So much rapture, so little point. When moviegoers flocked to “Interview With the Vampire” eight years ago, no one was surprised. However miscast they might have been, superstars Tom Cruise (as the vampire Lestat) and Brad Pitt were in it for a good time and a big payday. Beyond the lads’ box-office prowess, Anne Rice’s best-selling “The Vampire Chronicles” had been keeping book store cash registers jingling just before the advent of the “Harry Potter” series. The long-awaited followup, “Queen of the Damned,” is such a bald afterthought, the same moviegoers, and not a few Rice buffs, should drum it off the screen. Here, a decidedly 21st-century vampire named Marius (Vincent Perez) explains that he was born in 400 BC. Lestat (now played by Stuart Townsend) says he’s a former 18th-century nobleman. He rises from his cockroachy coffin with violin in hand but morphs, before you can say Arthur Fiedler, into the star of a heavy metal band. He gives information-impaired press conferences, concerts that could stop a clock – or at least a genuine musician – and neck nips that in vampire movies constitute symbolic intercourse. There’s a strongly implicit sexual bond between Lestat and Marius, his “maker” – the guy who first burrowed in and changed his mortality status. You couldn’t miss the gay subtext in “Queen of the Damned,” even if you’d been coffin-napping since 1954. Such commingling of blood. It’s more like the movie has a heterosexual subtext. And she’s called Jeese Reeves (Marguerite Moreau). She’s a paranormal researcher who works for an agency called Talamasca that studies vampires ‘n’at. But as poised and attractive as Moreau is, you wouldn’t hire Jeese for the sort of medical or historical research that requires stick-to-it-iveness. She takes one look at Lestat and thrusts her neck toward his fangs. A good hour into the bad movie, singer Aaliyah (killed in a plane accident last year) turns up as Queen Akasha, the sultry mother of all vampires. She, too, couldn’t be more contemporary. Between writers Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni and director Michael Rymer, “Queen of the Damned” seems to have been designed as campy eroticism. It rewards Lestat with one notable line (“Vampires don’t settle old scores, we harbor them”). But if Rice buffs embrace anything in the picture, all involved should be amazed and grateful. There’s nothing in Townsend’s presence that would explain him being cast as the second most famous vampire in all of fiction. Roles such as this demand a larger-than-life actor, not a callow kid play-acting. Where’s the mystery, the charisma, the authority? “Queen of the Damned” is as romantic as “Digimon,” as thrilling as “Pokemon,” as menacing as “Rugrats.” “Queen of the Danged” is more like it.

‘Queen of the Damned’

Director: Michael Rymer Stars: Stuart Townsend, Marguerite Moreau, Aaliyah MPAA Rating: R, for vampire violence

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