Night Watch

So, having reminded myself what good movies feel like in the wake of Daybreakers, I'm going to try and balance the junk with better stuff, like the Russian horror thriller Night Watch, based on a series of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko.

In Moscow, the forces of Good, represented by the Night Watch, are in conflict with the forces of Evil, the Day Watch. The Day Watch is made up of evil wizards and vampires, while good wizards and shape shifters run the Night Watch.

The vampires are pretty sympathetic as far as bloodsucking creatures of the night are concerned, Kostya foremost among them. He's the son of a butcher, also a vampire- which is where he gets his blood from, lest they run afoul with the Night Watch.

Kostya's neighbor Anton is with the Day Watch and is tasked with bringing in a vampire couple who have decided they want to feed on a child.

Of course, the vampires are just cogs in a bigger picture- The End of the World, of course.

One nice touch is the child is watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in Russian, of course, specifically the episode where she meets Dracula.

Night Watch is pretty cool- awesome effects, nothing exactly new, but presented in a novel fashion. I'm looking forward to the sequel, Day Watch.

Transylmania

What the fuck kind of trash is this?

Transylmania is supposed to be some kind of... vampire, college student sex comedy.

Six college students from the States are taking a semester abroad to a college in Romania.

It's... oh god, the pain.

The only thing... THE ONLY THING that makes it bearable is the vampire hunter's family name: Van Sloan. It's a nod to Edward Van Sloan who played Van Helsing in the Bela Lugosi Dracula.

That's It.

(I made it 38 minutes into the 96 minute long movie. Now, I have to take a shower because I feel dirty.)

I can appreciate a wast of time as much as anyone but this... it puts the Suck into timesuck.

Blood Bath

Well, Blood Bath was an interesting diversion. Clocking in at just a minute over an hour, it was a Roger Corman project slated to share a double - or triple -bill so the length wasn't that big a problem.

The problem is it's two films spliced into one- a European spy thriller crossed with a SoCal vampire movie set among the Beatnik art set.

It's a standard Corman cheapie, not too bad- that fact that he gets the two films to mesh with a semibalance of continuity. Sort of.

Artist Antonio Sordi works in the basement of his 11th century bell tower in Venice California. Yeah.

And he's being possessed by the spirit of his ancestor, a vampire.

It was choppy but workable. Better than Blood Dancers, that's for certain.

Daybreakers

Ok, THIS was what I've been waiting for.

Daybreakers is a sci-fi horror film starring Ethan Hawke as a blood scientist in a world where vampires are in the majority and humans are hunted for food.

For the first seven minutes or so, there's no dialog, just a panorama of images from a post Human world. Daytime travels trhough a silent, deserted city that comes to life as the sun sets, like some sort of slo-mo Goth Koyaanisquatsi .

Of course there's a problem- the blood supply, and the human population, is dwindling and blood starved vampires are mutating and rioting.

Human sympathetic Hawke's character falls in with a human underground to find a cure.

It's a treat to watch something like this, a stylish film with real actors. Despite the fact that it's smart, it still has a pretty good gore quotient- my favorite little touch is that people are getting their blood rations in their coffee.

Perry, who's been patient beyond belief with some of these movies, actually found it "infinitely better than what (I've) been watching." And compared to some of the stuff he's had to endure, it was.

The Vampire Conspiracy

A vampire gathers five strangers together in a featureless room- challenging them to escape from his lair in Vampire Conspiracy.

It's like... Cube. But with a vampire.

The credits are nice. And the score is pretty good.

That's about all the nice I can say.

The characters are all stereotypes- the angry streetwise black man (named Shiv- seriously), the weaselly white lawyer, the practical lesbian cop, an academic who's speciality was vampires and a disillusioned engineer. Of course they all turn on each other.

The Vampire, he's almost a joke, allegedly French, but sounding a lot like Antonio Banderas.

