Taliesin meets the vampires

Vamp or Not? Blue Jean Monster

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:07:00 +0000

This was a Hong Kong movie from 1991, directed by Kai Ming Lai, and it is one that finds itself gracing the occasional vampire filmography. As you can tell – by the very fact that it is being looked at as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ it is not your normal Chinese vampire movie.

It is a comedy action flick but the comedy misses more than hits – bad homosexual jokes that lead to the wife, Chu (Pauline Wong), of the hero of the piece Tsu Hsiang (Fui-On Shing) to believe he is gay and thus getting him a prostitute (Amy Yip) as she is heavily pregnant and sleeping with a woman is safer because sleeping with men will mean he'd get AIDS just wasn’t funny (in other words suggesting HIV/AIDS was a 'gay plague') – indeed it was downright offensive.

Afore mentioned Tsu is a cop and, when we first see him, he is at a Buddhist shrine praying that his wife’s pregnancy goes well. She has him use a sacred cup to tell his fortune but it breaks – signifying very bad luck. A young man, known as Power Steering, lives with them – he is an orphan, Tsu feels responsible for the lad and Chu dislikes him. Power Steering tells Tsu that he has heard there is to be a bank robbery – he lets Chu attend the clinic alone as he goes to the crime.

Caught up in the robbery is Gucci (Gloria Yip), who seemed to be Power Steering’ s gal. Anyway, she is taken as a hostage but Tsu tracks them down. She manages to get away with a bag of money and Tsu captures most of the gang until the leader causes a crane full of scrap metal to fall on Tsu. He is trapped and dying, unable to call out for help.

There is a storm. A cat sits upon his chest and power seems to leak into him and then lightning hits the metal. All this seems to revive him. Now a cat jumping over the corpse in coffin was a traditional way in which a vampire could be created in Eastern European myth. In the Japanese film Kuroneko a cat is involved in the reviving of our vampires. Lightning also revives the dead in Chinese cinema and we see such an effect in New Mr Vampire - in fact it was Pauline Wong’s character who was revived in such a way, though more than just lightning was involved and she was not the vampire.

Essentially we get a revived corpse who is trying to fulfil his two wishes – to bring in the bad guys and see the birth of his son. Unusually he can flag and die (or return to corpse state) and needs a new shot of electricity to keep him going – be it a defibrillator or a doctored iron. Too much electricity can send him off in a super fast mode. He can eat – but loses the food via a wound he gains in his stomach. We see no evidence of feeding off humans.

In life he was allergic to cigarette smoke and the smoke, in his undead form, sends him yellow eyed and crazy. When in that yellow eyed state we see, at one point, his rage being cured when his new born son pees on him – urine is a vampire/ghost/zombie deterrent in many Chinese films. However the standard vampire deterrents such as prayer scrolls and Taoist hexagrams have no noticeable effect on him. Light hurts his eyes and he has to wear shades.

He is named vampire once – ish – and that might have been bad translation (or just ignorance on the character's part). Gucci says he is “a ghost, a vampire, a monster, an alien or an ET” Given that an alien or ET or the same thing, as well as the impossibly wide range of her comment, we can put little stock in the V word. Is he a vampire by more tangible evidence?

Frankly no. He is undead – of some describe – but apart from being dead and sensitive to light I can see no reason why we would deem him a vampire. One to knock off the filmographies.

The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? La Notte Dei Dannati

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:07:00 +0000

This was a 1971 Italian horror, directed by Filippo Walter Ratti, which was primarily a story of a witch but, as we have seen, there is much cross over between the witchcraft and vampiric genres.

There was, I felt as I watched this, something rather reminiscent of Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ – something that is rather fitting as the works of Charles Baudelaire are a key part of this and Baudelaire was the first to translate Poe into French.

The film begins with the journalist Jean Duprey (Pierre Brice) sat at home, smoking a pipe, as his wife Danielle (Patrizia Viotti) reads an article out about a murderer caught due to Jean’s investigative prowess. A Government Minister phones, but he does not take the call and then a letter is delivered.

At first it sounds as though the letter might have been written by an old lover but it is from an old male friend called Guillaume de Saint Lambert (Mario Carra). The letter seems unintelligible at first until Jean realises it refers to a volume of Baudelaire’s works that Guillaume gave him and the true message is encoded within the works. Primarily he refers Jean to the poem L’ennemi. The final two lines of that poem read “And that dark Enemy who gnaws our hearts, Grows strong in blood as he drains us of ours!” Certainly that has a vampiric resonance.

Jean and Danielle travel to the castle in which Guillaume lives. When they arrive they discover that he has married a woman, Rita Lernod (Angela de Leo), and she informs them that Guillaume is ill with a disease un-diagnosable by the doctors and is under the care of one Professor Berry (Alessandro Tedeschi). Guillaume, when he speaks to Jean alone, says that he is going mad and that this malady kills all in his family when they reach 35. In many respects he is an amalgam of both Roderick and Madeline Usher.

Jean discovers that there is no registered Professor Berry – though Rita tells him it is an assumed name to make Guillaume believe it is his childhood doctor (else he would refuse treatment). Danielle fears the castle and a picture of witch burning sparks dreaming visions in which she is the witch. At one point Jean speaks to Guillaume and we see an image of a skull superimpose over the man’s face.

It is no surprise then to find that Guillaume dies. It is more of a surprise that Jean finds nothing odd in a funeral procession that involves carrying a skull at the head of the procession and the pallbearers wearing sackcloth hoods. One would have thought the great thinker and investigator would have pondered the unusual tradition but it is never mentioned.

He and Danielle are to leave when a body is found near the castle. It is a naked woman with claw marks down her breasts and not a drop of blood in her body. We know, because we saw it, that a shadowy figure (clearly Guillaume) took her to a ritual area where Rita sat upon a throne before clawing her body. The police, however, are baffled and want Jean’s help. It seems, once they i.d. her, that she was Guillaume’s cousin and had been taken from Strasburg – some 100 miles away.

So Jean investigates, a second body is found (the first victim’s sister) but that is 300 miles away and Danielle seems to come under Rita’s (sexual) control. Eventually Jean discovers that Guillaume’s ancestor, back in 1650, burned a woman as a witch. That woman’s name was Tarindrole – an anagram of Rita Lernod. Yes, it is she getting revenge on the family of her killer. It seems that the killings are to keep her young. Certainly, at the end, we see her rapidly age.

Guillaume is some sort of rotting dead servant – more zombie than anything, I would say. As for her – she appears to be immortal and that immortality costs others their lives. They are drained of blood but the whys and wherefores of this are not explored – indeed all we see is clawing. This would bring us slightly into a vampiric arena but for the fact that it is unclear as to why they are drained – and there is no evidence of blood drinking.

All in all I would have to go Not Vamp on this one, there just isn’t enough to cross over from a purely witchcraft genre film. The big problem with this as an actual movie, despite all the mysteries going on and the gothic atmosphere summoned within the castle, is that the film is deathly boring. It really was a bit of a yawner, I’m afraid. The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? Blood Car

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:58:00 +0000

This was a 2007 movie directed by Alex Orr and the reason for looking at this is fairly obvious. The synopsis of the film sets the film in the very near future when gas prices have skyrocketed to the point that no one drives any more. Vegan kindergarten teacher Archie (Mike Brune) seeks to create an engine that runs on wheat grass. Instead he accidentally invents a car that runs on blood.

Now vampiric vehicles are not unheard of. There was the vampiric motorbike in I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle. In that the bike was possessed and was sentient and suffered from the same genre specific weaknesses as any traditional vampire (sunlight, holy items, garlic etc). There is also a film I haven’t seen as I have yet to find a subtitled version, the 1981 Czech film Upír z Feratu. This concerned a racing car that runs on human blood and Blood Car would seem, on a casual inspection at least, to come closer to that.

After an interesting opening where we are told the general premise about the problems with gasoline prices we meet Archie. On his way home from work every day he stops by a vegetable booth to buy wheat grass from Lorraine (Anna Chlumsky, yes she who was in My Girl 1 &2). Lorraine has a thing about Archie – to the point of drawing erotic pictures of them together – but he does not seem to reciprocate her affections.

He lives below Mrs Butterfield (Barbara Carnes) and spends his evening experimenting with his wheat grass engine. The price of wheat grass, however, is going up and Denise (Katie Rowlett), who runs a meat stand near Lorraine’s veg stand, is trying to tempt him to buy her products. He seems to be in despair – there is some indication that he or someone he is close to has/had cancer but that is not explored more than showing us a memory of a doctor mentioning cancer.

He manages to get the engine working after he cuts his hand and blood gets into his engine. He then gets his car working by putting a mix of wheat grass and blood he siphons from his own arm into the tank. Denise is somewhat excited by the car and blows him for a fast ride but the tank runs dry – if he can get it running again she’ll go on a date the next night. Archie then begins to put his vegan sensibilities to one side as he hunts animals (squirrels, cats, dogs and duck) – he tries to rationalise that it is okay, it is for fuel not food, but cries as he shoots them with a BB gun. The car does not work.

He then notices that Mrs Butterfield has died up on her balcony and puts her into the boot of his car – which he has fitted out with a meat grinding set up. The car works – thus he realises two things; it needs human blood specifically and wheat grass is not needed. He also realises that Denise will do just about any deviant sexual act for someone with a car. As he tries to maintain his own sanity, whilst his morality plummets, the Government are after his invention (killing people for fuel is patriotic).

