DVD Tuesday: Heroes, Big Love, Aliens and Vampires!

• May 29, 2007 01:44 PM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Near Dark puts a bloody twist on vampire cliches and features a very young Adrian Pasdar.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk !

A hero, a big lover and three alien fighters walk into a bar and let me tell you, all hell busts loose. I love Near Dark (1987), the best vampire film never to use the V word ever made.

As I was watching the Heroes finale last week, I thought this would be a fine time to acquaint - or reacquaint - DVD Tuesday readers with a very young Adrian Pasdar ( Heroes' Nathan Petrelli), a scorching hot Bill Paxton ( Big Love's Bill Henrickson) and dynamite middle-aged murder junkies Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein. (Paxton, who was also in Aliens, does double duty in my admittedly gimmicky lead - forgive me, please.) Not to mention Joshua Miller, son of playwright and Exorcist star Jason Miller and hands down the creepiest movie kid ever. Plus the underrated Tim Thomerson, silver-haired star of too much direct-to-DVD junk. And there's the haunting Jenny Wright - anyone who can tell me what's become of her, please write.

Pasdar is good-looking Oklahoma boy Caleb, who loves his daddy (Thomerson) and little sister, his horses and his pickup truck, but not as much as he loves gamine blonde Mae (Wright) the moment he lays eyes on her, standing on a deserted small-town street, licking a vanilla cone and looking like moonlight made flesh. Their late-night date ends with a bloody kiss, and next thing Caleb knows, there's something really wrong with him. And that's before he finds himself scooped into a van with Mae's family, a pack of blood-drinking serial killers who keep dropping ominous hints about how long they've been criss-crossing the Southwest, wreaking gory havoc and reveling in every minute of it. "Let's put it this way: I fought for the South," says patriarch Jesse (the magnificently malevolent Henriksen). "We lost."

Caleb's dilemma: He's tainted by Mae's bite. He can't go home; he can't even stand in the sunlight without frying like bacon. But until he starts killing he's not one of them, and he's just not the killing kind.

Director and co-screenwriter Kathryn Bigelow never lived up to Near Dark's promise (and her writing partner, Eric Red - who scripted the nothing-short-of-brilliant original version of The Hitcher - suffered some kind of spectacular meltdown in 2000), but what a kick-ass variation on a theme: A vampire Western that anticipates The Devil's Rejects with a healthy dollop of serious sex appeal.

It died in theaters, and I had to spend a tidy slice of the '90s converting friends to its dark charms. Check it out on DVD: It looks fantastic and it holds up ferociously.

Things to consider:

What's the appeal of vampires? Filmmakers keep making movies about them, spinning the traditions every which way but loose, and moviegoers keep going to see them.

What's you favorite vampire movie?
When you like an actor or actress you know from something current, a movie or a TV show, do you seek out his or her earlier work? Any favorite discoveries?

Previously in DVD Tuesday

Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http:/ / community. tvguide. com/ thread. jspa? threadID= 800073953#comments"> Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases