• Body Thief is a terrible book.  But I can see Howard/Grazer's thinking: You want to get a piece of that vampire gravy train, so getting the rights to a popular, pre-sold property is the smart thing to do, and Anne Rice is the obvious go-to author. But Warner Bros probably still has its option on the first 3 vampire chronicles, plus you need something that can work as a stand-alone piece.  So you end up with Body Thief. Of course, to film it, you have a "Face/Off" problem: You have to cast a big star as Lestat, but the character runs around in someone else's body for the whole story, which means that you've got to get another big star, although that guy can't upstage the other star too much in case there's a sequel.

• Oh, we most certainly do. S.P. Somtow's Moondance is an epic, brutal fusion of a terrific werewolf story and a tragic yarn about the dying days of the old west, and it is in my opinion the best werewolf novel yet written. Robert R. McCammon's The Wolf's Hour is another genre fusion — the lycanthropic protagonist is an O.S.S. operative during WWII — and is also quite good. There are others but those two are the must-reads, especially Moondance.

• I liked the series of side-stories of the supporting cast that she did -- ie: Pandora. I adored that book. I wonder if it is terrible now.

• and from a nun... ugh.

• YES - wow, she was terrible.

• And Aaliyah died during filming and they had to modulate her brother's voice for lines that hadn't been recorded.  Sad times.

• Tho, Memnoch was not super awesome, and would NOT translate to the screen. All that nun-flirting and eye-gouging. 

• "Giant rock concert? Nah, let's make the one that is nothing like the rest of the series, and was written as a boring screenplay in the first place."  WTF. I remember reading that they only made Queen of the Damned because the rights to the movies were reverting to Rice, and they wanted to get something out of them -- like killing all the iconic characters, and some baffling recasting.  Anyway. Geeze.

• Wasn't Body Theif the one where Lestat talks about how he could feed from a girl on her period without hurting her? I am pretty sure I was scarred for life by that little thoughtful tidbit.

•  Also Ron Howard. That is already notched up the quality. Especially over queen of the damned (though I did like the soundtrack).

• "Lazytown x Warhammer 40k" ?! WTF, link me up. :}

• don't u have any influence on your lil sis? how can u stand this? ever tried to punch some taste into her? do it, save her!

• your sister got a twisted sense of humor

• There are 3 things I remember about the book: 1. Lestat pisses himself because he forgets to shake. 2. He rapes a girl and has sex with a nun who later goes insane. 3. For the first time ever, a character is overtly revealed to be gay. And I doubt any of these would make it into a film version.

• You're right, but the fact that we're wasting brain cells on this film is utterly wrong. (  >_<)

•  Okay, now I'm interested....

• Memnoch: "I totally did that cavegirl" God: "You . . . you what?"

• Ian McKellan as David Talbot, plz

• We already established how played-out being immortal had gotten in Queen of the Damned

• Do werewolf fans have good book to set their expectations by?  I saw Blood and Chocolate

• I thought it was Lord Byron who coined the dandy vampire

• It's didn't help that she swore off editors

• Rowan Mayfair is a proper moron neurosurgeon in The Witching Hour.  It's not until Taltos that you find out she's both an idiot psychic neurosurgeon, but also a callous bitch too.

• You forgot it was Aaliyah, Ashanti tried a weak knockoff on Buffy

• The best part is that you don't have to complain much about how they recast Lestat, because he's not in his own body for most of the film.

• HEY! ANNE RICE IS AWESOME! And this means one more step towards Memnoch the Devil my favorite book. SO YES! GO LESTAT! DOWN WITH EDWARD MC'SHIT'VAMP!

• Don't forget the Ancient Egyptian demon queen Ashanti, woken up by the power of vampire rock music.

• ^This. This is the best idea. MAKE IT HAPPEN FOX.

• The sound track was good. All the rest well.....I've seen better piles of worm infested dog shit.

• "This article is atrocious, it's the example of everything that is wrong with modern day journalism." I must have missed the memo that said a few typos are now equated with illegal phone-hacking and privacy violations.

•  I do not think that word means what she thinks it means.

• True story: When I was around five years old and still forced to attend Sunday school, the Sunday school teacher told us kids the story of the crucifixion and then had us draw pictures of it. I was already a budding artist, so I was determined to have fun with it by adding one of my favorite things to the scenario, namely monsters. (My early years were spent in the Bay Area, where I was addicted to Creatures Features when Bob Wilkins was the host.) When I finished my picture, the teacher was appalled to find I'd drawn Dracula standing open-mouthed and smiling beneath the crucified Jesus, whose blood was dripping into the vampire lord's eager maw. This caused a bit of a stir and resulted in my parents being brought in for a conference over whether I was "disturbed." When asked why I would draw something so horrible, I responded with my theory of how idf Dracula drank the blood of Christ, wouldn't he become in effect "Super-Vampire?" That fairly sound bit of kid-reasoning was met with neither agreement nor a pat on the head for creativity, and I remember it being a loooooong drive home from church. My mother was a compulsive hoarder of my childhood drawings, so she may still have that masterpiece, although she also may have chucked it due to it being religiously offensive to her Southern-raised sensibilities. Anyway, when I read Memnoch the Devil, I was annoyed that Rice's ending for it was more or less the same as what a five-year-old came up with twenty years earlier, so let that tell you all you need to know about Rice's storytelling abilities by that point. And now she has a book coming out about werewolves, the monsters I adore above all others, so I am curious to read it, even knowing it will likely eat ass. Jesus wept... And should you decide to endure Rice at her most ridiculous, check out her trilogy of Sleeping beauty "erotica," in which the amount of buggery is truly staggering. They're awful, but at least they made me laugh out loud.

