The Sopranos with Vampires!
Have you ever wanted to see Feech La Manna, Richie Aprile, Carmine Lupertazzi, Paulie Walnuts, and Sonny from a Bronx Tale fighting a vampire? A sexy naked French vampire? Well boy do I have a film for you.
Innocent Blood is 1992 black comedy film about a vampire who finds herself pitted against a gang of mobsters. The film stars a bunch of faces you’ll recognize from The Sopranos, as well as other notable actors like Anthony LaPaglia, Angela Bassett, Luiz Guzman, and even Don Rickles.
If you’re a fan of my channel, you’ll know that I like to review weird pieces of Sopranos related media for April Fools every year. Special thanks to viewer sidewinder714 who brought this strange, awful film to my attention. Even setting aside the Sopranos connection, the story is incoherent, the performances are wooden, and the tone ranges from corny to awkwardly erotic. It’s the perfect movie to cover for my April Fool’s tradition. So let’s take a look at this piece of shit about vampire gangsters.
The movie opens with Marie, a vampire living in Pittsburg. She has a moral rule that she won’t feed on the blood of the innocent. After reading about the ongoing gangwar in the city, she decides to target the mafiosos as her next meal.
We’re then introduced to Joey Genaro, an associate of the brutal mob boss Sal “the Shark” Macelli. Joey hesitates to shoot when ordered, and his friend Tony warns him that they have to do whatever Sal orders them to.
Joey then bumps into Marie on the street, and there is an immediate attraction. She considers eating him, but sees that he has innocent eyes and leaves him be. Instead she goes for Tony, seducing him into driving somewhere secluded for sex. She then reveals she is a vampire, in a real cheese effect.
After feasting, she blows Tony’s head off with a shotgun, both to cover up her bite marks and to make sure he doesn’t rise again as a vampire. The next day the police discover the body, and it’s revealed that Joey is actually an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the Macelli family. After being photographed at the crime scene, Joey’s cover is blown and he’s pulled from his assignment.
The next night, Marie goes after Sal. She again seduces him, and he brings her back to his place for dinner. She plans to attack him, but he pulls out garlic mussels which makes her sick. She attempts to escape from the bathroom but finds it locked. Sal then attempts to rape her, but she bites his neck and drains his blood. However she’s interrupted from finishing the job by one of Sal’s goons, and is forced to flee.
Sal is pronounced dead and taken to the morgue. However once there, he wakes up, and in a confused state he escapes, alerting the media in the process. He goes to his lawyer’s house, and after drinking his lawyer’s blood, is healed and feels stronger than ever.
Meanwhile after learning about Sal’s death, Joey investigates the scene and sees a trail of blood leading to the church. There he finds Marie, and after a chase she demands that he take her to Sal so she can finish the job. They go to the lawyer’s house, but Joey is captured by the gangsters. They take him to the docks to kill him, but he’s saved by Marie. She manages to kill some of his men, but Sal escapes.
Marie and Joey attempt to pursue him, but the sun comes up and Marie is forced to retreat indoors to a motel. Sal hides in a meat factory that he owns. At the motel, Marie and Joey confess their feelings for each other, and have some pretty graphic sex.
The next night, Sal goes to a nightclub he owns and announces his plan to rule the city using his new vampire powers. He begins transforming his men, who each become vampires in turn. Joey and Marie track him down, and end up taking out his goons by shooting them in the head. This leads to a big fight outside where Sal is lit on fire and eventually shot in the head too.
With Sal gone, Marie considers letting the sunlight kill her because she is tired of being a monster, but Joey tells her he loves her. They go inside to another hotel, and Marie decides to live. And as the movie ends, we get this weird upbeat credit sequence.
The film was directed by John Landis, most known for directing films like The Blue Brothers and American Werewolf in London, and also for killing 3 people while filming the Twilight Zone movie. While Landis was given a lot of freedom for this film, the movie ended up being a flop, earning only around 5 million on a 20 million dollar budget.
To sum up the flaws of this movie, I think Robert Ebert said it best when he reviewed the film. "Innocent Blood" is an uncomfortable marriage of vampires and mobsters; it doesn't work on either the supernatural or the criminal level. The payoff, in which the gangsters find that they've become vampires, is an exercise in missed opportunities.
Tonally the movie is weird. Sure you’ve got Robert Loggia hamming it up as a goofy vampire mob boss, but you’ve also got brutal murder and attempted rape. Plus you have some really gratuitous nudity, like you see full bush in this film and I’m not sure why. Am I supposed to be turned on while watching this, or be laughing at the corny jokes? The film doesn’t really know what it wants to be.
Really the only reason anyone would be interested in this movie nowadays is the Sopranos related cast. I only noticed this as of writing the script, but they even got the guy who played Junior in the flashback episodes. Unfortunately though only Robert Loggia really gets to give a performance, and he’s actually probably the best of the film. But all the other Sopranos actors barely get any screen time. Tony Sirico is even killed before he gets to become a vampire, which really sucks as he already looks like the perfect dracula.
However the biggest problem the film has is the pacing, which really ruins any kind of investment you might actually have in the action. The scene where Sal rises from the dead for example drags on forever, and it’s played more laughs than being a serious supernatural event.
This really hurts the film, as it’s hard to take the threat of a vampire mafia seriously. Sal only comes up with the plan in the final 20 minutes of the movie, and right after creating the vampires they are instantly killed by Joey and Marie. The fact that they just shoot them in the head is also really lame. I mean they build up this big climax with Sal being lit on fire and surviving, only to undercut it by having them literally just shoot him dead in an instant.
The fact that Joey was an undercover cop is also really underutilized. They reveal it in his second scene, and immediately he is outed publicly as a cop. I don’t even know why they included this detail if they weren’t going to do anything with it. You’d think that having him be undercover when Sal becomes a vampire would be interesting. He could witness his transformation, but when he tries to tell the cops they wouldn’t believe something so outlandish, forcing him to work with Marie to take him down. It would have been good for building tension, but instead it’s just another wasted opportunity.
There’s also a lot of weird sexuality in the film. I get that that’s pretty much part of the vampire genre at this point, but here it comes off as awkward and a little gross. The BDSM sex scene between Marie and Joey just feels gratuitous, primarily because we don’t ever get a reason for why they like each other, other than the sex appeal of course.
Overall Innocent Blood is not a good film. It’s in this weird spot between comedy and serious action. But if you’re interested in seeing some Sopranos' faces before they got onto the show, check it out. I hope you enjoyed this video, and stay tuned for more content, coming soon!
