HABIT a film by Larry Fessenden
cast: Sam ................ Larry Fessenden Anna ............... Meredith Snaider Nick ............... Aaron Beall Rae ................ Patricia Coleman Liza ............... Heather Woodbury
written, directed, and edited by Larry Fessenden
Runtime: 112 minutes. MPAA rating: none (contains explicit sexual situations, frontal nudity, some violence and gore, and profanity)
recommendation: yes (but read on)
reviewed by Douglas P. Mosurak (c) 1998.
Right before I saw "Habit" this past weekend, a friend of mine and I were having a heated argument about whether or not any more vampire movies needed to be made - ever. Said friend said that he had been let down by far too many vampire movies to care about either the concept of vampires or any cultural product geared towards (or stemming from) their legacy. I, on the other hand, have admittedly seen more vampire movies than he has, and told him that, while I definitely agree that there's a definite quantity-to-quality discrepancy in the genre, then that's hardly a reason to give up on them entirely. For example, he had written off the whole concept of sex in vampire movies, saying that it was another genre of film entirely. Whatever -- the concept of romance, and physicality, and especially sex, has always been closely intertwined with the concept of vampires, going all the way back to Bram Stoker's original characterization of the Dracula legend. Long regarded as a symbol of unrequited love, it is the vampire's power to seduce its victims that keeps their relationships on such an agonizingly surface level. You can't buy love; you have to earn it, along with the respect and responsibility that goes along with it. Draining someone's blood is not a solution for this issue by any means.
This point is hammered in fairly solidly in Larry Fessenden's debut, "Habit". Clearly a two-man operation (Fessenden and producer Dayton Taylor handled almost all of the direction, production and post-op responsibilities themselves), it's as strong a debut as I think I'll see in a while, but for some reason that's not enough. An extremely intriguing portrayal of ambiguity is carefully created in the first 90 minutes of the film, and in the final reel, he almost blows it with cliches ripped out of "Fatal Attraction" and the countless direct-to-video knockoffs that followed.
"Habit" centers around Sam (Fessenden, who looks like a cross between Keith Carradine and Nick Cave), whose life has hit a pretty big wall. His father, a renowned historian, has recently passed on, and his patient girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury) has moved out of their place, in the hopes that Sam will take stock of his life and get a grip on his alcoholism. But he's a fun guy, and well-meaning, if a little unkempt and disoriented. All of his friends seem to recognize that he has a problem, but never really confront him on the issue. His moments of true clarity shine when he's drunk, and it seems that this is the way that he's remembered.
At a Halloween party hosted by his friends Nick (Aaron Beall, who should rename himself "Mr. Drama") and Rae (Patricia Coleman), a particularly plastered Sam is approached by a girl named Anna (Meredith Snaider). Her pixie-like frame, close-cropped black hair, and semi-goth Italian model visage frame her as someone who wouldn't normally cross the street to pee on a guy like Sam if he were on fire. Nevertheless, they leave the party together. When he realizes he's taken someone else's coat, Sam asks Anna to wait for him. When he returns, she's gone, and later he loses the phone number she gives to him.
A few days pass, and Sam can't stop thinking about Anna. At his work (he manages a small bar and restaurant in Greenwich Village), his friend Lenny recounts a similar experience from the party, in which he met a girl who lives on a boat, and they has hot sex on the poop deck all night long. Lenny looks a little ill, though, probably due to being naked on a boat in a NYC autumn.
Anna predictably drifts back into Sam's life at a neighborhood street fair. Leaving his friends, he follows her to Battery Park, where they engage in some sort of unspecified sexual activity. Sam wakes up outside, half-naked and with a bloody lip, and thinks nothing of it - probably feeling like of of the luckier guys in the city.
Repeated visits to Sam's apartment and his work find Anna becoming an integral part of his life. His health is slowly deteriorating, and his injured relationship with Liza is almost broken off completely. All the while, the audience is led to believe that Anna is a vampire, and that Sam is really dumb for not realizing it earlier. She only comes over at night, won't eat or drink anything, won't reveal to Sam what she does for a living. She won't enter Sam's apartment until invited in, stands out in the hallway when she smells garlic, and, most importantly, likes to bite him and drink his blood, a little at a time, during sex. Sam just assumes it's her kink. But there's a rational explanation to all of her appearances and disappearances, and Snaider plays her role with determination undercut with an honesty not often found in screen vampires. Her character slinks through "Habit" explicitly on her own terms, and for the most part, avoids the cliches you might anticipate.
As for Sam, his blindness to the situation around him lends itself to his internal stability, and how much of a toll life has exacted from him. He doesn't open up his personality but a little bit; it's refreshing to see a character we can draw conclusions from, and feel for without feeling sorry for. In one of the film's stronger moments, Sam reveals to Anna the numerous scars he's made on his arms over the years "at parties". Whether it was an attempt at suicide, an attempt to impress people, or just Sam trying to set himself apart from everyone else, he describes them to the camera with loving detail, admiring their designs with an objectivity that belies the entire narrative style of the film. Fessenden obviously thought about this character for a long time, and in writing, directing, and starring in the role, we get a sense of completeness that might have otherwise escaped us. With his mussed up long hair and missing front tooth, he resembles an overgrown child whose parents have long given up trying to raise him. But Sam's too old to be taken care of, and by instilling that function in Anna, and to a more fine point, deriving it from naughty sex acts, he loses his way even further.
There are no weak links in the cast; even the most flawed character, Nick, brings his sense of overacting with a zeal that provides much-needed comic relief. The direction is well-crafted and paced, and Frank DeMarco's grainy color cinematography borders on stunning. In particular, a scene where Anna takes Sam, who suffers from vertigo, on a ferris wheel, is extremely memorable; using a hand-held camera mounted on the wheel itself, the scene creates a sort of on-screen nausea that perfectly foreshadows the instability of the events that will unfold.
Was it scary? Somewhat, in the same way that "Jacob's Ladder" was effective - in chronicling a character's descent into madness, though the terms set in "Habit" are much more conventional, and unfortunately, that much more obvious. If Anna is a vampire, like we're led to believe, what's her motivation? Why is she so afraid to tell Sam, who's obviously ensnared within her, anything at all? B-movie kitsch is something that, while noble in its own right, is more "Habit"'s copout than anything else. Subtlety is key here, and the film's gory ending is a complete sledgehammer.
Made for a budget of under $200,000, "Habit" shows a promising new filmmaker in Fessenden and, for the most part, a compelling narrative restructuring of a modern vampire movie, the likes of which I haven't seen since Kathryn Bigelow's "Near Dark". Let's hope that he's able to keep it up in the leg stretching period of his next few films, whatever they may be.
(C) 1998 Douglas P. Mosurak marumaru@andrew.cmu.edu
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews