My wife and I are pretty big fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series. We came to it late. I had some friends in college who loved it, and I gave it a shot back then, when it was originally airing, but I found it to be cheap-looking and cheesy. It wasn’t until years later, after my daughter was born, that we finally got into it.
When our daughter was a baby, we spent a lot of time binge-watching TV shows. We weren’t big on taking her out on the town – way too much prep work for our tastes – so we’d just sit with her watching TV. That might have been the beginning of our homebody years, come to think of it.
We’ve since watched it a couple of times through, and we’re currently watching it with our now-teenage daughter, and she’s become a fan, too.
But before the series, there was this movie. Joss Whedon wrote the script for the movie, but he was quite dissatisfied with the result. The studio removed a lot of his jokes, toned down some of the darker elements, and apparently Donald Sutherland did a lot of improvisation in his dialogue.
It’s probably a good thing the movie didn’t turn out as well as Whedon wanted it to, for this caused him to create the TV series. And it is kind of amazing that someone gave him the money to do so, as the film bombed.
The film, like the series, follows Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson), a stereotypical California valley girl. She’s blonde and pretty, a cheerleader who cares about fashion and boys. One day, she is approached by Merrick (Sutherland), who tells her she is the “Chosen One,” a vampire slayer, and that she has a calling.
It takes him a while to convince her, but when the vampires attack and she’s able to easily kill them, she decides to listen. There is a fun training montage, and some decent jokes, and then a final showdown with the head vampire (Rutger Hauer) and his main minion (Paul Reubens).
This is not a good movie. You can see the beginnings of something special, the bones of what became the TV show, but something feels off. Swanson is good. You get a sense in those early scenes that she’s not exactly happy being the ditzy blonde. Like she doesn’t really like her friends, but this is the lot that’s been chosen for her, so she just runs with it. It is interesting to think about how things would have gone had she been given the role in the TV series.
Sutherland can’t seem to get the tone right. He’s good at playing mysterious men who know more than they let on, and he can play the jokester as well. But he doesn’t get the blend right. And yeah, his improv isn’t great. It is a little difficult to understand who he is and what he’s doing.
Paul Reubens is the only one who seems to truly understand what kind of movie he’s in. He’s wonderfully campy and funny. It is no wonder they show some of his outtakes as the credits roll.
It isn’t a terrible film, but it certainly isn’t a good one. Worth watching if you are a fan of the series, just to see a different take on the material.