Vampire School Musical

How is it that a movie about the courtship between a twelve-year-old boy and a young vampire seems infinitely more realistic than a real-world high school love story with a little singing thrown in?  This is the question nesting in my brain after viewing two films: the Swedish vampire love story, Let the Right One In, and the Disney-juggernaut-that-won’t-stop, High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Comparing these two movies is a bit like setting a de Kooning painting next to a Hello Kitty trapper keeper, but seeing as I happen to like both, you can’t stop me.

Both films were released this past week, just in time for Halloween, yet the film about vampires, complete with blood sucking, wall scaling, and dismembered limbs, proves to be less scary than the musical, complete with auto-tuned voices, jazz hands, and endless duets between the lifeless pairing of Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron.  The only similarity between my viewing experience with both movies was the moment of bursting into flames: once with a vampire when the curtains were opened, and once with my pants when Zac Efron disrobed during a power solo before being showered in a cyclone of basketballs.  No complaints.  Sometimes I like fire. 

After films like Van Helsing and Underworld, it seems that, for lack of a better pun, all the blood has been drained out of the vampire film genre.  Yet to label Let the Right One In a “vampire” movie does as much of a disservice to this film as when Brokeback Mountain was labeled the “gay cowboy” movie.  For all of the neck biting and mounting people’s backs (I’m talking about Let the Right One In, pervert) what director Tomas Anderson has created is really a story about first love, the idea of vulnerability at an age where school suddenly becomes a war zone and true friends are hard to come by. 

The plot follows a bullied young boy, Oskar (played to perfection by Kåre Hedebrant in one of the best young performances in recent memory), who spends nights parked on the jungle gym of his apartment building’s courtyard, only to find a run-down young girl, Eli, sitting behind him one evening.   As the story builds, through the sparse beauty of cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s muted-palette images, Eli’s true identity as an ageless vampire trapped in the body of her twelve-year-old self comes to light.  Brutality overtakes the screen on occasion—after all, Eli must feed her hunger for blood—but the most haunting moments of the film are the simple ones depicting the restrained, awkward courtship of a young (and technically dead) girl who makes the mop-topped pre-teen feel alive.  Not enough can be said of the film’s beauty, where a shot as simple as Eli’s hand running down Oskar’s arm has the power to freeze you in your tracks.  It’s the type of work that, although not perfect, lingers in your mind for days. 

High School Musical: Senior Year, on the other hand, owes all of its lasting imagery to Zac Efron’s personal trainer.  The third installment of this popular franchise, and the first to hit the big screen, follows a group of high schoolers through their senior year, as they put on a musical called “Senior Year.”  The originality is inspiring.  And while a few of the performers supply high-wattage-golly-gee smiles concocted to warrant parental approval, few of them provide enough personality to make this excursion to the cinema anything more than high-budget camp of the blandest variety.  The more each character smiles (and I assure you, they seldom stop smiling, unless you are talking about Efron, who supplies more than his fair share of orgasm faces doubling as “acting,” again…not complaining, just stating fact) the more cardboard they become.  This type of “character development” allows for Disney’s marketing dream to come true: by making them nobody in particular, they can therefore become everybody—people twelve-year-olds in the audience can identify with.  As Let the Right One In proves, twelve-year-olds are hardly stupid, so to be passing the seventeen-year-olds in HSM off as so generic is not only a disservice, but it’s insulting. 

(Happy Halloween.)

These are all frivolous complaints when reminded that the franchise is little more than a cash cow.  Still, it would be nice if in the process of presenting sugar-coated-banality, there were at least a handful of production numbers to give the stultifying proceedings a bit of electricity.  Instead, all of the songs are rehashes of numbers from the first two films. (The only exception being a junkyard man-duet between Efron and Corbin Bleu that finds them rolling around on tires in front of a chorus of extras on loan from The Return to Oz.)  They may as well just sing ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money” over and over again, as it would be both more honest, and catchier than any of the material presented within the 90-minute adventure.

If this week at the movies proved anything, it’s that sometimes the living, complete with their fancy singing and dancing, come across more lifeless than those who actually are dead.  Maybe Disney should hire Tomas Anderson to direct High School Musical 4: The Vampire Years.  After all, how are they going to keep these characters the same age unless they make them undead?  I’m pale and hate the sun; perhaps I need to bite Zac Efron’s neck and save a Disney franchise...      

      

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