A Manhattan literary agent (Nicolas Cage) who has problems with women imagines that he’s turning into a vampire. The script by Joseph Minion, his first to be produced since After Hours, reflects some of that earlier film’s obsessions with predatory or defenseless females and New York as expressionist landscape; the variable but generally competent direction is by British newcomer Robert Bierman. Practically nothing happens other than gradual deterioration of any distinction between reality and fantasy, and the theme is closer in some ways to Jekyll and Hyde (with the emphasis almost entirely on Hyde) than to Dracula or Nosferatu. What really makes this worth seeing is Cage’s outrageously unbridled performance, which recalls such extravagant actorly exercises as Jean-Louis Barrault’s in Jean Renoir’s The Testament of Dr. Cordelier and Jerry Lewis’s Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor. Even for viewers like myself who have never been especially impressed with Cage, his over-the-top effusions of rampant, demented asociality are really something to see, and they give this quirky, somewhat out-of-control black comedy whatever form and energy it has. With Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley, and Kasi Lemmons. (JR)