Conceptually, it's an interesting premise. Its biggest fault is the budget restraints- the acting isn't even that bad- it's very Little Theater but I've seen much, much worse during the project.

I wouldn't put it at the top of your list, but if you've exhausted your options, it's not the worst way to spend an hour and a half.

To Die For

Tonights movie was To Die For aka Bram Stoker's To Die For aka Dracula: The Love Story to Die For aka Dracula: The Love Story aka Bram Stoker's Dracula: The Love Story To Die For.

Yeah. You know a movie with this many titles has to be good.

Well, good-ish. Apparently it was on cable a lot in the early nineties- since I didn't have cable back them I missed didn't see it.

Vlad Tepes has come to LA in 1988 and needs a real estate agent to find him a home; Kate's a real estate agent in a crappy relationship. Of course she falls for the mysterious foreigner, and finds him a big ol' castle looking thing.

He gets a Renfield in Kate's roommate Cici, who's hired as Vlad's secretary. Cici falls for Vlad, Vlad falls for Kate. Cici and Kate's boyfriends play the calvary.

It's SO totally eighties. Big hair and shoulder pads- for everybody. And it's not just 80's - it's SoCal eighties, like something out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

Almost a post script- I didn't mention any of the actors by name, because, honestly, it was SoCal girl 1,2, and 3, broody guy, and SoCal Boyfriend 1 & 2. But looking at the IMDB listing I saw a name the stood out: Duane Jones. Ben from Night of the Living Dead. He plays a policeman in this, and he's pretty good. Not as amazing as his turn in Night, but still pretty good.

Slayer

I'm pretty sure Slayer was a SyFy original.

There's a seriously crazy cast- Casper Van Dien, Lynda Carter, Danny Trejo, and Ray Park.

It's like... Predator, with Vampires.

Casper Van Dien playes a soldier in Central America. On patrol, he and his platoon encounter a group of vampires; killing them, they return to the States.

Upon returning his boss, Colonel Weaver (played by Lynda Carter), tells him that there have been other incidents and that her God-daughter- and his ex-wife- is out there in the jungle.

He's got to rescue her, and they've got to stop the vampires- one of which's played by Ray (Darth Maul) Park (two, actually- he's playing Acrobatic Twins, that's like their official credits title).

It's a standard SyFy timekiller, but there's a clever subtext about human encroachment in the Central and South American Jungles.

Of course, that's sort of negated by the fact that the town the vampires are operating out of is called Agua Caliente.

My Son The Vampire

I understand that Great Britain took longer to recover from World War II than the United States- rationing lasted til '54.

Watching My Son The Vampire I can understand how bad things must have been.

Bela Lugosi plays Van Housen, an evil genius known as The Vampire, who may very well be a real vampire.

He's created a super robot that is accidently delivered to Mother Reilly, an Irish shopkeeper, played by Arthur Lucan. Yes, Arthur. Mother Reilly is played by a man, in the Music Hall style of humor.

One of those styles of humor that never seemed to really cross the Atlantic too well.

And crossing the Atlantic was what this movie was all about apparently- Lugosi had gone to England to perform in a production of Dracula that flopped; he took the role in My Son The Vampire to pay for his ticket back to the States.

It's not quite Dracula in terms of production, but as goofy as it is, it's still considerably superior to some of the things I've seen so far- like Blood Dancers or Def By Temptation.

Bloodrayne

I generally try to stay away from movies base on video games, especially ones directed by Uwe Boll. but

I saw the screewriting credit for Guinivere Turner and thought, well, that's a good sign.

Except apparently her script was late so there was no time for rewrites, so Boll had the actors work it out.

Instead of hiring extras, they hired prostitutes for a scene.

It's bad. Really (x3) bad.

Watching it, I realized it's set in the sort of Middle Ages the members of the SCA think they would have lived in.

Gah.

There's an hour and a half better spent hitting my toes with a hammer.

Edges of Darkness

Ok, I'm taking a lot on faith watching this one- Netfilx says it's a vampire movie.

