Butt News Movie Club #12: Interview with the Vampire

A Coffin Is Just a Gay Box

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Right off the bat I am grateful for the warning that this movie is rated R for “vampire violence.” I thought I was renting a movie about vampire journalism!

We’re tootin’ around San Francisco in the 90s, which apparently had VAMPIRES roaming the streets, and somehow by 2022 it’s only gotten WORSE?!? (I’m a Republican and I think that poverty is crime!) Christian Slater invites Brad Pitt to his hotel room but not for sex. BOOOOOOO. He just wants to hear Brad Pitt’s life story… or…his DEATH STORY!? Or… maybe sex? Plz?

This is good dialogue:

Christian Slater: “So, what do you do?”

Brad Pitt: “I’m a vampire.”

Brad Pitt says that he has been “waiting” for Christian Slater (FOR SEX!!!!!) and Christian Slater quips, skeptically, “What were you going to do? Kill me, drink my blood, all that stuff?” And Brad Pitt is like, “Yes,” and then, to prove that he is a vampire, turns off the light real fast and sits down real fast!!

Is… that your power? Sit down real fast power? I feel like even if a guy sat down in a chair real fast I’d take a couple more rounds of convincing before I was like wow u r a real vampire huh. But Slater, in complete awe, is like, “You’re not lying to me, are you?”

You couldn’t even make Interview with a Vampire in 2022, btw, because Christian Slater’s job does not exist anymore! THIS is why we need regional print media and radio!!!!!!! For hard-hitting local vampire coverage like guy who sits down in a chair real fast in San Francisco!

Slater turns on the tape and Pitt starts telling his story.

Brad Pitt: “1791 was the year it happened…”

Lol if someone was telling me a story and started it in 1791 I’d be like UUUUUGHGHHGGHHHH. SKIP AHEAD!!!!!!

Question. Do we think Brad Pitt’s makeup is… good?

Brad Pitt says that back in 1791, way before he was pale and his veins were big because he need 2 eat blood, he was 24 and “master of a large plantation.” Oookay!!! Gonna be hard to root for this guy, but let’s go! Sure hope we don’t gloss over this detail and then NEVER SUBSTANTIVELY RETURN TO IT LET ALONE CRITIQUE IT!

His wife died in childbirth (anti-racist praxis!) and now he is sad so he spends his days playing depressed cards while being snoogled by sex workers and longing for death. One night, Brad Pitt gets mugged while getting a BJ and he’s like “oh sweet I hope this guy caves in my dome so I can stop being sad about my dead racist wife for once” but UNFORTUNATELY Tom Cruise is creepin’ and peepin’ and it is GAYAYAYAAYAYAYAAY! Tom Cruise kills the sex worker and throws her in the river (remember in the 90s when someone did this at least once per movie?) and then he bites Brad Pitt on the neck and they both float up into the air because of the power of their gay chemistry!!!!

Brad Pitt is laying around at home, being dead, when Tom Cruise shows up at his apartment, GAYLY, and offers to “pluck out the pain and give you another life,” so they go out into the swamp for gay sex. Now they’re in a cemetery. Is this a cemetery… in a swamp? Are both of them on his large plantation?” Whatever, it’s a lot of “look at this vampire shit.” Ooh, a grave! Ooh, moss! Yeah, we get it!!!!!!

Tom bites Brad’s neck again and says he’s going to give him (Brad) the choice that he (Tommy) never had: “I’ve drained you. You’ve bled to death. If I leave you here, you die. Or you can be young always…”

That’s not a real choice, man!!!!!! Brad is like uuummmmmm because he dk! He is basically dead! And Tom is like SO are you gonna come with me? Yes or no!?!?

Ok well are you going to bite my neck again?? Because you’re two for two at this point and honestly it kind of sucks!

Brad burbles something like “uuuyryrhsshsshshshfffrrrrrpppppp” so Tom takes that as a yes and squirts some of his own blood into Brad’s mouth. This movie needs to work on affirmative consent! Brad flips out and squirms around and screams and beans himself hard in the nuts. Tom Cruise lols and goes, “It happens to us all!” Vampire blood gives us all a tummy ache and makes you hit your nuts on an urn!

Now Brad is vampire.

He wakes up with new teeth and new contacts: “I was a newborn vampire weeping at the beauty of the night.” So do you like being a vampire or do you hate it?? Slater could you please ask some follow-up Qs??

Instead of helping me understand anything about what’s going on, Christian Slater just wants to Mythbust all the vampire stereotypes. Crucifixes actually rock, says BP. Stakes through the heart are bullshit. “Unfortunately coffins are a necessity.”

WHY? Why would coffins be a necessity!?!? I mean, I guess it makes sense when you think about it. Lace? Velvet? Drama? A coffin is really just a gay box.

They go out to a bar and Tom Cruise bites the waitress, who is intoxicated by vampire magic. Tom is like “here, buddy, you should eat her blood” and Brad is like “ok but quick boundary: I don’t want to kill people” and Tom Cruise is like “TOO SLOW, JOE! SHE’S DEAD AS HELL” (which I don’t get because they make a HUGE DEAL LATER about how they’re not supposed to eat dead blood, so wtf, but I’m sure you Ann Rice-iverse dorks will straighten me out in the comments!), so then Brad refuses to drink the blood, like, in protest? Don’t waste it, bro! That’s so disrespectful! How is it more ethical if she dies and then just goes in the garbage? Ethical vampires use all the parts of the waitress!

Here’s my big question about vampires. Are vampires… horny? Or just hungry? Because it seems like they just want to do aggressive foreplay with strangers at the farmers market and then om nom nom nom nom nom nomph gromph Cookie Monster their ass. This is fatphobic, btw!!!! How come vampires get to be cool and sexy, when I’m hungry all the time too and I get made fun of for it!!? I’m just a vampire but for macaroni and cheese!

Tom Cruise is like, “it’s okay, nerd, if you don’t want to kill people you can do this instead,” then grabs a rat and bites its neck and squeezes it into BP’s wine glass. (Hollyweird Fun Fact: That wasn’t in the script!) Rats are like oat milk for vampires.

Brad and Tommy move back into Brad’s large plantation where they force Thandie Newton to cook them a ham every night even though they only eat waitresses and rats AND THEY KNOW IT. Tom Cruise throws the rat carcass on the dining room floor, but don’t worry, I GUESS YOUR SLAVES WILL PICK IT UP. They throw a party and Tom Cruise takes a gay manservant out into the yard for gay dry-humping-not-sex while Brad Pitt sits with a MILF under a tree. Brad feels bad about killing the MILF at the last second so he sucks off her poodles instead. SUCKS THEIR BLOOD, YOU PERVERTS! Poodles are like tempeh for vampires.

Then Brad Pitt’s enslaved prisoners find all the dead doves he munched earlier and they figure it out about the vampires so they scream and dance around and do a bunch of voodoo that I’m sure is historically and culturally accurate and sensitive and consulted on by experts.

Thandie Newton: “They’re worried about you.”

ARE YOU SURE? ARE YOU SURE THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE FEELING?

Then he eats her. But he feels really bad about it!!!!!!

Brad freaks out and starts screaming about how the plantation is cursed and he is the devil, so he tells the slaves, “You are all free men… save yourselves!” and then sets the plantation on fire. Wow, big hero man, abolitionist king, etc, but if you’re such a freedom fighter how about you GIVE THEM THE HOUSE? They could sell those curtains! Let them eat a ham every night!

Note: This does not qualify as thoughtful engagement with the fact that the protagonist of your movie BUILT HIS VAST WEALTH ON THE FORCED LABOR OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then TC Kool-Aid-Mans through the window and goes, “PERFECT! Burn everything we owned!” in the BITCHIEST WAY. Are you two married????? Explain it for once!

Some time later, Tom Cruise is foreplaying with two naked chicks, raising once again the big question of this movie: DO VAMPIRES WANT TO FUCK OR NOT!? So far in this movie they have fucked zero times. Tom sensually (but not sexually!?!? or ??????) caresses one of the women and is like, “So soft. I can see you sitting on a bed of satin.” I said that exact same thing to a cheeseburger today!

How come none of these women are ever freaked out at all by Tom Cruise’s cold cold skin? TC sucks the blood right out of this chick’s big boob, and like, vampires must regurgitate a little local anesthetic into the wound like a mosquito, right? Because NONE of these chicks ever notice when they’re getting slurped dry! He also seems to somehow bite them through their clothes? Pop off in comments and explain it to me, nerds!

Brad Pitt is once again asking Tom Cruise not to kill the girls, please Tom you do not have to kill them this time, you could just stick them in a coffin and push it down a hill like on Jackass and then we run away, wouldn’t that be funny, but Tom Cruise is like YEAH HUH BUSTER I DO.

Brad gets super depressed and goes and wanders around eating plague rats. He runs into Kirsten Dunst, who is crying and hugging her dead mom’s arm and begging for help (RED FLAG!). So he BITES HER.

This storyline is like a metaphor for white stand-up comics saying the n-word. Brad Pitt doesn’t want to kill people and suck their blood but he JUST HAS TO! It is his dark nature! His gift and his curse!

