A modern-day vampire tale with a rock-song soundtrack ("You're my sanctuary./ Baby, let me in./ You're my addiction"). Always a flexible metaphor, the blood-thirst in this instance is not just a synonym for drugs, as the title might imply, and as the hypodermic syringe bears out, but an all-purpose synonym for sex, violence, vice, evil -- the whole dark side. And these various connotations are spelled out didactically in a national and universal context that spans from My Lai to the Holocaust. Unhappily, even downright miserably, the movie never really escapes the air of the classroom in which literally it begins; and the atmosphere grows stuffier and stuffier through the constant bandying-about of Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dante, Baudelaire, Burroughs, et al. All this sophomoric wing-flapping is made a little more sufferable by the artful -- not merely arty -- black-and-white photography of Ken Kelsch and the, so to speak, typically unusual Lili Taylor. With Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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