We here at Fang Freakin’ Tastic do not set out to upset our readers, so please be aware that this post may upset some people.  With that said, please enjoy our weekly dose of the Good, Bad, and Ugly.

 

GOOD

 

    

Let’s start with an easy one. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. Anne Rice is essentially the mother of all vampire novels, Bram Stoker not withstanding of course. When the movie released I was so excited. I was not disappointed. With a young Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as the main characters with a great supporting actress in Kristen Dunst this movie not only held up to the book but in some aspects even made it better.

 

I must have seen Interview with the Vampire at least 25 times at the theater when it released my senior year of high school. I saw it at the normal theater a couple of times, but then when it came to the dollar theater, it was on. I’ve never been a huge fan of Tom Cruise OR Brad Pitt, but there was just something about this movie that really just did it for me. Luckily the guy I was seeing/hanging out with/whatever we thought we were doing at the time, well let’s just say that movie did it for him too lol. Good memories there people. Gooood memories. It was one of the first vampire movies that I remember actually seeing that wasn’t a corny b-movie other than The Lost Boys (There is a book for this movie, but it came out after the movie). Keep in mind, I was a huge vampire dork in 1995. I even played Vampire: The Masquerade. (I also played Magic: The Gathering, but that’s a story for a different day!). My hair was dyed black, people thought I was weird, but I was a senior in high school and having fun. The notion of becoming a vampire was just so….cool. There was something romantic about it to me, though I can’t for the life of me remember why it seemed like such a good idea at the time.

 

I still remember thinking (I still think this) that Louis was the whiniest vampire in the history of vampires, and that I just felt terrible for Claudia. I’m still a big Kirsten Dunst fan. I just love her. I had read the books before the movie came out and seeing the movie just made the book better for me. It’s one of the only times I can say that I enjoyed the movie just as much as the book.

 

 

BAD

 

 

Queen of the Damned.  Another Anne Rice book.  The book was good but for me the movie wasn’t that good.  It wasn’t that it didn’t hold up, I just was not enthralled by the characters in the movie as I was with the book.

 

See, I REALLY liked Queen of the Damned also. Well, maybe I liked Stuart Townsend. I loved the idea of Jesse and the Talamasca and Lestat falling in love with her. I had read the book before the movie, but I do remember thinking they felt much different and that I while I preferred the Stuart Townsend version to the Tom Cruise version of Lestat, I did prefer the book to the movie in this case. Where Townsend played Lestat as a sexy and seductive vampire rockstar, Cruise was more of the effeminate aristocrat, which to me felt more like his actual literary character. The music in Queen of the Damned was amazing though, in my opinion.

 

This pic reminds me of the guy I was seeing when Interview released. His hair was longer (it was the 90’s) and he would look up a certain way, just like this…

 

I almost wish we had an “indifferent” category here. When I was in high school, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula released. I know so many people who really loved that movie. I liked it, don’t get me wrong. I actually liked it more than I liked the book. But I didn’t looooove it. I looooooved the soundtrack though.

UGLY

 

 

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead was a good book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I had really high hopes for what the movie was going to be when it came out. I even *gasp* saw it before it hit Netflix or Redbox.  I saw it in theatre and I was SO disappointed.  For me it didn’t follow the book, it didn’t have that good of characters, and just in general it was sad.

 

While I would love to talk about another movie that I feel fits here, it actually is a good version of the book, I just hate it, but I guess you will have to wait until our week of Vampire books.

 

I’ve got to agree on this. I LOVED the Vampire Academy books. Loved them. The movie was so disappointing, I was almost embarrassed I forced my husband to actually watch it. It just felt so lame.

 

I know this isn’t necessarily the popular thing to say, but I hate Twilight. I hated the books even though I read all of them. You may wonder why I read all of them even though I wasn’t a fan. Well, it was because everyone was raving about them, so I was hoping that at some point I would fall in love with them too. It never happened. I did the same thing with corn dogs. I don’t like them. I never have, but everyone else seems to love them, so every now and then, I will try to eat one just to see if I like them yet.

 

Here’s the thing about Twilight though: it got people reading again. So as much as I disliked that series and it’s crybaby heroine, as long as it got people to start reading again, I’m ok with it. I know there are books I love that others hate, and that’s ok. We are allowed to like different things.

 

 

What are your most and least favorite movie adaptions of books?

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