While reading Grace Jones’ I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, I discovered that she was in a movie called Vamp. If you saw A View to a Kill, you know that after Christopher Walken, she was the best part of the movie. Watching Grace Jones in a vampire movie became a priority!
Vamp is an 80s comedy horror film about a group of college students and wanna be frat boys who go to a strip club in the bad part of town a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and get more than they bargain for. Vamp is the antecedent to From Dusk Till Dawn, but the latter story is more consistent whereas Vamp has a promising beginning, but once the crap starts to hit the fan, whenever Jones and the emcee aren’t on screen, Vamp falls flat. Vamp sets up AJ to be the most adventurous and interesting student then switches to Keith, which could have been a clever twist on developing an unlikely hero except Vamp did nothing to develop Keith earlier except reveal him to have an important hobby early in the movie. Also Vamp misdirects the audience by making threats seem like they stem from the same tree when they are not the same. This concept was clever, but underdeveloped.
Jones is the best part of Vamp as Queen Katrina, and you should check out Vamp if you’e a fan, but don’t expect a lot from the actual movie.
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Queen Katrina appears to be an ancient Egyptian, powerful, possibly royal vampire, and I wish that we learned more about her journey and choices. I love that Vamp makes it a given that Jones and actually all black women in the movie are unquestionably desirable. On the other hand, they are also viewed as inherently dangerous though in different ways. Queen Katrina hearkens back to vampires as symbols of the dark side of sexuality, but because Jones is black, it is simultaneously emblematic of the immoral and oversexed Jezebel stereotype.
Vamp shows that the safer love interest is the blonde neighborhood girl who hasn’t actually stripped yet. Color and sex work are important and play certain normative roles. If the safe love interest was black, it would have helped. Ultimately I’m neither mad, nor do I find it problematic because Jones is such a unique, powerful individual that there is less of a danger of making her representative of black women in general or with her conforming to this stereotype. If anything, she subverts it by taking out the stigma and making it powerful.
Queen Katrina is as avant garde a performance artist as Jones rather than a stripper. I did not know until after watching Vamp that her initial appearance was based on Pris from Blade Runner! Jones does more without words than the average actor does with a starring role and is such an expressive fearless actor that it is a shame that she did not appear in more films or that when she did, she was not in the film for a longer period of time. I also like that she shares more characteristics with the Salem’s Lot vampires and Nosferatu than wimpier, romantic vampire counterparts. Vamp’s Queen Katrina expects that you serve her, and her fawning servants comply.