Beyond the blood for fuel (and the conceit that the blood has to be human) there is little vampiric about the car. It seems to growl like an animal rather than have an engine growl – but it is a filmic affectation. There is a hole shot into the boot that later seems to heal but actually that is just a continuity error and the hole (and rag stuffed in to seal it) reappear later. As for Archie, he does fall into a spiral of lost morality and depravity – for the sake of power and sexual conquest. The film is a black comedy but it is also, most definitely, a gross out comedy and the film makers go out of their way to ensure that if it can be offensive they put it into the film – a war veteran is beaten into the trunk with his own false leg, vegans are just one bout of deviant sex away from eating meat, school kids are summarily executed by the government for new technology… the list goes on, but is it vamp?

The car isn’t sentient, unlike the vampire motorcycle in "I Bought...", we don’t know why it runs on blood and it has no vampiric traits other than its fuel type. I can’t compare and contrast with Upír z Feratu but I would have to say, for this flick; no, it isn’t vamp.

The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? Killer Klowns from Outer Space

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:36:00 +0000

Sometimes a film does exactly what it says on the tin and this Stephen Chiodo flick from 1988 does just that. It is a film about Killer Klowns who have come to earth from outer space in a big top shaped spacecraft.

Now you would be forgiven for wondering why on earth I would look at this under ‘Vamp or Not?’ and it is because as well as occasionally managing to get onto a vampire filmography you also find that the title comes up if you do a DVD search, key word vampire, on Amazon (UK at least).

So I decided to look at a film where a couple Debbie (Suzanne Snyder) and Mike (Grant Cramer) are up at a make out spot when a shooting star blazes overhead. Why Mike’s character had the surname Tobacco was a mystery but I don’t think it had any significance. Anyway, they decide to follow the shooting star and find a big top in the woods. They enter it and discover that it is a space craft and humans are cocooned in cotton candy by creatures that look like clowns.

They manage to escape and try to raise the alarm but, of course, no one believes them – at first. One cop – Mooney (John Vernon) – really disbelieves them and seems to hates them as he seems to hate all young people, but they persuade younger cop Dave (John Allen Nelson) to check it out mainly because Debbie used to date him and he clearly still holds a torch for her. Soon Mike and Dave are desperately trying to save the town from the klowns.

I said that they were cocooning humans and it becomes clear that it was for foodstuff. We see one klown approach the cotton candy cocoon and get out a crazy straw. It sticks it into the cocoon and drinks – presumably the blood or general fluids. Using a straw is not unheard of in the genre and two examples – post this – that I can think of appear in the film the Witches Hammer and also in the modern Doctor Who episode Smith and Jones. That is all well and good but it doesn’t necessarily make it a vampire, especially as the thing is a set up for the crazy straw gag rather than a definitive lore aspect.

The klowns do not die by stake through heart (or any other established vampire killing technique) but by being shot in the big red nose. This causes said nose to explode and then the klown blows up in a flash of green light. So, why does it get listed on the vampire filmographies from time to time? Probably down to the straw scene but I do not believe that is enough to class this as a vampire film. Not Vamp.

The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? A Chinese Ghost Story

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:35:00 +0000

This Hong Kong movie from 1987, directed by Siu-Tung Ching, is one of my favourite movies to come out of that region. The reasoning? Well it has it all; it is quite a touching romance, with comedy aplenty plus action and horror in liberal doses. It is beautifully shot, with wonderfully choreographed fights.

The story is simple and as such becomes quite elegant – a bumbling but pure and innocent tax collector, Ning Tsai-Shen (Leslie Cheung), stays in an abandoned temple that houses both a disillusioned Taoist swordsman, Yin (Ma Wu), and a host of ghosts. The ghost Nieh Hsaio-Tsing (Joey Wang) is forced to lure men for her Mistress, Old Evil (Siu-Ming Lau), and in three days will be forced to marry the demonic Lord Black. Nieh realises what a good heart Ning has and the two fall into a doomed love.

The film also occasionally falls onto vampire filmographies, so let us see if that is justified…

There are three aspects to explore and we will start with Old Evil. She is some form of tree demon. She is 1000 years old and can take human form. Her tongue can expand and stretch for miles, seeking out the mouth of a man (prone due to Nieh), which she then uses to suck the lifeforce from him – turning him into a husk. We have had lifeforce sucking vampires before and, whilst she cannot to our knowledge create another of her kind, we should look at what becomes of her desiccated victims.

We see a group of them in an attic, lying like forgotten victims – husk like corpses from previous feedings. However Ning, in the room below, cuts his finger whilst slicing fruit – an old chestnut of a device, to be sure – the scent of the blood makes the husks react and they start moving. Their movements are very slow – but they are all withered husks to be fair. Essentially they begin to hunt – what they would do if they caught a man we don’t quite know.

We do see a separate one fight with Yin and the Taoist pins him with a magic needle and then blows him up with a prayer scroll. As for the ones near Ning they are part of a slow slapstick series of misadventures. At one point he steps on one’s hand and we see that it apparently has fangs. Eventually he opens shutters and the daylight causes them to melt down to gunk – rapid decomposition. The fangs might be a stylistic coincidence but rapid decomposition in sunlight is oh so very vampire. Indeed, given that these are victims of having their energy sucked and the look I was reminded of the zombie like creatures in Lifeforce.

