Last night on Tubi I watched Innocent Blood, a 1992 horror comedy directed by John Landis and written by Michael Wolk. The film starred Anne Parillaud, who was hot off of her fame in La Femme Nikita at the time, as Marie, a French vampire who goes to Pittsburgh and decides to feast on the local Italian mobsters. She is sexy and can play up an innocent act to lure in mobsters, and kills one (Chazz Palminteri), and shoots him in the head afterwards to cover her tracks and prevent him from waking up as a vampire. Anthony LaPaglia plays an undercover cop named Joe who had infiltrated the mob for three years, and Marie skips over him because “his eyes looked too sad,” like he looked too nice to kill. Joe and the cops are trying to take down the crime boss Salvatore Macelli (Robert Loggia), but when Marie attacks Macelli and is interrupted while feeding on him, he doesn’t die and comes back as a vampire, then feels more invincible and works on turning his mob into a vampire crime syndicate.
This was a lot of fun to watch. It’s weird and funny, kind of mixes some sleazy sexiness with the bizarreness of a vampire mob, and pairing a vampire and a cop together to take down the mob was creative.
There's a a running motif of characters watching old monster movies on TV, like a Godzilla movie, the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie, a Hammer horror-era vampire movie, etc.
Robert Loggia seemed like he was having a lot of fun playing a vampire Mafia boss, just chewing up the scenery and eating other mob guys.
There are so many character actors in this movie. Loggia, Palminteri, Kim Coates, Marshall Bell, Tony Sirico, Luis Guzmán, and Leo Burmester.
And so many horror icon cameos too: Dario Argento, Sam Raimi, Linnea Quigley, Tom Savini, and Forrest James Ackerman.
Angela Bassett has a small part as a cop just before she got big, and Don Rickles plays a mob lawyer.
The special effects with the glowing vampire eyes weren’t that great, and did take me out of the movie with how ridiculous it looked.
I really enjoyed this weird horror comedy a lot, I heard of it from a film podcast episode of Critically Acclaimed Network talking about vampire movies.
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