•  The irony in this post is delicious.

•  The Queen of the Damned was the exact moment when the series went off the rails. It was half an excellent origin story for vampirism, while the other half was a huge "who cares" in which Lestat — now an international rock star, mind you — finds vampires from all over the place converging on his big concert in order to kick his ass for revealing all the secrets of vampires under the guise of pop music theatricality. I never saw the movie but I dread it if it's as bad as segments of the book ended up being.

• If you thought Interview was bad, I double-dog-dare you to make it all the way through Memnoch the Devil. The ending may as well have been a recorded message from Rice, laughing in the reader's face and calling them a sucker for shelling out good money on what was so obviously an inconsequential book that she tossed off over over the course of a weekend.

• You made the right move in not bothering with the rest of Rice-a-roni's vampire stuff. Other than Queen of the Damned providing a very good backstory on the origin of vampires, Rice's work only serves as the Ground Zero for the pussification of vampires, from which Twilight's tsunami of awfulness was the next (de-) evolutionary step. I, like a fucking moron, kept reading them in hope that they would improve and I was consequently rewarded with a gaggle of crap that's currently gathering moss in a box somewhere in a closet.

• She also said I was uncultured for not liking Disaster Movie.

•  So, when is she gonna start teaching you about good movies? That'll be after Queen of the Damned, right?

•  I watch it sometimes when I'm down.  Seriously, what a funny movie.  Saw it in the theater knowing it'd be bad.... theater  full of black guys there because it was Aaliyah's final project.  Oh man what a fun time.

• How can you make a Tale of the Body Thief movie without the other books?  It was Anne Rice parodying her own characters... Lestat being so eager to be spontaneous that he gives up his body, Louis desperately envying him for gaining mortality, Marius being pissed and unhelpful... the entire book hinges on knowing the characters... also, I don't think Lestat's experiences with digestion and attempting to shag a very old man will be all that sellable.

• And he ended up IMO being the best thing about the movie, because he seemed to be the only one actually enjoying himself.

• Effete he may be, he's still 1,000,000 times the vampire Edward will ever be.

• I, myself, would much rather have Ellison's Mefisto in Onyx with Samuel L Jackson.

• Maybe 10 years ago I'd be excited for this...I did enjoy Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" immensely,  but the best stories, at least in my opinion, were the one's that didn't focus so much on Lestat.  "Blackwood Farm" would have made an amazing film.  Sadly, Twilight and all that other pseudo-vampire literary diarrhea has killed my desire to watch anything even remotely vamp related.

• “It will be OK. Please point to the doll to show us where Rob touched you….”

•  At one point I had not one, but 2 copies of it on DVD (one I purchased myself, the other a present)... yay for double dissapointment!

• Wow, an a modern day internet article of flaccid journalism containing more unsolicited opinion than fact and seriously bad spelling or just bad editing, WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?! btw - it you bothered to actually see Queen of the Damned before you ran your mouth about it you would know that the film (seriously flawed as it might have been) was an ill advised attempt to blend Lestat and Queen in one movie. It's probably the opinion of Howard and his company that Lestat was already attempted and that they should move forward. This article is atrocious, it's the example of everything that is wrong with modern day journalism.

• Someone needs to whack Kurtzman & Orci with a newspaper across the nose and say "NO." while rubbing their face in a pile of the shitty movies they've made.  I fail to understand how those two fools continue to get work...

• That premise sounds pretty terrible. If you're immortal, and you willingly switch bodies with someone who isn't, and you expect him to give you your body back...then you kind of deserve what you get, because you're just too dumb to live.

•  I saw it too, but I don't remember anything that happened in it. I wasn't even drunk, it was just that boring of a movie.

• My sister forced me to watch it because I "need to learn about good movies."

• Oh, I forgot that book existed. I'm glad I didn't read it. 

• I'm boasting with joy for this occasion. After they make a Tale of the Body Thief movie, they can finally make the most epic movie Hollywood will ever see: Memnoch the Devil, directed by Mel Gibson. (point in question: in Memnoch, the 5th book of the series, Lestat drinks the blood of Jesus Christ  (straight from his holy neck).