So far, fifteen minutes in, it's a Zombie Apocalypse. In fact one of the characters uses that phrase.

OH.

It's crazy, but the character who said "Zombie Apocalypse" was a vampire. There's a pair of them, husband and wife, hunkered down while the world is going to Hell.

Literally- Edges of Darkness is three separate stories linked geographically and one of them involves the Anti-Christ; another is about a writer in an apartment who's got a life-force sucking power adapter for his computer.

I don't write these things- I just watch them.

Some of these I watch so you don't have to. Like this one.

The vampire plot was... interesting. The husband has kidnapped a girl to serve as their food source, keeping her alive in a symbiotic relationship. Of course, things go wrong.

But he makes a statement that I found intriguing in a cross-genre movie: "This should have been our world."

Bram Stoker's Dracula's Guest

Oh merciful Lord, this one's bad.

It's funny, because the title is sort of word play- Bram Stoker's Dracula's Guest.

Here, unlike Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, where Stoker's is possessive, Stoker's is a contraction for the meaning "Bram Stoker is Dracula's Guest."

Really.

Dracula has come to London to buy a house and Bram Stoker works for a firm to procure it for him; later Stoker stays at the house.

It's bad.

I've seen the Coppola movie before and I've held off rewatching it for the project (saving one of the good ones for later) but one of the running criticisms of the move is Keanu Reeves' attempt at a British accent.

He makes the actors in Dracula's Guest look like Olivier.

The actor playing Dracula... well, he was pretty good as Leatherface in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Here, he was... well, menacing, but that was more of a side effect of his build- he's kind of a beefy guy- one of his featured roles was as a football player in Any Given Sunday- and I don't really think "beefy" when I think Dracula.

The sets and the costumes were ok; better than what I expected- unfortunately, that's not a reason to watch this movie.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer- The Movie

I saw Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Movie in the theaters way back when and I hadn't seen it recently.

There's a reason for that.

It's... kinda crappy. I think if I'd just watched it and saw it on its own merits... it wouldn't have been so bad. Conceptually, it's still sound- classic film victim becomes pro-active hero.

But... since I last watched the movie, the creator, Joss Whedon, developed a remarkable show starring Sarah Michele Geller in the title role, putting Kristy Swanson, the movie Buffy, off the radar.

I couldn't finish it.

So I rewatched a classic episode of Buffy instead: the musical Once More With Feeling.

Impaler

Ok, I sorted the listings on Netflix by actor tonight because I wanted to watch more Tina Fey in the wake of watching the first four seasons of 30 Rock. One of her Netflix credits was something called Impaler.

I had to check this out.

Here's the blurb:

Never before has there been a gubernatorial candidate quite like Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey, a self-proclaimed Satanic priest, Hecate witch and vampire. This documentary follows Sharkey's well-publicized bid to become Minnesota's governor in 2006. In addition to promoting the interests of farmers and veterans, this third-party candidate also advocated more controversial ideas such as the impaling of lawbreakers.

I love pseudo-documentaries- there're usually pretty funny. So Satanic Vampire running for governor in Minnesota- should be funny, right?

... and then I see why Tina Fey is in it- footage from SNL's Weekend Update.

Oh.

It's real.

Yeah...

It's mildly entertaing until I made that realization. THEN it became hilarious.

It's like a Goth Springer episode.

The only thing that could have made this cooler would have been beer.

Def By Temptation

Any movie that starts with a bartender convincing his girl friend to get an abortion can't be all bad, even when it's from Troma.

Or maybe it can.

Def By Temptation is an African-American vampire story from the early nineties- ok, it was released early enough in the nineties that it was filmed at the tail end of eighties that everybody was still wearing serious eighties clothes.

James Bond iii is the director, producer, writer, and star of the piece and it comes of as... pretty indulgent.

Bond plays Joel, a divinity student about to become a minister who visits a former classmate in New York City, where a lady vampire's been preying on men at a bar. The lady vampire is reminiscent of a Prince protoge' like Apollonia or Vanity.

