A vampire film manqué about an eight-year-old boy in middle America in the middle 1950s who becomes convinced that the pallid English widow on the neighboring farm is a lamia. (Banish all thoughts of Fright Night: she may wear dark glasses to shield her eyes from the sun, she may be sex-starved, she may use poor judgment in showing the little boy her dead husband's tooth or in giving him a whaler's harpoon as a present, but she's no bloodsucker.) It would be a nice trick if we were able to see how strange and marvelous everything looks from the boy's point of view and yet still see how normal it all is from an adult point of view, but the proportion of the abnormal is so pervasively high as to make the idea of a next-door vampire seem not at all implausible. The only character who in fact appears anywhere close to normal, out of a group that includes a mother who disciplines by water torture, a self-immolating father with a pederastic past, a one-eyed and one-handed sheriff, and a carload of leather-jacketed sex killers, is the late-arriving older brother, back from the Navy. But his disclosed problem -- bleeding gums and shedding hair from undiagnosed radiation sickness -- soon puts him right at home. The dialogue all sounds very written; the images all look very composed; and the overall feeling is very constrained. With Jeremy Cooper and Lindsay Duncan; written and directed by Philip Ridley. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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