brooklyn, our heroine Detective Rita Veder (the lovely ) works the night shift with her handsome partner Detective Justice. Cleary they are attracted to each other but the working relationship has kept them from pursuing this, and recently Rita lost her beloved mother so she is still suffering from that grief. They are assigned to investigate the strange, scary ship that wrecked into port with its entire crew dead and reports of a wolf running from the scene. Now, we know that this was how old Max made his way to New York, snacking on the crew along the way. The crime scene is where Rita first encounters Max and where Max realizes that Rita is the one for whom he Is destined.

Added to this plot, we have the comic presence of Kadeem Hardison, whose scalper character Julius becomes Max’s “ghoul” and then has a running gag about his slow decomposition. Eddie Murphy also portrays two other characters in the film (as he often does), a preacher and a gangster in scenes where the comedy is fairly shaky. But I’m not sure if the comedy is shaky because it’s just not especially good, or if it’s because of the awful tone problems this movie suffers.

Eddie Murphy is a funny actor with a lot of natural charm. Seeing him as a cool vampire is not all that difficult. He and Hardison have some amusing interactions. But the problem is that the comedy feels really forced and the jokes often feel like we’re beating a dead horse. We told this joke ten minutes ago – are we really still going on about it? So here’s problem number one: the comedy isn’t very comedic.

Here’s problem number two: all these attempts at comedy are being derailed by Wes Craven, who is making a horror movie. Our vampire Max is not some old-world charmer who is looking for his lady love. He’s a killer, admits it, and feels no remorse about it. He wants to pull Rita into the lifestyle with him, and the idea horrifies her: she is sworn to protect people, not murder them. It’s not that these things can’t be darkly funny, but that they are not treated with gallows humor but with disconcerting loudmouthed slapstick. This is like the Nutty Professor has decided to spend the night on Elm Street. There’s a fair amount of gore in the film and some truly awful deaths, including Rita’s young roommate (who is hung up for gruesome public display!). Rita’s roommate is a horny slut (that’s her entire character arc) but I think hanging her up on a cross is excessive.

Trying to reconcile these two sides of the story is just not possible. We don’t know what we’re watching. And then, as if we weren’t already confused enough, a third element is added: the seduction of Rita to the vampire world. You know, I think Angela Bassett is a fine, gorgeous, talented actress. But she’s out of place in this; maybe she’s just way too classy for this kind of nonsense. A couple times in the film she must portray abject terror (once when she is waking from a nightmare, once when she bursts into Max’s apartment with accusations) and she flails with graceless, spastic arms and legs and looks ridiculous. It’s like she has a muscular disorder. When she’s not doing that, she’s being strangely prudish for a Brooklyn cop and is nagging her partner Justice so much that we’ve got to wonder what he sees in her.

And as for her interactions with Max – well, they aren’t too bad when the pair of them is just chatting, but they’re few and far between, and anyway her chemistry is far better with Justice. Max wants to offer Rita magic and immortality and the finest things in the world. He doesn’t seem to mind her spastic muscle disorder. He also wants her to murder people nightly with him – innocent people, for the most part. She kind of draws of the line there, and I feel that we should, as well. There were ways around this, for crying out loud. There is a world of vampire stories out there that have figured out how to avoid outright killing people (blood donors, animals, non-lethal biting, just to name three common outs) – but oh no, Max for some reason has to be a legitimately evil creature.

The ultimate showdown will naturally be between Justice and Max for the soul of Rita, who has had her vampire side awakened by a bit of vampire lovin’ – a serious matter, or is it? Hard to tell, because Kadeem Hardison is still stumbling around losing body parts. This is a mess, literally, and figuratively.

I need to assign a number of Fangs now, and I come up with 3/10. Is that fair? On one hand, we’ve got a real vampire story that makes as much sense as most of the others have, and Eddie Murphy isn’t bad as the vampire Max. On the other hand, look at this tagline again: A comic tale of horror and seduction. Well, it’s not comic, it’s not horrifying, and it’s not seductive. Confusing? Yes, it’s got that adjective in spades.