The big-screen version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the one that a lot of people — from audiences to the people involved with making it — really don’t want to revisit. Screenwriter Joss Whedon was so disgusted with the way director Fran Rubel Kuzui camped up his vision of a fearless teenage vampire killer (played by Kristy Swanson) that he walked off the set and went on to create a TV show that’s still beloved by critics and angsty kids alike. Paul Reubens — who was still smarting from his scandalous 1991 run-in with the police at a Florida porno theater — ditched the Pee-wee Herman gear to play the greaseball underling of the late Rutger Hauer’s bloodsucking kingpin (perhaps the least memorable villain Hauer has done). And Donald Sutherland, as Buffy’s mentor, pretty much just ad-libbed his way through the film. But the movie, as unequivocally ’90s as it is (Mark DeCarlo, former host of the trashy dating show Studs, pops up as an oily high school basketball coach), does succeed in taking viewers back to a simpler, more beautiful time, when Swanson wasn’t a right-wing troll on the internet, and the dearly departed Luke Perry (her love interest here) was still just a smoldering young heartthrob looking for his big break. Midnight at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. CRAIG D. LINDSEY
Midnight Movie: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