Then Tom Cruise shows up at the plague shack and is like LOL and waltzes around with the dead mom’s corpse roasting BP about how he loves sucking blood after all. BP runs away to take a nap in the sewer.

Then Tom turns Kirsten Dunst into a vampire and “gives” her to Brad as a “gift.” It makes her teeth big and her hair curly. I would like the details for Brad Pitt’s lip stain, btw.

Turns out, KD is the horngriest lil vampire of them all (horny/hungry), and unfortunately she is permanently 10 or something and so she permanently has zero impulse control. She eats her ENTIRE MAID. They spoil her and buy her many dresses (she eats her seamstress). She sleeps in Brad Pitt’s coffin with him every night, and you don’t need me to talk to you about the weird sex-politics of making a 30-year-old perma-child sleep in a gay box with Brad Pitt, right? Other people have already written essays about this, right? Can I just do my little jokes in my little house?

Tom tells her that she’s their “daughter” now. Wowwwww! This dude has a bad personality so he vampirified an orphan to keep Brad Pitt from leaving him! That’s exactly what women do to NBA players!!!! Brad got PJ Washington Jr.’d! (NOTE: I DO NOT ACTUALLY SUBSCRIBE TO THIS SEXIST LINE OF DISCOURSE PLEASE DO NOT CANCEL.)

Kirsten Dunst goes ahead and eats her piano teacher and her dollmaker and some old lady too. She is a bloodthirsty lil snake, just like Tom Cruise! “Together they finished off whole families,” says BP, who I guess is just eating rats this whole time.

Thirty years go by, and KD starts to get mad that she’ll never grow up and be a woman with tits. She and Tom Cruise have a HUGE fight, so he tries to placate her with a doll and she goes, “ANOTHER DOLL? I HAVE A MILLION,” and throws it in the garbage. She cuts off all her hair. It instantly grows back. She cannot believe this shit. Now she starts asking the tough Qs: “Which one of you did it? Which one of you made me the way I am?”

Brad takes her back to her mom’s shack to tell her the whole origin story.

Dunst: “You both did it.”

Pitt: “I took your life; he gave you another one.”

Dunst: “And here it is, and I hate you both.”

Sorry, what’s the plot of this movie?

I do like how even though they’re both assholes they agree that Lestat is a huge drag.

Dunst is like “let’s bail on this guy,” and BP is like “he’s really hard to ditch but I’m down.”

They go home and Tom Cruise tries to neg his way back into their hearts by going, “I’ve found someone who’ll make a better vampire than both of you,” (THAT’S REAL DIALOGUE). Dunst tells him to come in the other room because she got him a present: a pair of curly little twins for him to munch!

Cruise: “We forgive each other then?”

Dunst: “Yes.”

Cruise: [munchmunchmunchmunchmunch]

BUT DANG IT WAS A TRAP! Those guys are the curly dead! She tricked Tom into drinking dead blood, the vampire’s no-no!

Cruise, dying(?): “Put me in my coffin!”

Dunst: “I’ll put you in your coffin!” [slits throat]

I know the Rice-heads are going to be mad at me, but the rules of dead blood are not clear AT ALL. I even Googled! No one will tell me! Does it kill them? Or does it just make them kind of weak enough that a kid can slit their throat and set them on fire? Or does it just give them a tummy ache? Does fire kill them? Why would throat-slitting kill them???? COMPLETELY UNCLEAR. Also, why is every vampire always crying about how they’re trapped in a cursed eternal half-life when they could just drink some dead blood (which they must be almost doing by accident ALL THE TIME) or go out in the sun for 30 seconds? Shut up!

Brad Pitt sees what happened and is like RUFKMRN!? so they book tix to Europe on the next boat. But before they can go, there’s a tap tap tapping at the door. Dang! Lestat’s back already! And he’s extremely gross and pretending to play the piano again! Turns out, he healed himself (did he though? he looks like shit) using alligator blood and snake and toad juice “and all the putrid life of the Mississippi.” Now he’s back to kill Kirsten Dunst (HOW?) because “you’ve been a very very naughty little girl.”

Brad Pitt throws a lamp at him and sets him on fire and they run away.

Brad Pitt’s Potential Future Landlord: “Sir, I’m sorry, but I am not going to be able to rent you this house because I’ve been looking at your record and it says you’ve burned down every place you’ve ever lived, plus all of New Orleans????”

They’re running to catch their ship and Dunst is stressed (“The ship is leaving without us!”) and I cannot help but wonder WHY YOU ARE NOT DOING YOUR FAST RUN? WHY ARE YOU DOING REGULAR RUN?? WHEN ELSE WOULD FAST RUN BE MORE APPLICABLE?

