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67Nothing near a modern vampire classic. Still, "Queen" is a great dose of vamp camp
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63Aaliyah rules as the undead Queen of the Damned, even if she has scarcely half an hour of screen time in this campy Anne Rice vampire tale.
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60Since the movie arrives and succeeds as entertaining B-movie fare, we may as well appreciate all of its howls, beastly or unintentional.
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50It is happy to be goofy.
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50Leaves us puzzled as to why the term "damned" applies at all, when vampirism is depicted as so cool, fashion-savvy and glamorous.
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50The original rock songs on the soundtrack, which are supposed to make Lestat ''bigger than Elvis,'' are terrible -- a common challenge for movies about fictional musicians.
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50At its best, Queen is campy fun like the Vincent Price horror classics of the '60s. At its worst, it implodes in a series of very bad special effects.
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50If you're going because you want to see an entertaining horror movie, good luck.
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50Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.
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50When Queen of the Damned knows it's ridiculous, it's moderately entertaining fun; when it tries to be serious, it's truly ridiculous.
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50Handsomely mounted, this direly conventional bit of vampire business is enlivened by flashes of humor and game performances. It isn't great entertainment or camp, but pic sets its ambitions so low, it can't help partially delivering on them.
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42Maybe in a few years the incoherent gaudiness of this underperforming sequel to ''Interview With A Vampire'' -- will have transmuted into a kind of appreciable camp. Until that time, however, we're stuck with this damned production
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42Is Queen of the Damned worthy of its hype or should it have a stake driven through its dark heart? The answer lies somewhere in between.
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40Rymer's film doesn't revitalize vampire clichés in any significant way and, frankly, "Velvet Goldmine" is a more seductive movie about sex, death and rock and roll -- and it's not even about vampires.
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40The whole film suffers from a serious case of overplotting, perhaps inevitable when trying to cram two largish novels into one smallish film.
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40Townsend and Aaliyah are sexy as hell, and clearly willing and able to explore the darker truths of villainy, but they can't compete against the unwieldy script.
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40The result is an exploitation movie that seems like it's about something -- though what exactly I couldn't say.
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38The main theme is the loneliness of the social outcast. That, plus a soundtrack to wake the undead, and the morbidly entombed presence of Aaliyah, will attract an audience despite the movie's intrinsic cheesiness.
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38Like many genuinely awful movies, Queen of the Damned has the ingredients of a cult film.
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38Abbott, Petroni and director Michael Rymer do exploit the visual and aural cliches of vampire movies from the last 20 years: The creatures wear tattoos, shave their heads, listen to blistering rock and dress in black leather. For a band of societal outsiders, they're pathetically conformist.
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30Just as the author's characters suffer through their immortality, as they crave closure and a death to their blood-sucking madness, so Queen of the Damned demands an end to its own misery.
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Aaliyah fans, as well as fans of charisma, sex, and violence, will be sorely disappointed.
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30Knows that it's junk and tries feebly to rejoice in its junkiness.
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25Self-serious, pointless and silly.
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25This kind of fiasco turns movie critics into so many Night Stalkers.
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20A surreal piece of silliness.
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20"Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster.
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20Although the movie is set in the rock world and, therefore, should be a sort of extended music video, it's devoid of even MTV-caliber originality.
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20What saddened me, however, wasn't the silliness but recognizing the great Swedish actress Lena Olin under a lot of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" makeup. What a waste.
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10Audiences should demand this film be buried never to see the light of day again.
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10Turns out to be a muddled limp biscuit of a movie, a vampire soap opera that doesn't make much sense even on its own terms.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 70 out of 98
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Mixed: 6 out of 98
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Negative: 22 out of 98
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10
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