In preparation for — nay, in honor of — the upcoming premier of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call in New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog and starring the great performer Nicolas Cage, the Acme Video blog will be running a series of (at least) daily pieces on the entire Cage Oeuvre, with its startling highs and mystifying lows. It is one man’s tale… a chronicle of madness and obsession.

DAY 1: VAMPIRE’S KISS

I begin with Vampire’s Kiss because, for the uninitiated, for the non-believers, for the haters and the nay-sayers, there is probably no better single testament to Nick Cage’s truly unique, entirely reckless, batshit-crazy brand of “acting.”  This is Cage’s Last Tango In Paris. His Aguirre, Wrath of God. His Silence Of The Lambs. If you crossed Marlon Brando, Klaus Kinski, and Hannibal Lecter you would end up with something close to Peter Loew, Cage’s utterly psychotic method-acting transformation from depressed-skirt-chasing-1980’s-literary-agent to control-freak-vampire-maniac-rapist.

One is tempted to use the phrase “a descent into madness,” but Vampire’s Kiss is more like a private tour of every wing of the nut-house. Loew is mad even at the film’s outset — a spastic, giggling, sexually-charged playboy, with women and money to burn and an awesomely Gothic Manhattan apartment. Cage adopted a strange, high-falutin, vaguely English accent for part, which comes and goes depending on his mood (and in one of several phenomenal scenes with his shrink, it actually becomes contagious; see the clip below). It’s just one of several crazy-as-a-fox decisions Cage makes, choices that would have been disastrous for a lesser actor — or at least one with smaller cajones. The fun really gets started once Loew gets his first vampire bite and begins his fitful, wildly uneven mutation into a blood-starved creature of the night. A fun enough premise in its own right, but both the film — and primarily, Cage — take so many stylistic left-turns that it’s not long before you’re feeling just as lost and desperate as Loew, wandering through Robert Bierman‘s fantastically cheerless Manhattan. Vampire’s Kiss then becomes a truly Kafkaesque fracturing of the Cage psyche. Donning a pair of old-person driving sunglasses, Cage’s movements become decidedly bat-like, as he leaps and flits around his office, screaming and twitching at his lowly assistant because of some completely insignificant file that’s gone missing. Much of the film is devoted to the manic-depressive head games Loew plays on this poor young woman (a perfectly mousy Maria Conchita Alonso) who fears — rightly — for her safety. Cage’s performance is truly one of the moodiest I’ve ever seen, and I mean that in the best possible sense: you can’t look away, and you never know what’s next. Few actors have ever mixed horror and comedy this well.

He eats a cockroach, people (in fact he ate three, one for each take). Gobbles it up. The final scene is an insane Cage-vs.-Cage riff, basically like watching a psychopath simultaneously prosecute and defend himself in a court of law. You MUST see this film.

Impossible to pick just one scene, but yeah… this one rules.