From Dusk To Dawn

Of all the "stripper vampires" movies I've seen so far, next to Vamp, From Dusk To Dawn is probably the best- and I'm only favoring Vamp because I saw it in the theatre.
FDtD has a better script- Quentin Tarentino, also pulling acting duty-a cooler director- Robert Rodriguez- and an awesome cast- George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis,Fred Williamson, John Saxon, Cheech Marin, and Salma Hayek.
Clooney and Tarentino play two criminal brothers, the Geckos, on a rampage across Texas headed to a safe haven in Mexico. They encounter a family traveling by RV- Harvey Keitel as the father, a former minister who's lost his faith and Juliette Lewis as his daughter- and kidnap them.
They end up at a strip bar run by vampires. Hilarity ensues. Well, a bloodbath really. Lots of crimson.
It's a fun movie, Hollywood having a little fun- Rodriguez and Tarentino are just indulging a some creative playtime with a big budget drive in movie, with exploitation film regulars Williamson (Hell Up In Harlem, and the original The Inglorious Bastards), Saxon (Black Christmas and Cannibal Apocalypse), and Savini (the special effects mastermind behind the original Dawn of the Dead) as a wonderful present to fans of grindhouse/b-movies.

Razor Blade Smile

Wayback last century, I took a course on Structuralism in literature. It didn't work for me, my youthful mental gears just didn't get "from a structuralist standpoint, The Color Purple is a comedy." I heard The Color Purple=comedy and I couldn't make the mental click.
I'm saying this because I saw the craziest James Bond movie tonight- Razor Blade Smile.
It's a low budget, b-grade vampire movie that's a James Bond film with a female protagonist and an absence of the glorious Bond gadgets.
But from a structuralist viewpoint, it's a Bond movie- pre-credit teaser sequence, a sexy siloutte credit sequence, and hit the ground running action.
Lilith Silver is a vampire assassin, wearing a latex catsuit five years before Kate Beckinsdale did in Underworld. For fun she hangs out at a goth club (playing Bela Lugosi's Dead in the background, naturally)

A treat for horror fans is a cameo by David Warbeck, from Lucio Fulci's The Beyond

Once Bitten

Oh, the eighties have SO much to answer for...
Once Bitten is a teen sex comedy pretending to be a vampire film.
Jim Carey, yes that Jim Carey, plays Mark, a teeneaged virgin wanting desperately to do it with his girlfriend, Robin, who's saving herself.
Luckily for him, he encounters The Countess, an immortal vampire queen who needs to feed on the blood of a virgin three times before Halloween to survive.
Luckily for her, she's found one.
With two feedings- she's saving the third for Halloween proper- Mark starts wearing black and acting odd. At his school Halloween dance- where The Countess and Robin have a dance-off competition for Mark's affections- he wins best costume as "vampire" while he keeps insisting he's not wearing a costume.

This must have been the only school in the world without a goth kid.

Carey's 1985 performance as a boy-next-door character foreshadows his everyman character in The Truman Show.
Lauren Hutton's Countess is less a femme fatale and more of a proto-cougar, but you can tell she's having fun with the role.
Both are eclipsed by Clevon Little as her fabulously bitchy butler/Renfield Sebastian- complete with a running gag of him spending time in the Countess' closet- she's constantly telling him to come out of it, to which he tells her he hasn't been in in years.

Once Bitten was enjoyable, but forgettable after viewing- my problem is that my bar on teen-sex-comedies is pretty high ( Porky's has a special charm of it's own that makes it difficult for me to objectively view TSCs. Yes Porky's. It's got little touches that make it better than the average TSC- for example, Kitty Wells playing on the jukebox of a bar) and I'm especially critical of vampire comedies, since so very few of them are actually funny. That said, Once Bitten wouldn't be out of place in a vampire marathon as some kind of palate cleanser between two especially violent or dark movies.

The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire

I asked some friends for their reccomendations and someone siad The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire- a Sherlock Holmes movie with a vampire twist; it even has Matt (Max Headroom) Frewer as Holmes.

Holmes is summoned to investigate the murder of monks in a Whitechapel monestary, deaths one of the brothers attributes to vampires.

I was at a disadvantage to this movie- I expected too much. First, I'm a BIG Sherlock Holmes fan. Secondly, Max Headroom is one of my favorite television show- I watch the entire (too, too short run) probably once a year.

Well. I expected a little too much. With the memory of Granada TV's Jeremy Brett in mind (THE classic Sherlock Holmes, in my opinion), Matt Frewer... pales in comparison. His "British accent" is unconvincing, but he does bring a good manic twitch to the part.

It's entertaining enough- a television movie from Hallmark Entertainment, so I knew I wasn't getting something by David Fincher, but rather the "literary adaptation" equivalent of a SyFy original film.

Now, I think in the wake of the recent Sherlock Holmes film, now would be a good time for someone in Hollywood to pay attention to Loren Estleman's novel The Case of the Sanguinary Count or the graphic novel Scarlet in Gaslight, both pitting the Detective against Dracula.

Now I need to find the Brett adaptation of the short story The Case of the Sussex Vampire, The Last Vampyre, featuring one of my favourite lines from the Sherlockian Canon- when questioned about his faith in the supernatural, Holmes tells Watson: "The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."