Finally I think I should mention Lord Black. When the heroes find themselves in Hell, trying to rescue Nieh, they see Lord Black who opens his court to reveal a number of heads who fly from his cloak and bite the heroes. I was reminded very much of the penanggal and similar flying head vampires but, to be fair, that was probably more coincidence than anything and I don’t think they were meant to be such a creature.

Of all the different types of creature mentioned the most likely to be classed as a vampire is the desiccated husk, zombie like creatures who dissolve in the sun. However, one feels that they are – if vampires – possibly only in the film long enough to warrant an honourable mention rather than class the film as a vampire movie.

What do you think? I am running a poll with this one – in the right hand column. Are they vampires, is it an honourable mention? Have your say by voting...

The imdb page is here.

Coming Up on Taliesin Meets the Vampires

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:57:00 +0000

Over the next couple of weeks I intend to have two theme weeks here on the blog.

Next week is ‘Vamp or Not?’ week, where we will look at five films that sometimes might be lumped in with the vampire genre and decide whether they deserve that place. We will even have a poll with one of them so that you, the reader, gets to chose.

The week after we will be, all things being fair, looking at anime for the week, with two feature length films and three series.

As well as this there are reviews due of independent vampire comedy The Kiss, vampire oddity Dracula’s Widow and the Julian Sands vehicle Tale of a Vampire, all waiting in the wings. I’m currently reading Norm Cowie’s Fang Face and that will feature in the not too distant future.

I’d like to take a moment to thank all those who visit the blog, brief visitations and regular readers alike and also those who take time to comment. I won’t mention you all but feel that a nice little community has built up over the years I’ve been running this blog and it is that community that keeps me working on it – as well as an obsessive compulsive desire to look at every little bit of vampire media!

Monsters – Pool Sharks – review (TV Episode)

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 07:55:00 +0000

Director: Alan Kingsberg

First aired: 1988

Contains spoilers

Monsters was an anthology horror series that ran for three seasons from 1988 to 1990. One of the key elements came out of budgets so small that locations were kept to a bare minimum, in this case one room. Pool Sharks was a season 1 episode.

We are in a bar run by Cappy (Page Johnson). At the back of the bar is a pool table and it appears that the provocative Natasha (Rebecca Kyler Downs) is hustling Lester (Irving Metzman). She is setting up shots, if he makes them she gives him a kiss but if he misses he pays $20. It seems clear to us that he is being hustled and probably he is happy to be hustled.

Enter Gabe (Tom Mason) – a man with a pool cue. He orders a drink and asks Cappy who died – there is a hearse out front. The hearse belongs to Lester, a funeral director. Some ten minutes after he came in Natasha came in, she’s been hustling him since. Gabe arranges for Cappy to give Lester a whisky “on the house” and then to keep them coming on his own tab. Cappy notices that Gabe wears a cross and asks if he is religious. Gabe says he is just cautious.

He approaches the pool players, hiding his cue beforehand. And puts a coin on the table – indicating his turn to play. Cappy brings over a ‘drink on the house’. Gabe manages to ‘accidentally’ break the glass of said drink and cut his finger on the glass. Natsha attends to his wound – by sucking it. The wound heals. He hustles Lester good and proper who then leaves but Natasha decides to remain with Gabe. She reveals she knew he was a hustler.

They end up betting on a game (first to 50 points) where the winner gets to do what they like to the other’s body – she turns to camera and reveals fangs. As they play he talks about a bar in Allan Town, PA. There was a man there who vanished after being seen playing pool with a beautiful woman. His family believed that something truly evil happened to him. They get to a point where the points are close and one more frame will decide it.

They both make their preparations. She goes to the toilet as he puts the balls out. Whilst she is gone he places his own cue with those belonging to the bar and then draws a cross on the black ball with chalk. She goes to Cappy and hypnotises him so he’ll sleep. When she breaks, the black ball does not move, presumably due to the power of the cross. He takes a shot she believes to be impossible, but Bobby – his brother – taught him how to make it. Bobby was the pool player in Allan Town.

Lester re-enters the bar, calls Natasha Countess and reminds her of the time (yes he was part of her hustle) but she is determined to finish the game. Gabe tries to distract her with his cross and she demands he remove it – unbeknown to her he drops it in a pocket. She makes the shot – winning the game – and is on Gabe, fangs and claws showing. The game isn’t over – the black jumps back out of the pocket (presumably repelled by the cross as the vampire made the shot).

She puts her hand in the pocket and burns her finger. He is trying to make the shot but she tries to distract him with a flash of suspender and her womanly wiles. To make the shot he looks in the mirror where, of course, she cannot be seen. The shot is made. So why the bet, why not just hunt. The vampires in this need an invitation – even to feed – the bet becomes an invitation made by the unwary.

