aka Night Owl

• Written and directed by Jeffrey Arsenault
• Starring
  • John Leguizamo
  • Lisa Napoli
  • David Roya
  • Ali Thomas
  • James Raftery

During press junkets for George Romero’s recent zombie film Land of the Dead, co-star John Leguizamo mentioned that he was excited about his role because he’d never been in a horror movie before.

Tsk tsk, John. That ranks up there with Denise Richards expunging Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) from her filmography, or Demi Moore drawing a blank on her part in Parasite (1983) (and the way her career’s been going of late, she should be happy to see the script for a sequel).

On the other hand, I guess you could claim that Nite Owl isn’t really a “horror” movie. It’s more of a gritty black-and-white life-on-the-streets “you can’t possibly understand what my life is like and I can’t possibly tell you” guerrilla indie drama, the kind New York’s independent film community is famous for. With a vampire.

“Set” in 1984 (meaning writer/director Jeffrey Arsenault wrote the script in ‘84, did most of the shooting in ‘85, and finally got the thing put together for release in ‘93), this little bit of film-as-art focuses on Jake (James Raftery), a nineteen-year-old who we can just tell is all deep and tortured, because he walks around looking sullen. He lives in an abandoned building with pirated electricity, and he’s ostensibly employed on the night shift at a local pizza parlor, though we never actually see him working. Instead, he spends most of his seemingly-endless free time going to clubs and standing around. Sullenly. I can’t say that I blame him; seeing the clubs he attends (or one club, I guess, which always features “Screamin’ Rachel, all the way from Chicago!”). If I were there, I’d probably spend all of my time standing around with a “Jeez, my life sucks” expression on my face too. But if the point here was to focus on the ennui of the vampire existence, the movie missed a bet, because the life of everyone in this movie seems drab and pointless and one step short of ending it all.

And now, a little something for the ladies…

Yeah, I kind of let it slip there; Jake’s a vampire. But I only told you a few minutes before you would have found out in the movie anyway. Jake somehow picks up Zohra (Karen Wexler) at the club, though we skip over the parts where Jake actually makes a good impression. (”Boy, I look morose. Wanna come back to my place?”) Zohra thinks that having sex on the edge of a washbasin in a derelict building is a good idea, because she immediately gets down to business. But midway through the spectacle of Jake’s buttocks clenching, her moans turn to screams because he’s bitten her. Then, with cold efficiency (or sullenness), he wraps her body in garbage bags and gets rid of her.

Next morning, Zohra’s brother Angel (Leguizamo) starts looking for her. Not being a professional sleuth, his main investigative technique is to accost people he knows, ask whether they’ve seen her, and then swearing at them profusely when they don’t get all concerned that an eighteen-year-old who spends her time picking up strangers in crummy bars isn’t home by the crack of dawn.

That bit of variety past, we get to go back to the dank club, where Jake finds himself drawn to Anne Guish (Ali Thomas), a godawful poet who drones on and on about being raped with knives. He also gains the attention of a cute Asian girl, and we get a mercifully abridged narrative of how he follows her home and sucks her blood.

“So howcome you aren’t, you know, swooning from my ’star power’ or anything?”

And then we’re back to Angel, passing out flyers and swearing at people who don’t care. Boy, it’s almost a relief to get back to the club the next night, where Anne Guish performs a poem about being raped by snakes. No, wait, it isn’t.

Jake can resist her allure no longer, so they spend the rest of the night playing pool and talking about being sullen and stuff. By a few nights later, they’re a regular couple, and take some time from carving a jack o’lantern for Halloween to get hot and groiny (the newspaper they spread for the carving comes in handy). And oddly enough, Jake doesn’t suck her blood when their coupling winds down.

Eventually, though, the two storylines have to intersect, so we get a scene of Jake and Angel fighting. No, really, that’s all it is. The two of them run into each other and start trading punches and kicks. Has Angel actually tracked Jake? Does Jake know someone’s on his tail? There’s no indication of either; more likely to me is the idea that director Arsenault somehow ended up with both actors on set at the same time and just decided to shoot something without a script.

Who knows what boredom lurks in the hearts of men?

I’ve you’ve been waiting all this time for a plot, I believe it’s right here: Jake’s sorta taken with Anne, so he doesn’t want to kill her. He spends the next few nights not leaving his apartment, getting greasier and stinkier-looking than normal, and occasionally cutting his own arm to snack on his fluids. And puking. So when Anne shows up wondering where he’s been and what’s the matter with him, he’s so ravenous for blood that, after trying to shoo her off, he rapes her (gee, welcome back, Jake’s bobbing butt; I didn’t realize I’d missed you) and then sucks her blood. And just to be kind, he also chops her up so she doesn’t have to come back like him.

Why didn’t he just go after some other clubhopper to satisfy his hunger? Did he feel like he would be “unfaithful” to Anne if he drained some other girl’s veins? Hey, I dunno; there’s only so much you can read from a sullen look.

So then he wanders around a bit more, only to be found (again) by Angel, who’s dead certain that this is the guy who did something to his sister, despite no scenes of him discovering clues or putting two and two together. In a bizarre turn, Angel starts taking his revenge with as much overt homoeroticism as he possibly can, biting Jake’s nipples and trying to sodomize him with a beer bottle. Jake responds by, well, biting him on the neck, then fleeing.

Co-starring Screamin’ Rachel as herself.

Note: the normal rule of thumb is “When the story’s over, the movie should end.” However, since this movie didn’t have any story to speak of, it’s more an arbitrary decision when to roll the credits, so we get another ten minutes of tacked on footage that really doesn’t matter. Like a flashback to an unconvincingly-staged 1944, when a cleaner but not visibly younger Jake takes a femme fatale to his bed… and then afterward, some vampire guy jumps him.

Oh, and we get to watch the wife (Lisa Napoli) of Jake’s boss (you know, at that pizza parlor where he kinda works but really doesn’t) watch some interview footage of Caroline Munro, talking about some on-set experiences making Dracula A.D. 1972 1972) and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974). Despite, y’know, that whole thematic vampire connection, nothing ever comes of this; it’s just five minutes of filler which is arguably more entertaining than the whole rest of the feature. (What renders this scene absolutely inexplicable is that this footage isn’t from some archive; it was shot specifically for Nite Owl, yet it resolutely refuses to have anything to do with the rest of the movie.)

And how does our street-level epic end? Well, said boss’s wife comes by Jake’s place and agrees to take his cat for him. Then she watches the Halloween parade out the pizzeria window. And then she finds Angel cowering outside the front door. I guess he’s been turned into a vampire or something. The end.

“Best Pampered Chef purchase I ever made.”

The end? The end. Like I said, if there’s no plot, it’s no more than a matter of whim deciding where to cut it off. That, and the end of the film stock on hand.

I will say this; you can get some surprisingly good performances in indie New York movies. That’s because people go to Hollywood to be performers; they go to New York to be actors. But even then, there’s nothing in looking at this shapeless mass of celluloid to make even the most discerning viewer say, “See that Leguizamo boy? Of all the actors here, he’s the one that’ll go far.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 6
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0