Grade: D -

Verdict: Avoid this heavy metal hell at all costs.

Details: Starring Aaliyah and Stuart Townsend. Rated R for vampire violence. 1 hour 41 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: At the end of Queen of the Damned, a title card comes on screen: "In Memory of Aaliyah, 1979-2001."

What a way to be remembered.

If the filmmakers really wanted to honor the late pop star, they should have never released this piece of slick trash.

Here's one memory of Aaliyah: Dressed in a skimpy metal breastplate, she lasciviously feasts on gory vampire guts while blood gushes from her mouth and a heavy metal dude wails on the soundtrack, "Why don't you die? Why don't you die?"

Or how about this: Knowing they've got a load of Z-movie claptrap, the filmmakers exploit Aaliyah's death by advertising her as a major character, when she doesn't show up for nearly an hour and has only a handful of scenes.

Queen of the Damned is a total waste. Obviously, Aaliyah's blood-spattered performance is difficult to watch after her death in a plane crash last year. But there's also a neat conceit -- completely unexamined -- lurking underneath this sensory overload of MTV video, rancid creature feature and atrocious acting.

Think of a vampire who lives in shadow but craves the spotlight of 21st century fame. A bored bloodsucker without an adoring audience. What's a shallow night ranger to do? Become a pasty-faced headbanger, of course!

Dracula as Marilyn Manson -- not a bad concept.

Our neck-muncher is the vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend), familiar from Anne Rice's pulp novels and the vastly superior Tom Cruise movie. Snoozing in a New Orleans crypt for a century, Lestat's in a funk and looking for a reason to rise when he hears the martial, bone-crunching beat of metal music.

Didn't your parents always say that devil noise was going to wake the dead? Soon enough, it's all "sex, blood and rock 'n' roll." Lestat is the new Ozzy, biting groupies instead of birds, commanding the cover of Rolling Stone and planning the Altamont of vampire concerts out in -- where else? -- Death Valley.

Cool idea, but director Michael Rymer (In Too Deep) and screenwriters Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni don't have a clue. Here's Lestat living luxe and on the loose in vacuous L.A., hovering over the Sunset Strip, being a bad boy and ticking off his fellow travelers who prefer their draining in silence.

A perfect Buffy-esque set-up ripe for parody, and they blow it. Instead, we switch to a long, leaden subplot about a dull, obsessed vamp-buster (Margeuerite Moreau) and her mysterious attraction to Lestat -- that old stake-him-or-make-him quandary.

We also endure the how-I-lost-my-mortality-in-the-18th-century flashback with poor, innocent Lestat falling under the spell of an evil dandy (Vincent Perez). Lestat's insatiable blood-hunger and screechy violin playing somehow unleash the entombed Queen Akasha (Aaliyah), a slinky Ms. Bad who dispenses fiery death and urges Lestat to be her playmate in crime. Needless to say, serious blood-loss ensues, accompanied by an ear-splitting soundtrack.

Rymer has some decent sets and stylish camera moves, and the vamps swoop and slide with a swift Superman-like grace. But the actors, from newcomers Townsend and Aaliyah to the talented Perez and Lena Olin, can't invigorate this lifeless script and genre. (Part of the problem is Rice's hack prose, although her first Lestat novel, Interview With The Vampire, was a pop classic.)

So, how should you remember Aaliyah? Listen to her CDs, rent that first movie with Jet Li, but take a blood oath not to let her young fans anywhere near this dumb, depressing Hollywood junk.

— Larry Aydlette, Cox News Service