{"id":39963,"date":"2023-10-25T00:51:59","date_gmt":"2023-10-25T04:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=39963"},"modified":"2023-06-03T00:54:33","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T04:54:33","slug":"my-best-friend-is-a-vampire-1987","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/25\/my-best-friend-is-a-vampire-1987\/","title":{"rendered":"My Best Friend is a Vampire (1987)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s interesting that Jimmy Huston\u2019s horror comedy has managed to rise above the rest of the teen horror comedies over the years. Even something like \u201cOnce Bitten\u201d which had a young Jim Carrey, isn\u2019t nearly as popular as \u201cMy Best Friend is a Vampire.\u201d Despite being insanely silly, and features one of the most lackluster romantic interests of the eighties, \u201cMy Best Friend is a Vampire\u201d (aka \u201cI Was a Teenage Vampire\u201d) has survived mainly for its very vocal LGBTQ overtones, and a soundtrack that\u2019s better than it has any right to be.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Teenager Jeremy Capello is a normal middle-class boy, who lives with his beloved parents and has Ralph as his best friend. He works making deliveries for a supermarket and is seduced by his newest client sexy Nora. During a sexual encounter with her, Jeremy is bitten and transformed in a vampire. As Jeremy struggles to figure out his new powers, his friend Ralph is mistakenly chased by two weird vampire hunters, Leopold and his assistant Grimsdyke, both of whom believe he is a creature of the night. Meanwhile, Jeremy meets elder vampire Modoc, who teaches him how to adapt all the while he decides to pursue his high school crush Darla.<\/p>\n

The teen horror movie was pretty popular in the eighties, as teens were becoming witches, zombies, vampires, werewolves, monsters, exorcists, freaks, and anything else that you could concoct. They were all mostly metaphors for budding sexuality and puberty, and \u201cMy Best Friend is a Vampire\u201d does it well. By today\u2019s standards it\u2019s hopelessly silly and garners a very goofy finale, but it watches well. It\u2019s often witty and is never all that subtle about its very vocal themes. Our introduction to character Jeremy involves a wet dream he has with his nearly non-binary love interest Darla. He\u2019s lured in to bed by a gorgeous woman who happens to be a vampire.<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s groomed by an older vampire gentleman who teaches him how to \u201cblend\u201d with others in society and lead a full life without being hunted. Not to mention the film\u2019s villain, a smug vampire hunter, literally is consumed in an orgy of vampires, and emerges embracing his new ahem\u2014lifestyle, so to speak. Rene Auberjonois is the film\u2019s master vampire Modoc who takes a liking to Jeremy and is very interested in getting him accommodated in his new lifestyle. It\u2019s no coincidence that Modoc is played with an obvious queer coding, as he tailors Jeremy to accept his life rather than fight them. Hell, while Jeremy\u2019s best friend is immediately accepting of his lifestyle.<\/p>\n

Jeremy\u2019s parents, meanwhile, have a sub-plot where they spend the whole movie trying to find a way to come to terms with his new development. There\u2019s also David Warner and Paul Wilson, in particular, a pair of spiteful vampire hunters that are dead set in killing Jeremy. They spend the whole film botching their attempts, and poor Wilson as sidekick Grimsdyke is physically punished by just about everyone. Robert Sean Leonard is charming in the role of Jeremy, an average eighties teen who is weak to the allure of the older femme fatale\/vampiress Nora (Cecillia Peck). \u201cMy Best Friend is a Vampire\u201d isn\u2019t exactly what I\u2019d call laugh out loud funny, but it does have some moments of raucous humor, and it is smarter than most of its genre contemporaries, which definitely helps it stand apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s interesting that Jimmy Huston\u2019s horror comedy has managed to rise above the rest of the teen horror comedies over the years. Even something like \u201cOnce Bitten\u201d which had a young Jim Carrey, isn\u2019t nearly as popular as \u201cMy Best Friend is a Vampire.\u201d Despite being insanely silly, and features one of the most lackluster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[219,349,477,874,1033,1151],"class_list":["post-39963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-movie-reviews","tag-comedy","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-romance","tag-teen","tag-vampires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39965,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39963\/revisions\/39965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}