Innocent Blood

After gaining international attention as the lead in the sexy 1990 French action thriller La Femme Nikita, actress Anne Parillaud traveled stateside to star as the elegant vampire Marie in John Landis's mix of horror movie, mob war drama, and romantic twist on the buddy action thriller. Marie has two rules: never play with your food (in other words, no romantic entanglements) and always make sure your meal is finished (preferably by severing the head). She uses a mob war as the perfect cover for her latest feed but inadvertently leaves mob boss Sallie "The Shark" Macelli (Robert Loggia) unfinished and he rises from the dead with a sudden surge of strength and a craving for human blood. Anthony LaPaglia costars as Joe Gennaro, an undercover cop embedded in the mob whose identity is blown. Joe finds himself teaming up with Marie to put an end to Sallie's grand plan to make his made men into undead warriors. Landis has always been a fan of combining black humor and bloody spectacle; Innocent Blood isn't quite successful (Parillaud's voiceover is more flippant than witty) but it is often entertaining, and Landis piles on the Italian mob clichés (every thug listens to Sinatra) and has fun with Joe's frustrated attempts to arrest Marie for crimes that defy all human logic (he also casts Don Rickles as the mob's apoplectic lawyer). It's fun and sexy but never reaches the imaginative heights of Landis's horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)