This isn't just a bad movie, in fact, I usually like bad movies. Tank Girl, Waterworld, Welcome to Woop Woop, and Super Mario Bros. area all movie I love and have seen about 100 times each, they're filled with bad acting, pointless plots, and general cheesiness, but still, they make entertaining movies and when I'm done watching them, I don't feel the need to vomit and rip out my hair because of frustration. So it takes a lot for me to hate a movie. So yeah, here, the reasons why I cannot stand The Queen of the Damned. And I'm not even going to get into all the differences between the book and the movie, for those, check out that section...


  Acting- God, It was just bad. My first time watching the movie, I was actually embarrassed by the bad acting and fake accents. Honestly, whenever a particularly badly acted scene was on, I would turn red and cover my face. I watched it a second time, just to try and let my anger fade and because people said that Townsend and Aaliyah were good actors. Well they lied. Aaliyah was a particularly bad actress. I got past her retardedly slinky walk and the irritating rolling of her 'R's and about ever other letter she could (which through all that stupid show, there wasn't a whole lot of acting going on underneath) I realized she was just a plain bad actress. She over acted everything. The walk, the talk, the lines. Let me tell you guys, just because someone is dead doesn't mean they're a good actor, or that you even have to pretend they are. There's a lot of dead bad actors out there. Sure, untimely death and all that, BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE HER A GOOD ACTRESS!!! SHE JUST SUCKED!! GET OVER IT! Townsend just plain over acted. People say he did a good job of representing Lestat, but most of these people are just going by the movie Interview with the Vampire. So yeah, his acting kind of matched up with Cruise, only if it was done by a middle schooler.

  Makeup- The bad makeup was mostly just irritating. Especially the gross silver gunk in the corner of the vampires eyes. I don't know what this meant to do, someone suggested that it was meant to make their eyes look all big and sparkly, but it just doesn't work. And the coppery eye shadow, all the vampires had that too. It was like the instant they became vampire they become permanently goth. If it was sunken eye thing, well that's stupid, and it didn't even work. The paleness of the faces was okay, but inconsistent. Why was a 200 year old Lestat palest of them all? Was he just more gothic then the rest? So yeah, a 200 year old vampire is paler than a 6000 year old vampire who has spent 5000 of those years sitting in a dark room not moving (if you haven't read the book, you wouldn't know that that's what she's been doing with her time).

  Sound Effects- The grossest part of the movie. The whole biting scenes sound like someone crunching into a juicy apple and then commencing to suck all the juice out of it. If you can't visual that: *crunch suck sluuuuuurrrrp* I can't imagine why skin would crunch when you bite into it. And the slurping was just gross. I'm not going to even mention the big bloody mess that they all made. In the books there's a perfectly logical reason why the vampires don't make a bloody mess. But the movie just throws that out the window.

  Special Effects- I probably could have done a more convincing special effect job on the old Atari in the basement. The effects were just really cheesy. The most cheesiest is the one where Aaliyah comes out of the burning vampire bar. She just all the sudden appears, there's only like 3 frames of a gradual appearing, it's just: Flaming doorway BAM! vampire queen! The way they made the vampires move all quick like was pretty lame too. With the afterimages. Mostly it just made them look slow. The whole 'eyes turn red when drinking' thing was just plain stupid.

  Hair Colors- The thing most fans of the book complain about. Those who have never read the book, just seen the movie, can't understand why this pisses us off so much. Main reason: Their hair colors were symbolic. And because they were such minor things its so hard to understand why 8 bucks wasn't spent on hair dye or wigs. Lestat's blond hair was what made him a vampire in the first place. Magnus (oh, who made Lestat, NOT Marius, if you haven't read the book) captured Lestat and made him what he was because he had golden hair and eyes the color of the sky. Magnus was just trying to capture something as a vampire he could no longer have. Is blond just not goth enough for the movie? On the official The Queen of the Damned web site the producer says that Townsend just did not look good with blond hair. Well maybe if they ditched some of the black eyeliner he would have looked just fine. In the books, Marius is supposed to have long almost white blond hair, but in the movie they for some reason, chose to go with the total opposite. A black buzz cut. Again, while on the official site, reading what the bloody producer had to say, they said that they even had a wig for him but again, thought it didn't look good on him, so they just used the actors natural hair. Okay, I can understand that it might not have looked good, but come on, they could have tried just a little harder, did they have some 'one wig limit'? Where if the wigs didn't look good they weren't going to try again and buy a different one? Maybe if the kept the long hair but darkened the color a bit. Sure it wouldn't be the near white hair, but at least it isn't a black buzz cut.

