Rockabilly Vampire: Burnin’ Love
with Stephen Blackeheart, Paul Stevenson, Margaret Lancaster
Written by Paul Gambino
Directed by Lee Bennett Sobel
(Garage Rock Pictures)
by Mark Phinney
I once remarked that if rockabilly guys didn’t have girlfriends, they’d have nothing to write songs about. That’s not a knock on rockabilly guys (God knows I’m one), it’s just that some things just fit together so smoothly it makes for a howling combination: ham and cheese, cement and mixing, and rockabilly and love. Lee Sobel’s Burnin’ Love fits snugly into at least one of those categories. Yes, it’s a vampire flick, and yes, it’s a love story. But what one lone wolf from the NYC indie-film scene has done with it is to take the swingin’est aspects of fifties ‘billy culture, wrap ’em up in Lugosi’s cape, and drop the whole package onto the nineties’ doorstep.
Eddie Vincent is restless, thirsty, and alone, the typical traits of a vampire on the streets, only Eddie isn’t your typical fangster. With the looks of a young Elvis and a heart of eternal gold, he takes pity on his victims, even going so far as to ask them if they have any family before he dines. On the lam from his aptly-named brother, Wrecks, who got him into this predicament in the first place, our everyvamp roams the Lower East Side, out for blood yet unexpectedly sucker-punched (so to speak) by love.
It’s Sweet Iris, stuck in an antique clothing shop and lost in her fifties daydreams, writing her book about the King and dreaming about escaping in the arms of the Pelvic One. So when Eddie happens by the shop one night, it looks as if the man of her hip-swivelin’ dreams has finally arrived to knock her bobby socks off. Cupid shoots a stake through their hearts and they’re off, all leather, sideburns and danger, into the New York night.
Sobel is an enthusiast of trash, B-pictures, and the culture of cool, and Burnin’ Love is a prime example of how the three can be meshed to form a rockin’ outpost where anything can ensue. And yet Sobel cuts through to the vein of emotions beneath the skin of kitsch; look into Eddie’s eternal eyes and you see the pain of the immortal being – the rockabilly trappings are merely the icing on the devil’s food cake. We need new genres in the cinema (indie and mainstream alike), and Sobel may well be the man who knows what the cult elitists of the world wanna eat up for retro dinner and how to serve it up hot. Burnin’ Love is not just an extension of cool culture but a step in a new direction, a swanky statement that reads: Elvis? Monsters? Hell, yes!!!
To order this film, the soundtrack, or the Rockabilly ’96 video, write to Lee Bennett Sobel, 123 W. 93rd St., New York, NY 10025.