Of course she tries to escape her fate – she offers herself sexually but he had grabbed his own cue for the final shot – it comes apart and makes a stake which he rams home – ending the vampire’s life. It is a moment of violence and gore in an episode that worked without such devices up to that point. It worked due to well written and delivered dialogue and good characters. The noirish jazz soundtrack added much to the episode as well.

Whilst games such as pool aren’t unique as the main premise for a vampire piece – we previously looked at Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire that uses the game snooker – they are unusual. However the main thing this went to show was that you don’t need an awfully long episode or lots of locations to make something worthwhile. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Monsters – the Legacy – review (TV Episode)

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:03:00 +0000

Director: Jeffrey Wolf

First aired: 1988

Contains spoilers

Monsters was an anthology horror series that ran for three seasons from 1988 to 1990. One of the key elements came out of budgets so small that locations were kept to a bare minimum. The Legacy was a quirky little episode from season 1.

I say it was quirky because – despite nicking a bit from The Shining – this is one that hid its story in knowing hints and yet was fascinating due to the fact that it was clearly inspired by the great Lon Chaney.

Dale (David Brisbin) is a struggling writer who has rented (I assume) a house that he discovered was the out of Hollywood base for the great character actor Fulton Pierce. He confirmed this when he discovered Pierce’s makeup case in the house. His girlfriend Debbie (Lara Harris) is less than impressed with the house and his book work. It is apparent that she is the successful one in the relationship and hints through the episode indicate that he resents this but she, in turn, is non-supportive of his dreams.

After Debbi has left the house – with a cutting comment about the fact that he hasn’t even finished his Phd paper – he gets around to looking in the case's mirror. He starts to see characters in the mirror. He sees Quasimodo, he sees the Phantom of the Opera and he sees the vampire. This was interesting as it was clearly the vampire from London After Midnight, which is where the Pierce actually being Chaney aspect came into this. All the apparitions are played by Kevin Jeffries.

Dale goes to see Stella (Mary Ann Gibson) to discuss Pierce as she was in a relationship with him. She doesn’t know what his secret was; he would look in the mirror for hours and talk to himself, becoming the character. Dale asks why it was so late in his career that Pierce played the vampire, turning the role down early on. Stella suggests that the vampire was evil and Pierce knew that.

Debbie brings an ultimatum to Dale, her or Pierce – he has to make up his mind. The phrase triggers something and he realises that he has to ‘makeup his mind’ – that is what Pierce did. It allows him to finally tap into the characters as Pierce did (though we also see that the first typed sheet of his book is just the phrase ‘make up your mind’ over and over again – ala The Shining and the ‘All work, no play’ motif). He starts to change – taking on the facial features of Quasimodo without applying makeup, for instance. The Vampire seems to be the one behind this and we see, eventually, arms reaching from the mirror. Dale throws the case and the mirror cracks. Debbie walks in to see the vampire – though whether it was the vampire escaped or Dale transmogrified we do not know as the episode ends.

The episode leaves much for the viewer to work out through hint and innuendo. Clealrly Pierce feared the vampire and yet, in the end, played the vampire. Dale could not control that primal force. The episode could have done with a little more expansion – but, given the length of it, probably couldn’t have found the space within the running time. With a very clever twist on the mirror motif this is an interesting episode, if flawed due to the curtailed detail, worth 4.5 out of 10.

The episode’s imdb page is here.

Skin Trade – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:01:00 +0000

Author: Laurell K Hamilton

Release date: 2009

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: I’d worked my share of serial killer cases, but none of the killers had ever mailed me a human head. That was new.

My name is Anita Blake and my reputation has taken some hits. Not on the work front, where I have the highest kill count of all the legal vampire executioners in the country, but on the personal front. No one seems to trust a woman who sleeps with the monsters. Still, when a vampire serial killer sends me a head from Las Vegas, I know I have to warn Sin City’s local authorities what they’re dealing with.

Only its worse than I thought: several police officers and an executioner have been slain paranormal style. When I get to Las Vegas I’m joined by three other federal marshals. Which is a good thing because I need all the backup I can get when hunting a killer this powerful and dangerous.

The review: Anita Blake is back… and many of you will know how long it is that I have been waiting to say that as when I say she is back I also mean that Hamilton is back on track. The series has been marred by a decent into hardcore porn and soap opera story lines. This is more like old school Anita Blake (but with the writing as improved as later Hamilton was, on a technical level).

That’s not to say there is no sex in this, though – and those who read the last few novels will gasp to hear – it doesn’t occur until page 390. That’s not to say that there is anything wrong with sex scenes in a novel, my own novelhas sex scenes aplenty. But the difference was, to me, that my scenes meant something story wise and the vampires used sex as an extension of power – Anita is a victim to her succubian urges.

However in Skin Trade the sex is story necessary, it actually brings a story resolution and this is because Anita ceases to be a victim of her own powers but uses it as a power. A necessary sea change that signifies that Hamilton has ceased to go for titillation and has actually developed a worthwhile story.

