Nadja
Last night I had the pleasure of watching the most deliciously fucked-up vampire movie I've ever come into contact with. Nadja aired in the wee hours of the morning on Channel 4, who are showing a horror movie every night this week in the run-up to Halloween, and right from the start it was clear to me that this David Lynch-produced 1994 effort was something special. Shot in black and white with inserts photographed using the Fisher-Price PixelVision camera, this trippy, baffling affair features Nadja, the daughter of Dracula (the sublimely disturbing Romanian actress Elina Löwensohn), swanning around New York during Christmas as she tries to track down her brother, Edgar. Meanwhile, the aged and senile Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) keeps on ranting and raving about Dracula to his estranged son (Martin Donovan), whose wife (the bafflingly-named Galaxy Craze) has already been corrupted by Nadja.This is what you might call a pretentious art movie, but it's a bloody good one. The whole vibe of the piece is extremely unsettling, and I can't quite put my finger on it. It has a sense of humour too, although this plays second fiddle to the brilliantly creepy mood that is maintained throughout. The experience of watching this film is, I would imagine, not unlike how it feels to be incredibly drunk or high - it feels as if you're only half awake, and everything seems deeply profound and deeply nonsensical at the same time. It has its faults, to be sure, not least the fact that the PixelVision effect is damned annoying, but overall this is, in my opinion, an absolutely brilliant piece of work, and so, when I discovered that Pioneer had released it on DVD back in the early days of the format, I just had to pick up a copy (£3.40 at DVD Pacific).
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