Innocent Blood movie storyline. Marie has two appetites, sex and blood. Her career as a vampire is going along fine until two problems come up, she is interrupted while feeding on Sal (the shark) Macelli and she begins to develope a relationship with the policeman who has been trying to put Sal away. Sal wakes up in the morgue very confused and very thirsty. He goes back to his old haunts and begins to create an organized crime family of vampires while Marie and her policeman lover hunt him.
Innocent Blood (also known in some regions as A French Vampire in America) is a 1992 American crime comedy horror film directed by John Landis and written by Michael Wolk. The film stars Anne Parillaud as a beautiful French vampire who finds herself pitted against a gang of vicious mobsters led by Robert Loggia who eventually becomes a vampire himself.
The film is set and was filmed in and around the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. The “Little Italy” of Pittsburgh, a portion of the Bloomfield, Pittsburgh neighborhood, clustered around Liberty Avenue, is recognizable in many of the film’s outdoor urban scenes. Actors Tony Sirico and David Proval have supporting parts as gangsters, foreshadowing their roles in The Sopranos. It also features early appearances by Anthony LaPaglia, Angela Bassett, and Chazz Palminteri. The film is notable for being a mixture of the vampire, gangster and buddy cop genres.
Film Review for Innocent Blood
“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. More’s the pity, then, that the movie contains an intriguing character in Marie, a vampire who is woman enough to spare at least one man from her fangs.
Marie is played by Anne Parillaud, star of “La Femme Nikita,” as a lonely creature of the night who lives in Pittsburgh and rejoices when a local gang war breaks out. That means there will be lots of killings to provide a cover for her nocturnal feasts. She can dine on a gangster’s blood and flesh, and then destroy the evidence with a well-placed shotgun blast that looks like a mob hit.
Her plan seems foolproof. “But there’s a problem,” the disconsolate coroner complains after examining one of her victims. “Not enough blood. This guy’s about five quarts low.” An undercover cop named Joe Gennaro (Anthony LaPaglia), who has met Marie under a variety of suspicious circumstances, begins to suspect she may be behind the killings – especially after she dive-bombs him in a church, flying through the air in rage after being attacked by one of the gangsters.
The gang is run by Sal the Shark (Robert Loggia), whose early scenes have a nice edgy menace, but whose later scenes are so dominated by the special effects that we are looking at the movie instead of watching it. The notion of gangster-vampires, intriguing when you hear about it, is never really explored except in some brief, contrived dialogue.
The movie was directed by John Landis, no doubt with nostalgia for his “An American Werewolf in London” (1981). He fills it with clips from old horror and monster classics, and even gets into a big hospital scene by panning from Hitchcock’s walk-on in “Strangers on a Train.” But such cuteness doesn’t make up for the lack of a clear idea of what the movie is about. It looks great, with its film noir streets and its vampires who steam and disintegrate at the touch of sunlight (Don Rickles, as Loggia’s lawyer, meets a particularly gruesome end). But it’s all effect and no emotion.
That leaves the Anne Parillaud character, looking as sexily consumptive as she did in “La Femme Nikita,” and narrating the film in a sad voice, complaining of hunger and loneliness. Hers is an interesting character, and some of her scenes with LaPaglia have a certain poignance as a result. But she’s real enough, dimensional enough, to be more at home in one of Anne Rice’s vampire stories, instead of in this uneasy anthology of genres and styles.
Innocent Blood (1992)
Directed by: John Landis
Starring: Anne Parillaud, Anthony LaPaglia, Robert Loggia, David Proval, Chazz Palminteri, Leo Burmester, Luis Guzmán, Angela Bassett, Rohn Thomas
Screenplay by: Michael Wolk
Production Design by: Richard Sawyer
Cinematography by: Mac Ahlberg
Film Editing by: Dale Beldin
Costume Design by: Deborah Nadoolman
Set Decoration by: Peg Cummings
Art Direction by: Martin Charles
Music by: Ira Newborn
MPAA Rating: R for vampire violence, and for sexuality and language.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: September 25, 1992
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