If I had a complaint it would be that the occasional characters Edward and Olaf, both major parts of this story, are not at their best. Edward is by far one of my favourite Hamilton characters and Olaf makes my stomach churn but is a fantastic reminder that it is not always the monster that is monstrous. Whilst they are still interesting parts of the story they are perhaps not at their peak (storywise) but one feels that any curtailing was due to the urban setting and that actually worked well in terms of the location and the fact that they were stuck with the cops through most of the book.

This is the best Hamilton read I’ve had since around Obsidian Butterfly and Narcissus in Chains. Hopefully Hamilton will now remain on track but I hoped that after things seemed to turn around with the Harlequin, but Blood Noir proved otherwise. Hopefully the return to form can be maintained this time. 7.5 out of 10.

Monsters – The Vampire Hunter – review (TV Episode)

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:39:00 +0000

Director: Michael Gornick

First aired: 1988

Contains spoilers

Monsters was an anthology horror series that ran for three seasons from 1988 to 1990. One of the key elements came out of budgets so small that locations were kept to a bare minimum and were sometimes clearly sets. The Vampire Hunter was a season 1 episode.

We start with a view of a crucifix that pulls back to a selection of crosses and stakes. They belong to a Mr Ernest Chariot (Robert Lansing). He is a vampire hunter who is retiring. He intends to travel to Egypt and then on to Vienna where a person called Freud has come up with some salacious theories regarding the human mind. He has a young friend, Jack (Jack Keonig), who believes that Chariot cannot abandon the world (as it were) but the older man is tired of fighting a creature he believes to be a coward at heart.

The whole set up is rather Sherlock Holmes in style, so it is no surprise when a housekeeper, Mrs Haggerty (Sylvia Short), comes in and states that they have a visitor – one Miss Maura Warren (Page Hannah). In short, she believes that a vampire has selected her brother in order to steal her fortune. Chariot tests her, to ensure that she herself has not been bitten, but then refuses the case. Jack, once she has gone, states that Chariot is the coward.

Jack is drinking alone in the dark when she returns and he agrees to accompany her – she tells him of voices from the cellar, bats and a coffin. In the ‘cellar’, the very painted set resembling dungeon more like, there is a creature, Charles Poole (John Bolger). He wears a mask over his jaw and it is clear that Maura works with him. He is after Chariot but laughs at her suggestion that they will let Jack go when they have the hunter. He removes his mask – though we do not see his mouth – and bites the young man.

It is two days later when Chariot returns – he has been checking Maura’s background as he did not trust her. He hears that Jack is missing and then Maura arrives and says she will take him to his friend – he must not bring weapons. Charles and Ernest are old adversaries and it is down to the hunter that he wears a mask – covering the scarring on his mouth. Which is part of the problem…

Aside from the acting, which in parts can fall into histrionics (Mrs Haggerty), the short episode hints at much but reveals too little. Why did Chariot background check Maura Warren? Why didn’t he explain that to his friend? Exactly what was the background between hunter and vampire? How was the mouth scarred (I assume holy water but that is a guess)? Why wasn’t the job completed originally? So many story questions appear that there is little time or inclination to answer. I did like the idea that a vampire was deemed a coward because he was undead – too scared to face death – it was a nice perspective from the hunter. Okay, but had potential to be much better, 4 out of 10.

The episode’s imdb page is here.

Killer Barbys – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:47:00 +0000

Director: Jess Franco

Release date: 1996

Contains spoilers

The Killer Barbies were a horrorpunk (I guess would be the best descriptor) band and two films were built around them by Jess Franco – this being the first. The band name had to change spelling in the title of the movie, due to protests from Mattel and the UK release of this had the title extended to ‘Vampire Killer Barbys’ just so you’d know what it was all about.

Now, I have to say that some time ago I had said that I can even find things to like within Killer Barbys – and it is true, just. What I did thoroughly like was the actual tracks by the band. Unfortunately only two songs were used as far as I could tell (over and over again) but they are very catchy little ditties.

What I didn’t like was the lack of cohesive story – one might say that the film is deconstructionist and it is meant, being pure fantasy, to have no cohesive story but, frankly, that is so much bs. I also hated the awful dubbing on the UK release. Finally I hated the obvious night shots filmed during the day – especially when the same scene might transform into a night shot filmed at night!

Anyway we start with a man running from a castle. It appears he is a lover running from discovery due to his state of undress but then a man, Arkan (Aldo Sambrell), seems to follow him with a crossbow in hand. The man is caught and suffers his throat being cut by a further man named Baltasar (Santiago Segura). Baltasar then takes an ear, cut from the victim, to Pipa (Pepa López) and Pipo (Alberto Martínez). Arkan attends a rotted skeleton that is still alive and says that *he* has returned to help us.

