Pizza & A Movie 74: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
1992 • PG-13 • 1h 26mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
🪄 Magic! Three female-lead movies for spooky season
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie—Eating our way through rental classics and their backstories. Tonight we begin a three-part film festival for your inbox I’m calling Magic! First up is the story of a teen who just wants to get that yellow leather jacket at the mall but vampires keep getting in her way. It’s the nineties-tastic campy cult classic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Here’s the plot. Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson), a high school senior in LA, has rich parents and not a care in the world. That is until a mysterious man called Merrick (Donald Sutherland), an aged personification of stranger-danger, tells her she’s a Slayer. She’s destined to kill vampires, he says. Buffy takes the news with the same level of skepticism you would, but a series of nightmares Merrick seems to understand change her mind.
Also in LA are vampire kingpin Lothos (Rutger Hauer) and his right-hand man Amilyn (Paul Ruebens). Out on the prowl, Amilyn hunts for snacks in the form of aimless fellas Oliver (Luke Perry) and Benny (David Arquette). Oliver escapes. Benny turns vamp. Blood-suckers attack Oliver as he tries to leave town, but Buffy and Merrick save his bacon. In an Oliver twist, the guy and the Slayer become pals. But when more and more of Buffy’s classmates turn into creatures of the night, she and Oliver must fight them with every wooden stick in town. Will Merrick’s training be enough? Can she save her remaining human classmates? And what about prom?
This is one of those movies. One you watch and mutter to yourself, “Geez, what do I know them from?” Your pal Justin is here to help. I give you:
Buffet de Vampire Slayer
🍢 Amuse-Bouche
We begin, of course, with Donald Sutherland. The Canadian has never won a real Oscar but appeared in gazillions of movies including The Dirty Dozen (’67), M*A*S*H (’70), JFK (’91), Space Cowboys (’00) and The Italian Job (’03), all of which led like a red carpet to his crowning achievement as that bad guy in those Hunger Games movies, which were definitely good and we all remember them.
🍲 Soup
David Arquette is a real sloppy boy. If he were a food, he’d spill all down your front. We know him from Scream (’96), Never Been Kissed (’99), Bone Tomahawk (’15), a lot of TV, a brief stint as a pro wrestler, being Patricia Arquette’s brother and just sort of being around.
🥗 Tossed Salad
The most is-this-a-real-performance-or-a-joke entry in tonight’s film comes courtesy of Rutger Hauer. You know him from Blade Runner (’82), Batman Begins (’05), Sin City (’05), and Hobo with a Shotgun (’11).
🍽️ Main Dishes
Kristy Swanson is the star. She was in Pretty in Pink (’86), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (’86), Hot Shots! (’91), The Phantom (’96), Big Daddy (’99), and Dude, Where’s My Car? (’00). In ’06 she won Skating with Celebrities. She married her skating partner.
You didn’t like that one? Someone’s picky. Then try the chicken nuggets, Luke Perry. He mostly did TV like Beverly Hills, 90210, Law & Order: SVU, and Riverdale but was also in The Fifth Element (’97) and a little film you might have heard of called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (’19).
☕️ Coffee
We sip a bitter yet smooth Stephen Root. At 71, he’s been consistently excellent. Credits include King of the Hill (’97-’10), Office Space (’99), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (’00), DodgeBall (’04), and Barry (’18-’23).
🍰 Dessert
Paul Reubens contains more sugar than is good for you and appeared in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (’85), Mystery Men (’99) and guest spots on 30 Rock and Portlandia, which makes sense.
Whedon the Garden
Buffy came from the mind of Joss Whedon. Guy knew his way around the business end of a keyboard. He’d written for Rosanne and doctored up all kinds of scripts. He wrote most of the dialogue for Speed. Co-wrote Toy Story. Banged out an early pass at Atlantis, seminal kid flick of my own childhood. But Buffy was his baby. He cared about this one.
Regrettably, in the movie biz as in life itself, if you love something sometimes you have to let it go. For money. That’s what happened when Whedon sold his Buffy script to… sorry, let me double-check this… Dolly Parton? Yes, Dolly Parton. Parton’s production company, Sandollar, bought it when director Fran Rubel Kusui was developing the movie. Then 20th Century Fox got involved and changed a lot. The bigwigs cut a bunch of Whedon’s jokes, figuring the target teen audience wouldn’t get them. A shame, I think—the yuk-em-ups they left in (or added?) are stinkers. Fox also excised dark stuff like Merrick committing suicide and Buffy burning down the school gym with a prom-load of vamps inside.
