TheRetroCritic

Many years after Interview With The Vampire , we got Queen Of The Damned , a movie based on another part of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles . No Tom Cruise this time, sadly, the role of the vampire Lestat instead being played by Stuart Townsend who seems to get the character yet somehow lacks the convincing theatricality and threatening cruelty of Cruise's original performance. Townsend's Lestat is the mischievous, camp killer you'd expect but there's a wooden, overdone delivery to his lines and his voice-overs which tends to distract more than anything. The film sees Lestat wake up from a long slumber in order to, I kid you not, start a goth rock band in order to piss off other vampires who don't necessarily want humans to learn about their existence. This bold move awakes Akasha, the Queen Of The Damned, the mother of all vampires. She is played by the late Aaliyah, this was her second and last performance in a film before her tragic, untimely passing. Bel