The Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer
There is a limit to how many times a person can watch the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I now know I have surpassed mine. We undertook this dreadful precursor to the television series as the teen is a huge fan of the Buffy-verse. She has watched all seven seasons of the television program and even dressed as Buffy one Halloween when just a wee thing.
So, she needed to see it. But this is one that Joss Whedon probably can’t sit through. Okay, maybe I exaggerate. Maybe not.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (rated PG-13) was released in 1992, when I was in high school. Kristy Swanson plays the role that later made Sarah Michele Gellar famous. Luke Perry as Pike helps Buffy save the day and has some entertaining experiences when his best friend becomes a vampire. Donald Sutherland provides a strong performance as Buffy’s watcher and Paul Reubens offers more ridiculousness than creep as the master vampire’s lackey. By the end of the film, he’s lost an arm and dies in an almost never-ending collection of grunts and gasps.
But this film isn’t about good horror. It’s about the origins of a pop culture legend. We were scarcely twenty minutes in when the teen declared she hated the character of Buffy. The teen surprised me by never mocking the Valley Girl aspects of Buffy and her friends, though she did label them “stuck-up.” She also never commented on the use of menstrual cramps as a vampire detector, an element that never carried over into the television series.
By the mid-point of the film, Eva said the most unbelievable part is that Buffy’s parents are never home and don’t care at all what Buffy does. Despite her criticism, giggles peppered the living room the bulk of the 86-minutes it took to watch the film, and not always at the lines I find memorable. She didn’t bat an eye at, “You threw a knife at my head… I just want to graduate high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater and die.” Of course, the teen has no idea who Christian Slater is.
Lines like “Kill him a lot” made her roar.
“As if killing him a little is a thing,” she said.
And the most distressing part of the movie? “The master eats kittens!”
Even the iconic scene where Buffy sets the master vampire’s head on fire with a cross and a can of hairspray feels flat in regard to delivery and doesn’t matter to Eva. Yet, when the vampires invade the Senior Dance, she yells strategy advice at the screen. The teen also thinks Buffy does too many gymnastics when sometimes it’s just more efficient to run.
The DVD jacket of our copy of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer states that Variety once said the movie has “plenty of teen appeal.” Does it… more than 25 years later? It’s definitely comedy, she said, not horror, and she laughed sometimes because things were funny and other times because things were stupid. The teen also enjoyed the fact that the girl did the dirty work and the boy got thrown around. And the one time he landed a punch on a vampire, she explained, he had to distract him and tell him to look up.
I guess that means the Buffy the Vampire Slayer does have teen appeal. Makes me more anxious to set her loose on The Craft.
The Plot Sickens: If you want more from Angel Ackerman and Eva Parry, check out their review of I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House!
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Angel Ackerman and Eva Parry
After a fifteen-year career in print journalism, Angel Ackerman has studied world history, (specifically post-colonial Francophone Africa, Muslim relations, and contemporary Western politics) and traveled several continents. Her recent publications include the poem This Paris in StepAway magazine, an essay on the weather and travel on the Horn of Africa in Rum Punch Press, academic encyclopedia entries on Djibouti, a review in Global Studies South on a book examining famine in Somalia, book reviews from eons ago for Hippocampus Magazine and an upcoming essay on chickens. Follow her on Twitter.
Eva Parry will enter high school this fall but has already spent a season in the low brass section of the marching band carrying a sousaphone. When not irritating her mother by piling as many clothes and candy wrappers as possible on her bedroom floor, she explores various writing forms and antagonizes her cats. She has known Billy Crash most of her life and never stops making noise or talking, which once resulted in her missing a catch and taking a Frisbee in the mouth.
(Still from Buffy the Vampire Slayer via Fandom Factory.)