Habit

Glass Eye. Dir Larry Fessenden; Producer Dayton Taylor; Screenplay Larry Fessenden; Camera Frank DeMarco; Editor Larry Fessenden; Music Geoffrey Kidde Art Dir John Arlotto

Larry Fessenden
Meredith Snaider
Aaron Beall
Patricia Coleman
Heather Woodbury
Jesse Hartman

Another hip vampire drama set in New York's East Village, small budget indie Habit manages to impress with plausible scripting, first-rate performances and an unsettling mood of mounting dread.

Larry Fessenden performs as a multi-hyphenate, doing quadruple duties as writer, director, editor and leading man. He is effectively cast as Sam, an alcoholic restaurant manager who starts to suspect that his new lover, a mysterious beauty named Ann (Meredith Snaider), may be a vampire.

As their relationship continues, he notices that she never eats, and refuses to enter his apartment when she smells garlicky food. And then there's the business of her controlling wild wolf dogs in Central Park.

Habit is wickedly amusing as it focuses on the perverse eroticism that is intrinsic to the vampire myth - Sam obviously is enjoying the best sex he's ever had - but the pic wisely refrains from pushing the humor too far. Unfortunately, Habit tries to have it both ways in a finale that fails to resolve the mysteries and lacks sufficient emotional punch.

(Color) Extract of a review from 1996. Running time: 93 MIN.

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