Complete butchering of a good story . I had never seen Queen of the Damned until last night, when I had just finished Anne Rice's novel Queen of the Damned.  Knowing I would soon be done with the novel, I was curious to see the movie so I went out to MovieStop and picked up a cheap, used dvd copy, despite hearing that this movie was very bad.  Turns out, the word bad is an understatement.    Let me get to the point, there were several changes in the story, and I understand that some of this needs to be done in the movies for screen time reasons, etc.  But I found that after reading the novel, while the basic premise of the story is the same as in the novel, pretty much everything that gave the novel's plotline it's depth and intrigue was removed from the story in the film adaptation, and this movie simply falls flat.  I was shaking my head by the end of the movie with such disappointment that so much of the story was hacked away.  The vampires in this movie are not portrayed with the amount of love & feeling that is intended by Anne Rice, Akasha included.  Maharet, perhaps the foremost character in the novel, basically doesn't show up until the end of the movie simply to take part in a disappointing final showdown.  Again, all of the backstory that should have been present here was missing.    I won't spoil it for any of those who still plan to read the novel, but Akasha's motives for what she was planning to do were actually logical (in her own evil and misguided way), but there was a reason for it that she saw as legitemate, where as in the movie it was simply "everybody must die!".  Period.  That's your motive for everything that the movie was building up to.  I can't stress this enough - the depth of the book is GONE in the movie.    Like I said, I understand that things need to be trimmed/skipped for the sake of screen time, etc., but this movie was barely over 1 1/2 hours long, and so much of the plot development could still have been included here to give this movie the depth that it lacked.  What's wrong with adding even another 30-45 minutes of screen time to fill in the story and make it a 120 or 135 minute film?  Heck, I sat in the theatres for all three Lord of the Rings movies which all ran over 3 hours.  Or was this movie directed at punk kids with 10 minute attention spans, rather than the fans of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles?  Such a shame, because this movie really had the potential to equal, if not better, the adaptation of Interview With the Vampire.    I could go on and on about the other things that were done in this movie that I thought were just stupid, silly, etc. etc.  Kind of like how the other vampires were pissed at Lestat for revealing himself to the world as a vampire and giving away vampiric secrets, yet they decide to fly up on stage during the middle of the concert, in front of tens of thousands of people and start fighting, in essence "revealing" themselves as well, which is totally inconsistent with why these vampires were angry in the first place.  I won't go into all of the details, because it would take too much writing to tell you everything that bugged me.    Bottom line, I guess if you're into cheesy vampire action flicks with a Korn, etc. movie score, then you may still see some value here, but Anne Rice diehards will most certainly find this movie a waste of their time.  But don't let this movie scare you out of reading the novel, because the book is much much MUCH better than this movie
Output: NEG