• I see Anne Rice is trying to reclaim the "crappiest vampire film franchise" title from Twilight. The first time I saw Interview with the Vampire I thought it was alright. Then I read the book.  Holy crap, that was one of the worst things I've ever read, not just content-wise but her writing itself is pure shit.  How such a poor author could get so popular is something I will never understand. To say I am not excited for this movie would be an understatement.  With any luck I will completely forget that it's coming out.

• I'll be honest. I liked the books when I first read them 20+ years ago. Now, I'm more a fan of Dracula, and the more monstrous variety of vampire. Keep in mind though, children, that when Anne Rice was writing these things there wasn't much vampire stuff around to compare against. Hers was a fresh take that was intriguing once upon a time.  Just because everyone else has copied her relentlessly and poorly, and just because the final book was a steaming pile of crap does not make the series worthless. Or at least it didn't back in the day. These days, most people are used to the idea of effete luxurious vampires. In fact, it was this takeover of vampires that drove me to liking zombies. The whole Zombie Anti Defamation League (the ZADL of my name) was formed as a rebellion to this notion of the undead. I thought about elitism and exclusivity, and enjoyed the notion that zombies were the polar opposite of that. I've just run out of steam with the whole ZADL thing, others are doing it better now, and I just hold on to the name for consistency's sake.  So... um... yeah.  How 'bout them Mets?

• All I needed to read was Orci and Kurtzman and I knew I didn't want any parts of this gigantic vulture turd sammich

•  QoTD was the crazy S&M vampire thing with the thousand year old chick who, naturally, needed to bang Lestat (and take over the world) It wasnt that bad of a book and could have been done better had it been a movie and not a music video. I barely remember Tale of the Body Theif though, and thats not a good sign.

• The only thing I recall from Interview with the Vampire was that I was rooting so hard for Tom Cruise to be good and shut that bitch Anne Rice up.

• By the end of that one I figured he was pretty much God so who the fuck cared anymore. 

• ... I've never read the Anne Rice vampire books, but the plot description for the fourth one sounds like the synopsis to fan fiction. REALLY REALLY SHITTY FAN FICTION. Body swapping? Done without a hint of irony? ... Has anybody done that since the 80's? I mean it, I've read fucking Lazytown x Warhammer 40k crossover fics that had more orginality and integrity than that blurb. How does a series go from gothic brooding to Freaky Friday shennaigans in the space of four books?

• I read Interview With the Vampire and stopped there. What utter, horrid drivel. And the movies were <i>worse.</i>

• Yes, because this strategy worked so well for Superman Returns...

• that doesn't mean it wouldn't translate into other media well

• I vote for a Kindred: The Embraced reboot.

• Wow.  I didn't read any of the series besides Interview, which I didn't really enjoy, probably because I also read Poppy Z Brite's Lost Souls around the same time.  That is how you write a vampire novel.  But I digress.  I have heard the The Vampire Lestat is quite good, never picked it up though, and didn't see Queen of the Damned because I didn't really want to.  In short, I've never really cared about the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, beyond actively disliking Interview in execution even though it was a solid concept. But this... that synopsis sounds like a complete and utter pile of crap.

• I saw a few minutes of it and turned the channel. I was tempted to watch the whole thing just to see if it was better or worse than the book.  Wasn't Queen of the Damned the one where Lestat became Superman?

• Tale of the Body Thief was I think the first Anne Rice book I read that showed her characters weren't just stupid, but rather terminally stupid.  Yes, I don't think it was ever claimed that Lestat was the brightest biscuit, but he is an unbelievable idiot here.  (It didn't help that I read the first witch book or whatever around the same same, which has a supposedly smart character being an oblivious idiot.)

• dammit,can't they do a remake of Nosferatu or something?Before twilight emerged from deepest hell,shit about Leastat and co was my least favourite vampire novel (besides most victorian ones)

• Because they know there's enough of a fanbase preinstalled to merit continuing the franchise yet deem that it won't generate enough buzz or interest elsewhere to merit anything less than half an ass.

• I saw what you did there.

• They did make The Vampire Lestat movie.  With Tom Cruise no less........... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USxhXb5VC5E 

• It's amazing...they'll reboot The Spider-Man franchise unnecessarily.  Nolan's final Batman film isn't even released yet and already there's talk about a reboot to sync the character up into a "Justice League" universe.   Godzilla, Charlie's Angels, Total Recall...the list goes on and on.  But The Vampire Chronicles, which really has been treated so shabbily film wise -- why can't they get their collective heads out of their you know whats to make a decent version?

• no one saw Queen of the Damned... I did. What the fuck was I thinking?

• Blah! Blah!

• Oh, sure, Hollywood Reporter. Mention Orci and Kurtzman's work on the Transformers movies and Nu-Trek-Which-is-More-like-Star-Wars-than-Trek-and-even-though-I-liked-Nu-Trek-it-still-wasn't-Trek and neglect to mention the only good non-Fringe thing they've done, Transformers Prime.

• Seriously, that is really the worst of the books.

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