Def by Temptation (1990)

Since Spike Lee carved out his Bedford-Stuyvesant film empire, the field has been open for affiliated black talent to get in on the band-wagon and spin off from Lee's somewhat self-righteous cinema in bizarre and entertaining ways. This opens with a bar-room pick-up scene between a fast-talking sexist stud and a cool fantasy fox which could easily be snipped from a Spike Lee joint, and then turns into a hip-hop Blacula, stirring a little Carolina Baptist fundamentalism and modern-day New York sexual politics into a familiar vampire scenario. While Temptation (Cynthia Bond) is content to pick up and suck the blood out of a succession of feeble-minded bar-hops, she really has her sights set on Joel (James Bond III), a chubbily naive divinity student who is in town to think things over before becoming the new Jesse Jackson. With only a blaxploitation he-man actor (Kadeem Hardison) and a dumb-spieling cop (Bill Nunn) between her and the achievement of her worst desires, Temptation - who sometimes sprouts fangs, snake-eyes and (it is suggested) a killer dick - looks set to triumph again, especially since the last reel of the film strays into familiar Elm Street territory as reality goes rubber around the edges allowing in all manner of strange imagery and letting director-writer-star Bond III off the making-sense hook as our hero's holy Granny pops up like the 7th Cavalry and the actual plot falls apart. It's by no means a great horror movie or a particularly significant ethnic movie, being struck out on both counts by a religious streak it's hard to take, but it is zippy, snappily-written, endearingly acted and has some good gruesome chuckles.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: City Limits

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