[3.9/10] Remake every film from the 1980s. Okay, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. Because so many of them have great ideas, or good premises, or some compelling hook. But they’re all wasted on the cultural wasteland so much of cinema sunk into during the Reagan administration for reasons that are beyond me.

*Near Dark* is a superb example. A baby vampire, struggling to adjust to the rough and tumble gang that’s taken him in, is a great setup for a horror movie. Giving it the vibe of a western, with shoot-’em-up elements and a countryside-rambling gait adds distinctiveness to the story. The vicissitudes of how a longstanding group of vamps gets by and what their morality might be after living for ages is worth exploring.

But the movie squanders all of that potential in its Eighties-tastic execution. The acting here, with a couple of exceptions, is god awful. The score saps whatever emotional quotient survives with the performances with its synth-addled crap fest. And the entire presentation is so broad and cheesy that the good ideas at the heart of the film have no force.

You can squint and see what future Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow was going for here. But the results are so piss-poor that it’s almost worse than if the central concept had been bad from the jump.

The one exception is that a young Bigelow still displayed a talent for putting together some impressive set pieces. While they veer more toward bombastic cartooniness than the gritty realism she would come to be known for, there’s verve and creativity in the film’s bigger sequences.

The vamps terrorizing a redneck bar in the middle of nowhere has tension and terror that roils and builds to a bloody crescendo like in one of Quentin Tarantino’s genre escapades. A shootout with the cops where daylight becomes a weapon puts a unique spin on a familiar action scenario. But the climactic showdown with the baddies still falls into the corniest, explosion-filled 1980s shlock-fest clichés, with too much volume and not enough humanity.

Thank god, though, for Bill Paxton. Most of the performances in this movie are downright terrible, either wooden and awkward or hammy and overblown. Paxton, however, is the only one who understands what kind of movie he’s in. He goes for broke, and it’s not a naturalistic performance by any means, but he’s so over the top, and having so much fun, that it wraps back around to being infectious in its glee. Lance Henriksen does yeoman’s work as Jesse, the head vamp, injecting some legitimate menace into this cartoony sploosh of juvenalia. But only Paxton manages to lean into the tone of the film and make something out of it.

But there’s also nobody likable in this film, or at least, the only likable people are too one-dimensional and ephemeral to the plot to matter. The best you can say for Caleb, *Near Dark*’s protagonist, is “Well, that townie is a douchebag, but I guess he doesn’t deserve to die a miserable death.” Our introduction is him creeping on a young woman and trying to make her kiss him before he’ll drive her home. His only redeeming quality as the film wears on is that he seems to be suffering after she turns him into a vampire, and he doesn’t want to kill people, which isn’t exactly a high bar.

Worse yet, the backbone of the film is the romance between Caleb and Mae, the vampire lady he picks up. But we only get ten minutes worth of uncomfortable interactions between the two of them before we’re supposed to take it as a love for the ages and two people profoundly devoted to one another. Nevermind the fact that Mae not only turned Caleb, condemning him to a life she herself struggles with, but then she tries to get him to kill random strangers so they can feed. It’s not exactly a romance to latch onto, or failing that, a compelling portrait of mutual self-destruction.

Weirdly, despite all that, Mae’s arguably the film’s most sympathetic character. She’s the most reluctant of the villainous vamps, the one who seems to struggle the most having fallen into this life, and the one who makes the sacrifice play to save Caleb’s little sister. But whatever intrigue lies in the character is wasted on a raft of breathless gobbledegook declarations about really *seeing* the night and a warmed over romance.

Still, that’s what’s so frustrating here. *Near Dark* gestures toward interesting ideas about its characters that go almost wholly unexplored. The head vamp fought for the Confederacy and has been prowling the hills for decades. One vampire looks like a little boy, but is really a grown-man, and struggles with the incongruity of how he looks and how he feels. Another vampire treats him like a son, suggesting deeper regrets and relationships. But all of this is texture at best and set dressing at worst, cast aside for more blood and guts and Caleb whining and pining.

What ensues are painful scenes where the vampires make over-the-top threats, or Caleb and Mae make goo goo eyes at one another, or Caleb’s dad coughs up some standard shtick about finding his boy. The scenes are either turned up to eleven to where they’re laughable, or languid and dull to where you want to fall asleep. Some inventive design and effects work, particularly when the vamps are exposed to sunlight, salvages some of these moments, but it’s thin gruel.

It’s the same sort of maladies that afflict scads of films released in the 1980s. Horrid dialogue, breathless performances, sonic abominations, and a general tone of caricature and bombast flowed freely through the era. The end result was films like *Near Dark*, where the combination of these pathologies is a turgid chore of a movie. Bad films come out all the time. But the greatest sin of this one, and so many from the same time period, is wasting good ideas on bad filmmaking.