LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Soaked to the skin, I was shivering on a grandiose Mayfair doorstep in deepening gloom, about to ring the bell leading to David Bowie’s press showing of his horror film The Hunger—when a gigantic thunderclap ripped through the unseasonably slate-colored skies.
LETTER FROM BRITAIN
STAYIN’ HUNGRY
by
Cynthia Rose
Soaked to the skin, I was shivering on a grandiose Mayfair doorstep in deepening gloom, about to ring the bell leading to David Bowie’s press showing of his horror film The Hunger—when a gigantic thunderclap ripped through the unseasonably slate-colored skies. After two weeks of saturation Bowie-sell, for a moment it seemed spookily possible that DB’s PR machine might actually have got some Gothic grip on the meteorology of the city. Safe inside the screening theatre, however, what emerged as The Hunger was merely a lengthy likeness of those stylish TV ads for cigarettes, Cointreau, and Maxell tapes we face every evening on Channel 4.'
The film turns out to be a frank little Bmovie where erotic vampirism of the sort popularized in Anne Rice’s Interview With The-Vampire becomes a metaphor for drug addiction and general “animal instincts.” Its heroine is the suave Catherine Deneuve (who ends up, like Candy Clark before her, catting a collapsed Bowie about in elevators), a fact which simply adds to one’s dismayed sense that this project was somehow orchestrated by a consortium of interior decorators.