  Lack of Main Characters- Mekare, Louis, Gabrielle, Armand, Pandora, Khayman, Mael... names you probably don't know if you haven't read the book, but very very important characters to the story. Yeah, Armand, Pandora, Khayman, and I think Mael were actually in the movie. But they didn't have more than three lines. And the couple of scenes where these characters were 'developed' (i.e.: had more than 3 lines and vaguely hinted that they had pasts and personalities) were deleted from the movie. If you have the DVD you can watch them, and these scenes actually help (although very little) clear up some of the plot and who these people are that keep following Lestat around. The most important character in the story was not Lestat, not Jesse, or even Akasha. But was Mekare for there would be no story without Mekare (Maharet is equally important, but it was Mekare who destroyed the Queen). "How is she important to Lestat's rock career?" Well she's not dammit, but the book was not about Lestat's rock career, sure it was important, but there was so very little in the book about it. His being a musician was just used as a base to tell a far more interesting story, The Story of the Twins. "What the Hell is that?" It's what the book was about. Mekare and Maheret, and the story of how vampires came to be. Not some stupid goth band. Over half the book was set 6000 years ago. Whatever enough of that, read the book. Louis was excluded from the movie because the producer felt he was not important. He didn't have some huge part in the book, but he is still Louis, his part was just about as important as Jesse's part, which was no where near as huge as it was in the movie. Her only real thing was that she was related to The Great Family. That's it. Her and Lestat were sure as hell not lovers of any kind. And she wasn't the last one remaining in The Great Family. Far from it. The point of The Great Family was that it was so huge, The Great Family was humanity. Not one over made up red haired skank.

  Lestat And Jesse- No, no, no. Lestat does not love Jesse, Jesse does not love Lestat. Jesse has a fascination with him, that's it. There is one brief scene where they have anything at all together. And it sure as Hell isn't love. Lestat doesn't make her, Maharet does. At the end Lestat and Jesse do not walk off all dreamy into the night. Lestat and Louis do. LOUIS not Jesse. Any hint of anything even mildly homosexual has been erased in the movie, except for the fact that they made Marius overly... flamboyant. Also just a side note, the only thing Lestat really noticed a lot about Jesse was her lack of makeup and jewelry. He was fascinated with her because he could see the similarities between her and Maharet. So yeah, if the book talks so much about how she does not wear makeup, jewelry, and skanky Hot Topic brand plaid tube dresses, what does the movie do? Load her up with makeup, jewelry, and Princess Leia hair.

  Music- People who don't like the movie sometimes like the music. I think its fine music. I wouldn't rush out of the house and go find the sound track, because while I still like Static-X I got over my KoRn phase in 8th grade. So yeah, the music is not that bad (although my favorite music is the violins) I'm not going to complain about the soundtrack, except for one part. The part where Akasha comes out of the vampire bar. The music goes from KoRn screaming to really tacky bad dramatic music with a poor quality to the recording. It's just cheesy. Couldn't they have taken some scary part out of one of the songs on the soundtrack and put it there? So yeah, except that one bit, I don't have much of a problem with the music itself. I do have a problem that that is the music they chose though, it doesn't fit with the way Townsend talks, and is nothing like what fans and even Anne Rice herself thought of what The Vampire Lestat would sound like. Someone less distinctive as KoRn should have done the music, KoRn sounds like KoRn.

  The Ubergoffika Atmosphere- Ubergoffika: a not real word made to describe things that are so ultra goth and just cheesy and only the most attention craving middle schoolers could love. So yeah, this movie is too ubergoffika. White faces, black hair, smudgy eyeshadow, tight leather pants, overly priced mass produced gothwear. Once in a review for it by some random idiot I saw "This one is for the goths". That was the most retarded thing I've seen, but sadly I think that's what the people who made it had in mind "It's a vampire movie... since goths like vampires, lets make it be the most stereotypical Hot Topic fueled vampire movie ever. Goths will love it, especially because KoRn and Manson will be doing the singing."

  "Come out, come out, wherever you are"- I hate this line. Every ridiculously cheesey horror movie has used this line. Whether it's from some stupid chainsaw killer walking around an empty hallway, Some insane chick who went homicidal after her boyfriend broke up with her, or ugly ubergoff rocker vampires taunting all of the retarded children of the night.