The he is Baltasar and there is a story later of how he was a satanic monk who kidnapped an aristocratic woman, who killed her and then saved her with a potion made from blood and semen. He appears in the castle every so often and refers to Arkan as master. The two dwarf cohorts he has refer to him as father and he calls them the children. It is not much of a spoiler to say that he is disposed of at the end of the film by steam roller – one of the few examples outside animated cartoons that I can think of.

The Killer Barbys are playing a gig. They are comprised of Mario (Charlie S Chaplin), Rafa (Carlos Subterfuge), Billy (Billy King) and Flavia (Silvia Superstar). Dancing in the same skimpy outfit that Flavia wears is Sharon (Angie Barea). We see that Arkan watches the show and rips a bit of poster away before leaving. The band hit the road, after the gig, but take a turn off the beaten path when a road sign indicates that direction (in fairness it was also clearly written on paper, presumably by Arkan on the ripped poster). They end up with the van out of commission and at the castle of the Condesa Von Fledermaus (Mariangela Giordano).

She was the skeleton but, due to the potion created by Baltasar, she is becoming whole again. Billy and Sharon stay in the van having sex – a move that sees Billy stabbed and placed in a wheelbarrow and Sharon chased naked through the woods until, eventually, she is beheaded. The others go to the castle, where apologies are given for the Condesa as she is ill. A tow truck is ‘due’ first thing in the morning.

Morning never seems to come. We keep passing through 12 o’clock, being midnight or midday – depending on dialogue – it is difficult to tell as many of the night shots were filmed (as I mentioned) during the day. The band members seem worried at first – they even work out that the tow truck has not been phoned for – but that consideration goes out of the window. Eventually, however, the Condesa is well enough to have dinner with them.

Dinner seems to be a cannibalistic affair – though the band does not know it. Rafa, who is with Flavia, seems bewitched by the obviously older Condesa (and the band seem to have worked out that she was a famous screen vamp and singer, thus should be over 100 years old). He therefore leaves the dinner table with her for sex – a sex session that ends up with him being stabbed and her rolling in his blood.

How will the band members escape? Who cares… the film is a mess. My write up seems more coherent than what I watched on screen and yet the band are fun to watch, if badly dubbed, and their songs are catchy. The cinematography is typical Franco with a reliance on stuffed animals in places! The effects are poor and yet passable for a low budget flick. It is the lack of cohesion that lets this down more than anything. 2 out of 10 is generous.

The imdb page is here.

The Sisterhood – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:34:00 +0000

Director: David DeCoteau

Release date: 2004

Contains spoilers

I guess that it is just about time that I reviewed a DeCoteau film. I have, lurking in my collection, I’ve Been Watching You – which will need reviewing at some point – and Ring of Darkness – needing a ‘Vamp or Not?’ – but for now we concentrate on this.

Now for those who don’t know, DeCoteau is a prolific horror director who is also openly gay and, as a result, does like to put a homoerotic edge into his films. Even in this, where the concentration is on a sorority with a bit of rampant lesbianism, he manages to get buff guys posing in open shirts or lounging around in black shorts. Trouble is, of course, that it is nothing but low level (and very softcore) sexploitation, there is no great furthering of gay cinema in his works for his works are, as far as I have seen, piffle.

This begins with a guy (with black shorts) and a girl getting it on. Now the nudity in these films is… well it isn’t, there is always underwear in the way. Be that as it may they are having a good time when someone comes in – we only see a leg. The girl apologises and runs and is pursued. She runs from the house – the sorority house of Beta Alpha Tau (BATs), just check out the sign.

Why were her actions a problem and is our blue neon faced pursuer the main vampire? Who knows, the film reveals nada about this later but, assuming the pursuer is the vampire, it is pretty darn ineffectual. This girl in underwear can out-dodge the chaser willy nilly. Eventually, however, she gets to the building roof and takes a tumble.

Cut forward in time and Christine (Jennifer Holland) is attending a new school. She shares a room with Reagen (Kate Plec). Christine is majoring in chemistry but takes a psych class taught by Ms Masters (Barbara Crampton). In there she meets Josh (Storm David Newton). Masters goes on about psychic phenomena and then a floating pen writes Christine on the white board (unseen by the class it seems). Christine freaks and runs. Josh chases after and they talk about inane things and then she bumps into Masters who says her reaction was understandable!

What we later discover is that this probably is in context of the fact that Christine’s parents died recently. Anyway Masters does some psychic testing and discovers that Christine is very psychic – Hell, her eyes flash purple as she puts candles out by thought alone! Masters tries to recruit her as an agent to infiltrate BATs as they may be evil… as it is Reagen wants to join the sorority and Christine gets drawn in after Josh (who declares that he is saving himself for marriage) stands her up.

Masters gives Christine a cross as protection but then singularly fails to tell the girl anything about what she knows… talk about working in the dark. Later, when Christine questions the evil of the sorority and sorority leader Devin (Michelle Borth), Masters says that she should look in the cellar – a suggestion that is then ignored for the rest of the film.

