This week: Queen of the Damned

Filthy says: "Just fucking dreadful."

Being out of work as long as me, a man gets a sense of why he can't keep a job. It's not my work habits and it's not my hygiene. Maybe it's that I like to go to work lit up like a Christmas Tree, but that's just a symptom of the problem.

Here's what I figure: I'm a visionary, always looking ahead and picturing my future. I can't tell you how many girlfriends I've broken up with because we got in big arguments about how I knew that somewhere in the future we would break up. I would plan ahead and start badmouthing the girls to my friends and pouring sugar in their gas tanks before we even split up. Actually, I can tell you the number. It was three. That's every single one I ever had before Mrs. Filthy came along and told me to shut the hell up. There is no amount of joy in the present that can make me stop knowing that there is immeasurable misery ahead.

I can't keep a job because I hate working. I don't hate the work at hand, or even the work I just did. I hate that there is always work ahead. When I start a new job, I look forward to the weekends. I think of those two days, Saturday and Sunday, snuggled together like a pair of lipstick lesbians gesturing for me to join them in bed. It's 48 hours where I can do whatever the hell I please, so long as I find where my wife is hiding the grocery money. I've always found Saturday to be much more enticing than Sunday, though, and after a few weeks on any job I only look forward to it. My Sundays are spent in a funk, brooding over the fact that Monday is waiting to swallow me up and then all I will have to look forward to is Friday.

Eventually, I hate myself for spending all week looking forward to that one lousy day. Well, for that and having jerked off to the image of a nurse in the Parade section of the Sunday paper. Anyway, I feel like I'm trapped in a shitty Loverboy song. Saturday is the only day I'm happy. That is, until I really start dreading Sundays. Then I spend Saturdays pouting about how miserable I am on Sundays.

Eventually, I get so far ahead of myself, that I am loathing weekends that are four or five months away. I hate vacations because they are spent thinking about how I have to go back to work when they're over. I even hate accruing vacation time. I hate going home from work because I would rather be doing the job than sitting at home and thinking about how much I hate it.

That's why I like being unemployed better, but just barely. Right now, I'm already dreading my next job because of how much I will hate myself for looking forward to weekends. And I'm dreading being old and broke and having to shoplift potted meats.

There is only one time I don't obsess over how shitty it is to work. It is when I am sitting in a dark movie theater by myself and watching a great movie. Hell, even a decent movie can tear me away from the fear that I might have to go back to work and have those awful weekends in a couple of months.

Queen of the Damned is fucking awful. It doesn't help me transcend my miserable little life. It doesn't make me stop thinking about the lousy gig I'll have washing dishes or cleaning lint trays. I paid eight fucking dollars to be taken away, Hollywood promised in their ads that I would be, and all I was left with is the dull pain of sadness that comes on a Sunday morning.

This is why I get so fucking pissed at the movies and those grassfuckers in Hollywood. They know Queen of the Damned is a Cleveland Steamer on the chests of moviegoers, but they don't give a brittle shit. They have a contract with us, we pay and they're supposed to deliver two hours of escape. Instead they sell us some popcorn, throw us to the bathroom floor and ram a busted broomstick up our asses. What puts my dick in the peanut butter is that those pricks know full well they're twisting one off in our asses, and they don't care.

Queen of the Damned is dedicated to the dead pop star Allihay. She must have fucked the executives' husbands to piss them off that badly because having this monument to ineptitude as your lasting monument is worse than them dumping your corpse in the pond out back. I mean, if this movie was meant to inspire people to live every day as though it were their last, it's effective, because no fucking way would even a crappy actress like her make this if she knew it's how shell be remembered.

To imagine how scrotum-wrenchingly bad this move is, let's start here: Picture a world where the goths in high school are the cool kids, and the shit they like is hip. Marilyn Manson isn't a bad joke. Now imagine this world interpreted by the makers of "ChiPs." Nobody wants to hang out with goths, that's why they eat lunch alone and keep journals of poetry and lists of people they want to kill. Still, Queen of the Damned thinks they're the God damn prom queens, then makes the even more egregious mistake of letting clueless fifty-year olds tell us how they act.

Like real goths the movie's characters say the stupidest, most overblown shit. Unlike real goths, they speak articulately and don't mumble into their shoulders.

Here is the order this movie was made in: select the wardrobe, select the locales, whip up a story to fit those. The plot is some convoluted horseshit about the vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend in a career-ending performance) rising from a hundred years of sleep to start a goth-metal band in New Orleans. In the band's lyrics, he gives away vampire secrets; stuff like "We drink your blood to live, we live in the dark, someone stole my lunch money and pooped in my locker again." Thanks to some charisma we never get to see, the band becomes the most popular in the world and is having only one concert in California's Mojave Desert. So, naturally, they hold a press conference in London. Huh? There, a poorly-defined paranormal research institute is keeping track. A young, dull-eyed researcher named Marguerite Moreau becomes obsessed with Townsend and follows him. She wants to become a vampire, too. Well, she does until he shows her that,--oh my god!--it's more than just strutting around in a velvet jacket. You have to suck people's blood! It's understandable that a vampire researcher wouldn't know this small detail. Meanwhile, we are treated to extensive and cheesy voice-over narration that vainly attempts to explain what the fuck is going on. And in a long, long series of flashbacks, Townsend falls in love with the statue of ancient Egyptian vampire Akasha (Amilaya). In the present, his rock music wakes her from the dead. This is believable. This music's so awful our cemeteries are probably full of corpses sticking decomposed fingers into their desiccated ears. At the big concert in the Mojave Desert, all the world's vampires show up to get even with Townsend for giving away their secrets, and Ayullah shows up to save him and seduce him. With the aid of cheesy special effects, Townsend and Atilla kill the vampires and escape to start a superbreed of vampires. After discovering what a shitty lover the queen of the Damned is, Townsend starts wishing he had porked Moreau. And then it really gets silly. Swear to God, it gets even worse.

Ameliyah is supposed to slink about sexily, but her heavily modulated voice is annoying as hell and her slinking is so herky jerky it looks more like she's trying to pop-and-lock like Rerun on "What's Happening." Townsend is tit-numbingly bad. He has since claimed he was hamming it up, but if that's true, how come it isn't funny? Every character is so poorly defined that we're stuck spending two hours with people how we'd rather were dead. The accents are uniformly fucked up, like the actors had Eurail passes and wanted to show they got their money's worth. The music is two hours of goth-metal-rap written by an angry six-year old. The locales and sets are inexplicable. The plot is inscrutable. And the special effects are dull and repetitive.

This is a bad fucking movie, bad enough to make a sad man sadder. But, it's what Akilyah gets as a tombstone for being so fucking greedy. One Finger.

Want to tell Filthy Something?