22: Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust (2000, Kevin J. Lindenmuth & Tom Vollman)

Owned version: The DVD released in 2002 by Delta Entertainment. I don't foresee any further releases of this movie in its future.

Acquired: November 29, 2014 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

See that title card up there? Here's a dirty little secret - that's from the closing credits, not the opening credits. The opening credits bear this:

And the cover of the DVD smooshes both titles together atop an ugly-ass Photoshop nightmare:

What's the import, why start with all this minutia regarding the actual title to this film? As I see it, an inability to even agree on what to call the infernal thing speaks to a deep discord in terms of the production. I suspect what I have in front of me is a salvage job, and a damned graceless one at that. But what's the nature of the salvage?

Addicted to Murder 3 Bloodlust Vampire Killer starts by picking up where Addicted to Murder had left off, with vampirized serial killer Joel Winter (Mick McCleery, letting a pair of dark sunglasses and a goatee do all the acting work) embracing his newfound calling as a vampire slayer. Then the opening credits roll and Joel is forgotten about for the next twenty-plus minutes; instead, we get more documentary-style framing device nonsense (this time for an ostensible show about vampires) and a series of supernatural domestic squabbles, as Tricia (the neophyte vamp from Tainted Blood) deals with a paramour who demands to be turned and doesn't take kindly to being denied. Joel pops back in just in time for the framing device to resolve in a double twist... at which point the film then jumps to a completely different cast and begins telling a story about a man sent to prison for murder whose cellmate is a vampire. Once that story is over, Joel gets to trot back on screen for a little longer, another random vampire shows up to kill some random lady and then the movie is over.

This isn't the first time Lindenmuth has pulled a fast one like this - his Alien Agenda: Endangered Species uses its status as an omnibus film to justify using at least one unrelated short shot five years before. But at least in that film, he tries to make the piece fit - there's something muttered in the narration that attempts, however unsuccessfully, to provide a way to tie this pre-existing object into the rest of the film built around it and independently of it. Bloodlust Addicted to Murder 3 Vampire Killer doesn't feign such concern - the prison segment was shot by Dead Meat director Tom Vollman, who was blithely unconcerned with whatever the hell kind of world Lindenmuth had been building with the Addicted to Murder series. I can say this because the big, bald menacing crime-kingpin vampire in this segment only goes out at night, sleeps on a mattress stuffed with dirt and at one point hisses, "Holy water, crucifixes, wooden stakes, the whole ball of wax... I don't like any of that fuckin' shit." You know, basic vampire-lore stuff... and absolutely the kind of stuff Lindenmuth had made such a point of flouting. Lindenmuth's vampires wander around in the sun all the time (there's a throwaway line in one of the two previous films about how while they're stronger at night, the sun doesn't bother them), they sleep anywhere and on anything they please and they show no particular aversion to Christian iconography - Tainted Blood even makes a joke out of that when Tricia's friend tries to ward her off with a large plastic cross and she retorts, "Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood... what do you think HE was?" So either Addicted to Bloodlust Killer Vampire Murder 3 is a duology where neither side consulted with the other about the world in which this was taking place, or it's... something else.

Here's my theory: Vollman shot the prison film, intending it to be either a longer stand-alone piece or (more likely, given the tidy narrative arc and Tom's previous involvement with Lindenmuth on Alien Agenda: Under the Skin) a segment in another in-the-works omnibus, something akin to the Creaturealm films where there's no linking device and everyone just makes what they want. But Lindenmuth has about thirty minutes of footage shot in 1998 and intended for another Addicted to Murder film but no film to show for it. Why not? Maybe he couldn't make his idea for the film work without the involvement of Sasha Graham (who only appears in flashback footage), or maybe he just lost interest. At any rate, Vollman's featurette is just what he needs to puff up this orphaned work to saleable length. So in it goes, an abrasive overacted stretch of idiocy stuffed in the middle of a pile of aimless crud like an old, overhard egg inside a stale challah. 3 Killer Vampire Lust Blood Murder to Addicted is one shitty, unfinished film wrapped around another shitty, unfinished film and presented like we won't notice, like the seams aren't snapping and the glue isn't failing to hold. What a terrible way to piss away any remaining promise held by the original work.

1: A propósito de Buñuel (2000, Jose Luis López-Linares & Javier Rioyo)

Owned release: The 2000 Criterion DVD release of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie includes this on a separate disc as an extra.

Acquired: June 14, 2010 - bought the disc from Criterion shortly after the announcement that it was going out of print.

Seen before?: No.

One of the things about this project that I'm looking forward to is re-watching a lot of Luis Buñuel. Buñuel was the first canon director I became obsessed with as a teenage cinephile. I spent a good portion of my teen years trying to watch all the major works of his and got to most of them (Viridiana eluded me until the Criterion release years later, and Los Olvidados came soon after when I realized that my library system at the time still offered VHS tapes - a luxury that, as I found recently, is no longer). I spent one summer reading My Last Sigh. I had a Belle de Jour poster tied to the Scorsese-sponsored Miramax re-release in my room in high school. I was the only one in my college Intro to Film course who had seen Un Chien Andalou prior to it screening in class. (To this day, one of the greatest in-unison reactions I've ever heard from an audience.) I spent years considering him my favorite filmmaker of all time, and if pressed I probably still would hold to that notion.

And the last time I saw a film of his was March of 2011, when my local arthouse theater showed Belle de Jour. That's no way to treat an old friend.

With all that as a foundation upon which I've set a good deal of my cinephilia, it then seems appropriate to start this off with a documentary about Buñuel. Buñuel, who has meant so much to me over the years, serving as a lamplight for this new thing of mine. It's like it was meant to be.

I wish I could say the documentary was deserving of the man, but it is ultimately the kind of basic talking-head documentary that seems all wrong for such a unique and unclassifiable figure. The film even admits this more or less immediately, when Jose Bello says, "With Buñuel, it's difficult to look for the explanation because most of the best things about him had no explanation." The project is undercut before it even begins, really, yet it doggedly goes on anyway. Because... well, what else would you do? What would a properly Buñuelian documentary about the man himself look like? A hall of mirrors, a pile of half-truths, a series of dreams, a disconnected parade of fetishes? Would it simply be an adaptation of My Last Sigh? And would there be cows?

The condition of the film's release, maybe, is telling. If A propósito is relegated to supplemental material status, unable to earn a release on its own, that seems strangely appropriate - consider it also a supplement to the man himself and his work, a conventional adjunct to the much richer and more fanciful Sigh (passages of which are read at various junctures during this film). There is the occasional interesting piece of information (the midfilm passage where several interviewees reflect on Buñuel's strangely conservative stance on sex and eroticism is engrossing - "Love is a secret ceremony to be performed underground"), and stories about the man never get old even as they've been told before. There's also a demonstration of Buñuel's signature cocktail, which as a booze nerd makes me indescribably happy and I can't wait to try it. (Three parts gin, two parts Carpano Antico, one part Cinzano sweet vermouth). Plus, it's made me want to dig up my old copy of Sigh and re-read it - it's been too long for that, too.