Razor Blade Smile

U.K. / 1998 Directed by Jake West Starring Eileen Daly Christopher Adamson David Warbeck Color / R / 101 Minutes Format: DVD (R1 - NTSC) A-Pix Entertainment

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2005 Anchor Bay Edition

		Review by Brian Lindsey

5     5   10 = Highest Rating

Lilith Silver is a 150-year old vampire who blends in with the goth-garbed Dracula wannabes at London's "Transilvania" Club. For kicks — and to pay the rent — she works as a deadly assassin for hire known as The Angel of Death. Offing her contract targets also provides a source of blood, with this undead la Femme Nikita shooting her victims repeatedly in the throat to mask the tell-tale fang wounds. When the urge hits her, though, Lilith's not above seducing and killing a random guy or gal to stock up on a few pints of the red stuff...     Such is the premise of Razor Blade Smile, a low budget British film that's a hodgepodge of influences from other movies and TV shows: Besson, Jackson and Woo flicks, Blade, The Avengers, Highlander, James Bond and Vampyres to name a few. (The Bauhaus song "Bela Lugosi is Dead", which opened Tony Scott's The Hunger, is the music first heard in the vampire bar.) While decidedly unoriginal, it certainly possesses a surfeit of style — director Jake West's kinetic camera, surprisingly good CG effects and the MTV-style editing give the film a terrific look which belies its relatively miniscule budget.     But it's Eileen Daly, Britain's counterpart to American horror hostess Elvira, who steals the flick with a memorable turn as Lilith. No conventional beauty or master thespian, the thirty-something actress nonetheless sinks her canines into the role full throttle. Clad in a succession of goth-slut outfits, lingerie, and Emma Peel catsuits, Daly's piercing eyes, pale skin and raven tresses combine with her slinky body language and low, throaty delivery to create the sexiest female bloodsucker to grace the screen in many a moon.     While Daly is divine, the actor playing Lilith's nemesis, the ancient vampire Sir Sethane Blake, gives an awful performance which really hurts the movie. Gargoyle-faced Christopher Adamson may look the part but is ludicrously over the top here; it's too much even for what is a deliberately campy, comic book story. Any dialog scene Adamson appears in triggers eye-rolling incredulity... he's that bad.     Fortunately the other key roles in the small cast of characters are handled more ably, especially Jonathan Coote as a vampire-hunting Scotland Yard detective and Heidi James as Ariauna, a goth-waif patron of the vampire club with whom Lilith spends a night of torrid — and eventually quite bloody — passion. The late David Warbeck (The Beyond), in his last performance, makes a cameo appearance as "The Horror Film Man", a suspicious police coroner. (Note: Be sure and hang through the closing credits, or you'll miss a surprise coda to the story.)

The A-Pix disc appears to have a matted video transfer — i.e., it's "phony" letterbox. (I can't be sure, though.) There's also a bit of grain evident here and there. The film's vibrant color scheme looks great, however. Sound quality is quite good with a robust Dolby 2.0 audio track.     Bonus features include a still gallery, a short text article from Femme Fatale magazine, and a number of trailers from this and other A-Pix DVD releases. (The absurd Jack Frost and outageous Killer Tongue among them.) 6/15/01

UPDATE The A-Pix DVD reviewed here went OOP in 2004. Anchor Bay released a new edition in September 2005, featuring an audio commentary with Daly and West.

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