It's... ugh.

It does have one thing going for it though- it's a horror film where the black guy doesn't die. There aren't that many black horror movies, so it's... well it's something.

Of course, the real redeeming quality of this thing is Samuel L. Jackson as Joel's dead father, appearing in flashbacks, nightmares and visions.

Blood Dancers

It's weird. I've got this odd "I want to suffer" attitude about some of my viewing.

Scrolling through the films listed on Netflix, I saw a listing from Blood Dancers.

Vampire strippers- ok, sure. After watching Vamp last night, I thought I'll give it a try.

I made it twelve minutes in.

Bad dialog. Bad cinematography. Bad music. Very bad acting.

All the negatives of your average low quality porn video without the sex.

So far, I've been doing this using the streaming video function of Netflix. Last night, I signed up for their dvd by mail option.

That should adjust the quality of my viewing significantly.

Perry hopes so, at least. The other evening, during Vampires: Out For Blood, he wanted to know if he could ask me a question. Anticipating this, I replied, "this is as good as it gets."

Vamp

I'm still in an eighties kind of mood left over from Waxwork, so I decided to pop in my other favorite vampire movie from that time- Grace Jones's Vamp.

A trio of college boys travels into the big bad city to find a stripper for their fraternity initiation. They choose The After Dark Club, a stripper bar run by vampires, with the vampire queen Katrina, played by Grace Jones, as their main attraction.

It's a fun movie, where the director was having a lot of visual fun. The early scenes at the college campus are filmed in a realistic style, then when the trio get to the big bad city, their car is sideswiped into a spin; when they get out- "not in Kansas anymore"- the color palate changes, lots of greens and pinks, like an Argento or Bava movie.

The guys are played by Robert Rusler, Chris Makepeace and

Gedde Watanabe, all actors who seemed to have peaked in the eighties. Dedee Pfeiffer plays a waitress at the club who knows Rusler's and Makepeace's characters but plays coy as to how she knows them. She's fun thanks to her eighties hair and zebra pattern jacket...so, so very eighties.

Of course, the star of the show is Grace Jones- with NO dialogue at all, because she talks with her eyes and her body. The absence of dialog adds to the character, giving her an aura of mystery- compounded by little touches the director threw in- like an Egyptian sarcophagus with Jones' face carved on the lid.

Vampires: Out For Blood

Vampires: Out for Blood.

It's not bad. It's not great.

It does get cool points for having Lance Henriksen in it.

Vampires use raves to gather their victims and troubled police officer Hank Holten, Entourage's Kevin Dillon, is sent in to investigate.

Henriksen play's his supervisor in the police department.

There's a vampire orgy that probably got heavily censored when this monstrosity played on the Sci-Fi Channel.

But Lance Henriksen was in it.

Hank's ex-wife is a novelist who specializes in vampire novels, so she's his go-to gal for what to do. Her grasp of vampire folklore is... original, to say the least. (Vampires are guarded during the day by demons called Wraiths who are afraid of heights and bleed acid. Yeah... that's news to me.)

But Lance Henriksen was in it.

Henriksen is one of those actors that can salvage an otherwise craptastic movie. If you're going to watch Vampires: Out for Blood, do it for him, because he's the only redeeming thing in this movie.

Waxwork

Some movies are distinctly products of their era.

Waxwork is a quintessentially eighties movie, almost a horror version of a John Hughes film.

Six college classmates are invited to a private showing at a waxworks and are transported into the tableaus. Among the scenarios are zombies, a werewolf, and Dracula's castle.

It's a light hearted horror movie and the Dracula portion is ghoulishly hilarious.

The girl, Chyna, experiencing the Dracula scene isn't particularly nice, so she gets what's coming to her. She get's dinner with Dracula and family, where she's served raw meat.

"I haven't had steak tartar in a long time," she tells him.