The trimming left remaining material in a weird zone. Are Buffy’s menstrual cramps-slash-vampire radar a joke? Or a weird but serious power? Or a cryptic comment on sexuality and creeps? Based on what made it to screen, we don’t know. But here’s Whedon explaining his theory of womb envy to Mother Jones: “[I|t just seemed to be a fundamental thing that women have something men don’t, the obvious being an ability to bear children, and the resilience to hang in as parents. I don’t understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of 'women are inferior.' Men not only don’t get what’s important about what women are capable of, but in fact they fear it, and envy it, and want to throw stones at it, because it’s the thing they can’t have.”
Did you get that while watching Buffy? I did not. But it does turn up the thematic heat when you know. The immortal-but-for-a-stake creatures chasing Buffy are much more powerful than her. Why are they obsessed with defeating her? Lothos wants to possess her to undefined (probably icky) ends. None of it makes sense unless they see her as more powerful in some way.
This kneecapping of his story? Whedon didn’t like it. Not one lil’ bit. Donald Sutherland’s refusal to follow the script and mumble-garbling of lines were the last straw. He stormed off the set and out of the project. Though the movie got made without him, Whedon would continue to believe in what his story could be.
So he wrote a pilot script for a Buffy TV show. It would be a sequel, continuing the story of the film as he had written it, including references to events not in the movie. This guy, right? A new channel, The WB, picked it up. They installed scream queen Sarah Michelle Gellar as the lead. Future American Pie and How I Met Your Mother star Allison Hannigan and Ted Lasso baddie Anthony Head brought the drama to couch-sitting masses starting on March 10, 1997. Buffy show ran for 145 episode, spawning spin-off show Angel, comic book runs, 76 novels, 6 video games and a rabid fanbase. It became everything Whedon couldn’t get done in ’92. Buffy was an industry unto itself.
Connoisseurs of Camp
Did the good people of 1992 like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Nope. The movie made its money back, but no one got rich off this one. Against a budget of $7M it made $16M. After marketing costs, figure it landed a scant few million in the bank. In dumbing down the material for teens no sharper than the jocks in this movie, I think Fox ruined Buffy’s potential to cross over to any other audience.
Critics gave it a hard pass too. They hated everything from the direction to the dialogue except Swanson’s and mystifyingly Ruebens’s performances. Swanson is great. She’s locked in to her character, up for the acrobatics, and makes us believe she’s more than a match for the horde of vamps. But they’re wrong about Ruebens. In this, he’s so bad. But! That single performance is enough to make Buffy a worth good-bad movie watch all on its own.
Buffy is a cult classic, I think because it’s mostly bad with infrequent and unpredictable excellence. Things that don’t have a big dose of bad in them don’t gain cult followings. You need transgression if you want folks transfixed.
It’s mighty fun to see the early ‘90s version of the same story that would spawn a Millennium-era mainstay. If you haven’t seen it before, run don’t walk to the digital Blockbuster of your choice and rent Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Pizza of the Week
I’ve been making pizza at home every weekend for the last 8 years. Here’s what I made this time.
Spinach on Red & Pesto Sauce
This pie was a clean-out-the-fridge special. I love that about pizza: Almost anything can be a topping. If you’re putting a delicate green like spinach on a pie, don’t forget to dress it. Put it in a bowl with a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt and pepper. The oil keeps it from burning. The S&P? Mother Nature doesn’t season stuff for you, bub.
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this one—I really did. Next week we’re back with 1996’s The Craft. We’ll finish Magic! the week after that with Sandy Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s Practical Magic.
And hey, if you liked this one, share it with someone else who would too! Put a stake through their weekend.
NOTES:
Carter Burrell did the soundtrack, he of True Grit.
Drew Goddard was a main writer for the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He went on to write Cloverfield, The Cabin in the Woods, and The Martian.
Both David Arquette and Luke Perry appeared in 90210 in ’92. A thing like that.
Stephen Root played a vampire in True Blood.
Joss Whedon still hates Donald Sutherland.
Are the vamps in Buffy actually zombies??
Rutger Hauer was colorblind.