David DeCoteau is a 30-plus-year veteran of the cheesy schlock horror filmmaking circuit, but his specialty since the turn of the century has been homoerotic horror (oddly peppered with family fare like An Easter Bunny Puppy and A Talking Cat!?!, the punctuation being part of the title). Immortal Kiss: Queen of the Night is his first foray into African-American cinema, and as it vividly — or rather, blandly — shows, his emphasis veers much more sharply towards the “homoerotic” than the “horror.”
Trina Parks, perhaps best known as Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever, stars Amina, a vampire queen who, for some unknown reason (really, she even says she doesn’t know why), can choose a mate only one night every century — when “the planets and the moons converge for me and my kind.” She’s narrowed her list of candidates down to five unsuspecting young men, whom she invites to her mansion under the pretense of helping them with their various careers.
There’s Eric (Omar Noah), a self-centered model; Jerrell (Jerrell Pippens), a self-centered football player; DJ Cray (Prince Vaughn III), a self-centered DJ; Kayne (Jonathan Davis), a self-centered “criminal”; and Tariq (Quincy Ndekwe), a writer who’s slightly less self-centered. Guess who wins?
The plot, as it were, involves each guy arriving, being shown to their room, disrobing for one reason or another and…well, that’s pretty much it. Eventually, Amina’s jealous assistant Parnell begins killing them off in hopes of taking their place by the queen’s side, but gore fans will be disappointed to find that all but one kill takes place off screen — because, really, how can you sacrifice the TEN MINUTES OF SHOWERING in this film? Or the crucial dream sequence in which Jerell just walks around the house in his boxer briefs for ELEVEN MINUTES? Oh, and I can’t forget about Jerell in the hot tub, just rubbing himself for ANOTHER six minutes. In fact, of Immortal Kiss’s 72-minute running time, I’d say 30 minutes is made up of pure beefcake with no dialogue and no attempt to advance the plot whatsoever.
With all of the female T&A in mainstream horror, it seems only fair to have something like this as an alternate, but the beefcake needs to be within the context of a good — or at least entertaining — movie, something DeCoteau has shown he has little interest in creating. Basically, he makes sexless porn.
He’s such an assembly line filmmaker, in fact, he reused the same mansion from Immortal Kiss in about a dozen films within a year or so of each other, and his movies, which can be shot in three days (or in Immortal Kiss’s case, I’d assume less), are threadbare productions (which apparently can’t afford soap for shower scenes) with terrible acting, hammy dialogue (Amina: “I will have what I deserve, and it will be new and unknown and lovely!”) and no earnest attempt at horror.
Frankly, the scariest thing about Immortal Kiss is that someone actually received a writing credit for it.