It turns out the meat is the fiancee of the girl she's supposed to be within the waxwork. He's restrained in the basement, as food for the vampires, parceled out a bit at a time, his left leg sliced off under the knee.

She dispatches several vampires but eventually falls victim to Dracula, played by Miles O'Keefe, previously seen in Tarzan with Bo Derek and Ator, the Blade Master.

It's a silly little movie that's a delightful tribute to classic horror- to the degree that the Mummy sequence has Swan Lake as the soundtrack, the same piece of music that that introduced the opening credits of Boris Karloff's The Mummy.

I hadn't seen this movie in over a decade, and it's just as much dumb fun now as it was back in '88, which isn't that big a surprise since the director, Anthony Hickox, was the son of Douglas Hickox, director of Vincent Price's Theatre of Blood.

Vampire Wars

I'm behind a couple of posts, so I'm going to take my movies when I can, and try to do a couple of double features.

Tonight's first movie was the short (50 minutes) Japanese OAV (Original Animated Video) Vampire Wars.

Fifteen minutes in it's like some kind of... Jason Bourne thing- the head of French intelligence hires an ex-KGB agent to take out a CIA director. And somehow there's vampires.

There's sex. And violence. And profanity. But twenty minutes in- forty percent through the movie- no vampires.

(Wait, thinking back there was one early on but not obviously a vampire)... and now, one's showed up and he's a goober.

Half way through, I've paused it five or six times- it's not holding my attention; I will finish it though.

I know this is based on a series of novels, but it's crap. The animation is mediocre and the voice acting is annoying- that's mostly a function of the wooden script, I guess, and that's probably a function of the translation.

The Return of Count Yorga

The best part of sequels is that once upon a time they didn't have to justify the return of someone who died in a prior movie. Like The Return of Count Yorga. Yes, he perished at the end of Count Yorga, Vampire.

But he's back, still rocking the red smoking jacket.

This time, he's got his sights set on a pre-James Garner Mariette Hartley as Cynthia Nelson, a teacher at an orphanage.

One scene of note is where Yorga's followers attack Cynthia's family- it's reminiscent of the Sharon Tate killings, something still in the public conscious just two years after the fact.

There's a cute touch when Yorga's watching television and an Italian language version of Hammer's The Vampire Lovers is on.

I'm not really keeping track, but this is the third film Michael Pataki has been in for the project- Grave of the Damned and The Bat People are the two others.

One more thing- Yorga get's a special shout out in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula short story "Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977," as Khorda, the Deathmaster, formerly known as General Iorga of Dracula's Carpathian Guard. In the Anno Dracula series, Newman takes figures from history and mixes them with characters from pop culture (literature, movies, television) and builds a world where Van Helsing and company weren't triumphant at the end of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but where Dracula becomes consort to Queen Victorian and vampires rule the world- sort of. Anno Dracula, the first book in the series, is being reissued in March 2011 by Titan Books.

Dead Heist

I saw the word "bloodsucking" in the description, I had to give Dead Heist a try.

It's mostly a bank heist caper that goes horribly wrong when the town they're in is hit by vampire zombies.

Yes, Vampire Zombies.

Then it enters survival horror land, killing off the creatures with statistically improbable shots to the heart.

It's fun. It's short, but it really doesn't need to be all that long- the set up seems to take forever, but once it kicks in, it doesn't let up til most of the cast is dead.

As it should be.

The Brides of Dracula

There's always some discussion among fans about The Brides of Dracula after a viewing because there's no Dracula in it.

But the title is the Brides of Dracula, not "Dracula and His Brides," so I can give it a pass.

The vampire in this Hammer film is Baron Meinster, a follower of Dracula. He's kept captive by his mother until freed by a young woman, a school teacher coming to take a post at a girl's school nearby.

Of course, where there's vampires, there's Van Helsing. He keeps the young lady from falling prey to Meinster and dispatches the vampire in a manner not seen before nor since- by turning a windmill's shadow into a huge cross by turning the sails.