‘Queen’ falls off the throne

The eternal battle between good and evil and the endless conflict over a book and its movie counterpart take center stage in the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Queen of the Damned. The battle, it turns out, is visually appealing but lacking in substance.

The film amalgamates plotlines from the second and third installment of Rice’s wildly popular The Vampire Chronicles. In less than two hours, the film follows the rise of the vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend) from his century long slumber to his controversial tryst with the queen of the vampires, Akasha (Aaliyah).

The first half of the film is shot haphazardly and leaves you with a sense of shock – a shock of how corny the movie is going to be. The clich