Pitt and Dunst make the boat and then wander around Europe searching for other vampires. Pitt tells Christian Slater that Dracula is bullshit—“the mad ravings of a drunken Irishman”—but… not really because you are actually real? Bram Stoker accidentally made up a real thing?? Also you totally do all that dumb stuff in that book!

Finally they move to Paris and run into Antonio Banderas, goth as hell, who is running a vampire theater where vampire actors pretend to be humans doing plays about vampires. Respectfully: why? BP and KD go see the show, and at the end this chick comes out and is like, “Somebody help me please,” because she knows she’s about to get eaten live on stage, but she DOESN’T say “yo audience members I am not an actress in the play these guys kidnapped me and they’re literally gonna kill me,” she just says “eeeeeee!” So then they rip her top off and kill her on stage. And the audience is like clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap.

When that lady goes missing wouldn’t there be 100 people who could be like, “oh yeah I just saw that lady on stage at the vampire theater and then I saw Antonio Banderas and 20 goths eat her body”?

I didn’t write down who said it but apparently at this point somebody asked, “Am I evil or just hungry?” And that’s always the question that I deal with too!!!!!!

Antonio Banderas tells BP that the greatest vampire crime of all is “to kill your own kind,” WINK, implying that he knows they toaster-strudeled Lestat.

Dunst gets jealous and says that Pitt doesn’t really love her, he only loves Antonio Banderas, which, SAME.

Then Banderas reveals that he has to execute Pitt and Dunst for trying to kill Tom Cruise! (But isn’t THAT killing a vampire too??) He tells Pitt to send Dunst away for her own safety, and then he’ll be forgiven and he can stay forever and learn more about vampire history and culture. Then Antonio Banderas whispers in Brad Pitt’s ear for about 10 minutes but I didn’t follow any of it, and then he is like btw I knew Lestat and I agree that he sucked and they high-five.

Pitt goes home and tells Dunst that she has to go into hiding so the theater kids don’t murder her and she’s like “ok but I found this chick who lost her child and wants a perma-child so can you make her a vampire please so she can hang out with me since you’re LEAVING ME?” And then she says, “Who will care for me, my love, my dark angel, when you are gone?” which is romance and I am not engaging with it!

Before they can escape, though, the Paris vampires show up and grab them and tell Brad Pitt that he’s getting “eternity in a box” and stuff him into a coffin (uhhhh, that’s just called Spirit Airlines!) and then they put the girls into a cell with a window so they get frizzled to death by the sunlight (your skirts are so big! Go under the fabric!!).

Antonio Banderas gets Brad out of the coffin before eternity starts but he’s too late to save Dunst and the random, who are Pompeii people now. But Brad Pitt is not even grateful because he KNOWS that Banderas let Dunst burn up on purpose! What a dick!

Brad Pitt, who has one signature move, goes and burns down the theater where all the vampires are sleeping in their coffins.

Rule #1 of vampire: If u execute a guy’s elderly-child-girlfriend, don’t set him free and then immediately go to sleep in ur coffin!

Brad Pitt escapes the burning theater and is about to burn up in the sun but then Antonio Banderas rescues him and they ALMOST make out! Uuuuuugh JUST GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT, WHICH ISN’T RAT BLOOD AND BURNING CORPSES!!!!!

Pitt goes back to America because “the world was a tomb to me” without Claudia (Dunst), but did you even really get along with Claudia?? She sucked!

Eventually, it’s 1988, back in New Orleans, and “I caught the scent of death and it wasn’t coming from the graves.”

Guess what.

It’s Lestat.

And HE. IS. CRAPPY!

He asks BP to get him some human blood so he can be cool again but BP is like nah I gotta go.

Now we’re back in the present day with Christian Slater in San Francisco. Slater is like “OK WOW NOW I WANNA BE A VAMPIRE, DADDY, I’M A SERIOUS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST FOR VISITSANFRANCISCO.COM AND I WANNA BE UR NEW VAMPIRE HUSBAND!!!!!!”

Brad Pitt lifts him up by his neck and is like, “Do you like this? Do you like being food for the damned?” and Slater has to admit that nope, actually, when you put it like that, nevermind. He hops in his car and he’s like FUCK THIS, I’M GOING TO SAUSALITO.

But then in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, OUT POPS LESTAT FROM THE GLOVEBOX, who bites Slater and steals his car and drives away! HOW DOES HE KNOW HOW TO DRIVE? HOW DOES HE KNOW HOW TO USE A TAPE PLAYER?

The only vampires that can afford to live in San Francisco these days are the ones who invested in Google in 1622.