Vampira: About Sex, Death, and Taxes

By EMANUEL LEVY

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A Green Bird Oy production. Produced, directed, written by Mika J. Ripatti.
 

Considering her flamboyant personality and claim to notoriety as the presenter of midnight horror movies on L.A. station KABC, docu about Finnish actress Maila Nurmi/Vampira is a disappointingly shallow and dull work. Basically a lengthy interview with the bon vivant femme (now in her 70s), interspersed with footage from her movies and TV shows, "About Sex, Death, and Taxes" should travel the fest road and perhaps be included in future retrospectives of notorious filmmaker Edward D. Wood, with whom Nurmi worked.

Nurmi grew up in a small fishing village, but at 17, despite strong parental objection, her showbiz aspirations led her to New York, where she was cast as a chorus girl in a Mae West musical. Soon after, like many other would-be actresses, she continued to L.A. on a Greyhound bus, landing in what she describes as "sordid" Hollywood, with only $ 75 in her pocket.

After a number of movies as an extra, including one whose cast included starlets Marilyn Monroe (then known as Norma Jean) and Mamie Van Doren, Nurmi's big break came when a KABC producer offered her a tempting proposition: to introduce a latenight horror movie series. "I always liked to shock, I was always sinister," Nurmi says, regarding her choice to do the presentations as a heavily made-up dragon lady. Vampira's combination of intense erotic appeal, dark humor and macabre sensibility made her both special and outrageously subversive in the conservative climate of the 1950s.

Nurmi maintains that she deliberately expressed onstage "everything that I repressed during my Depression childhood," which resulted in a small but loyal following of buffs. During her "height," she befriended and hung out with troubled actors James Dean and Tony Perkins. In one of the docu's most interesting and prophetic clips, Dean tells a talkshow interviewer, "I'm extra-cautious when I drive on the highway." Days later, he died in a car accident.

Unfortunately, Finnish director Mika J. Ripatti, obviously a Nurmi devotee, glides over such important issues as the actress's claim that she alone created her bizarre screen personality, her loss of commercial rights to the Vampira character, the effects of the "Addams Family" show on her career and her blacklisting by Hollywood.

Section on how the "world's worst director," Ed Wood, offered her a part in "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is one of the film's highlights. What convinced Nurmi to do the movie, she says, was its title (which initially was "Grave Robbers From Outer Space") and the fact that Wood waved before her a wad of 200 one-dollar bills as her fee, at a time she was near starvation.

Here and there, Nurmi makes amusingly entertaining observations, such as her comment that on a full-moon night, she always leaves her house because she knows that a crazy person will show up at her doorstep. What's surprising for such a bright woman, however, is her admitted lack of realization that many of her fans were and are gay men.

Tech credits are extremely modest, but docu fails to capture the campy quality of its subject, a truly original icon of American pop culture.

Camera (color), Timo Peltonen; editor, Anne Lakanen; music, production design, Marjaana Rontama; sound, Janne Nurmimaa; makeup, Tanja Savalainen. Reviewed at AFI/L.A. Film Festival, Oct. 19, 1996. Running time: 64 MIN.
 

With: Maila Nurmi/Vampira.