Little known but pertinent fact: Apocrypha director Michael Fredinelli is related to Tony Fredianelli, a guitarist whose most prominent gig was in Third Eye Blind but whose real work happened in the late 80s as the guitarist for a speed metal outfit called, jeez, Apocrypha. Now, allegory's the cheapest form of analysis, but considering the movie's focus on the landscapes and destroyed minds of California, we could easily see the movie's exercises in style as a knowing chastisement for sell-outs.
The common intertexts for the film seem to be somewhere between Martin and The Addiction. But I'd make a wager that the director will likely find annoying and say that Twilight's the key intertext. That's not to say that Fredianelli and Reichmuth's script apes that series' Teen Heart Street logic. But no one can deny that the use of color correction here definitely echoes the cinematography in that run of recent Pacific Northwest vampire movies. The thing is, though, this movie doesn't take place in the Pacific Northwest, and that makes all the difference. The characters profess an aversion to the sun, but a pair of shades helps the situation. It's almost as though these characters have seen too much sun, have been around a crumbling culture of go-getters so long that their vision, along with their behavior, has been irrevocably turned as a result.
The movie's slow build in its first half hour allows for these kinds of reflections, but in terms of narrative, we meet with the most polished yet of Wild Dogs' classically-focused efforts. The ebb and flow of the narrative works well here, supplying the familiarities of the genre with the occasional shift in approach. There are some stock elements that fall flat (the fortune teller business seemed particularly convenient to connect disparate plot elements, and the CG is obviously a bit limited (about half of the scenes with vampire ephemera are effective; those with CG eyes end up being a tid silly by default). If nothing else, we can see Apocrypha as navigating a very tricky balance (that same tricky balance that Hawks, Fuller, Ray, Peckinpah, and others tried) riding between a hyper-codified classical aesthetic and interstices of personal investment. It may be far from Fredianelli's masterpiece, but in terms of expressing a state of being, we can see here a singular talent at work at a very particular moment in both popular culture and, in a sense, in the development of a directorial personality.