“Where are the vampires?” you might ask and, other than the question mark over neon face at the beginning, it would be a fair question. We seem to get a crash course in lesbian temptation, Devin and her friends can go out in the sun and the cross, whilst annoying to Devin, is soon disposed of. Certainly Devin can cast spells on folks and get what she wants. Little of this is (specifically or at all) vampiric. That will come, for 30 seconds at the end of the film.

It is all centred on the initiation into the sorority. Devin produces fangs and, after a quick psychic blast by Christine, Masters can stake her. It is somewhat of a damp squib as the whole vampiric appearance weighs in at not a lot of time at all. As for Christine is she good, is she bad – she flip flops in attitude more than a freshly caught fish gasping for air on the deck of a trawler.

There is a vampire coda set in a coffin but that is too little too late. We have sat through MTV style cuts, poor film stock and some of the lamest acting I‘ve seen for quite some time and the money-shot, so to speak, is subsumed by being short, uninteresting and boring. As for lore, not a lot is known. Devin has psychic powers and likes to corrupt. She has been around for 400 years. That’s about it.

It is not a good film, with a mixed up story, poor locations, bad effects (given its relative newness) and really poor acting. One to avoid, methinks. 1 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

New Film: The Eternal

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:16:00 +0000

Spotted this one over at Vampire News, the synopsis runs a little like:

Samuel Gradius has lived too long. In his 500 years on earth he has seen empires rise and fall, changed the course of history with his bare hands and experienced countless revolutions first hand. Samuel Gradius is a vampire, perhaps the only vampire, and he's had enough. He wants to die.

No longer content with the idea of simple suicide, he makes the decision to go out in the ways of old. He wants a warrior's death. THE ETERNAL follows Samuel on the pursuit of his own personal oblivion, he hopes, at the hands of someone worthy

There is a homepage and on there you can watch Ending The Eternal a short sequel which, as it started, I wasn’t too sure about until Adam Kenneth Wilson, as Samuel Gradius, took the short and made it something very watchable… I’m looking forward to the actual film now. There is also meant to be a comic tie in, the first 6 issues (of 12) of which are due to be online for free.

True Blood UK premier

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:29:00 +0000

The UK premier of True Blood Season 1 is on the channel FX staring on Friday 17th July at 10 PM.

This, of course, means that the UK are more than 12 months behind the US – which seems a little silly – but for those who didn’t buy the region 1 box set here is your opportunity to see what the fuss is all about.

You can read my thoughts on season 1 here.

Bloodlust – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:52:00 +0000

Directors: Richard Wolstencroft & Jon Hewitt

Release date: 1992

Contains spoilers

Allegedly Bloodlust was the first Australian film to be banned in Britain due to excessive gore and sex. To be honest it didn’t necessarily seem that bad when compared to more contemporary efforts – for instance Strange Things Happen at Sundown. Indeed, Strange Things came to mind as I watched the film but it struggled to discover the ethereal something that Strange Things tapped into – there were other issues with the film when compared to the later Strange Things which we’ll get to.

As I did some research it seems that co-director Wolstencroft has some rather controversial and, to me, very objectionable political views. I didn’t know this as I watched the film and so they, in no way, coloured my thoughts on the movie and, whilst aspects of the movie are distasteful, I don’t believe necessarily that they were preached within the film – in a direct manner at least. Certainly my thoughts on the film should not be construed as an endorsement of his apparent right wing beliefs/sympathies.

The film starts with a vampire, Dee (Ian Rilen), running down the road. He is being chased. Eventually we see a mob of priests. He gets into a car but they get to him before he can start the ignition. They are ramming stakes through the roof and pull him out of the car. As the head priest Brother Bem (Phil Motherwell) spouts on fanatically, the other zealots stake Dee – we see this fully later, the camera remaining on Bem at this point.

Having seen various scenes through the credits we meet some of our primary cast. Tad (Robert James O’Neill) steals the car of a mobile phone (and for that read brick) wielding yuppie (driving past a couple of beer swilling cops who don’t give chase but eventually find the yuppie when one goes for a pee – the cops are main characters too) and meets a gun seller. The guns are sans ammo and the ammo will be given once the 3K asking price has been met – a price that has gone up by 50% since the deal was cut. It doesn’t matter as Tad has no money anyway, he does have a clip of ammo in his pocket though.

Frank (Kelly Chapman) walks past the zealots as they preach and enters a hotel. She takes a seat near a businessman and suggests that they see the view from his room. In the elevator, when he asks how much, she states he’ll pay whatever the asking price might be. We then see her riding atop him, there is blood on her hands and he appears to be dead – that does not stop her taking her fun and her sustenance.

A man crawls on all fours until he reaches Lear (Jane Stuart Wallace), whom he addresses as mistress whilst licking the dirt from between her toes. He is admonished for speaking and sent to get her a drink. He cuts his hand and she licks the blood and then tells him that she is leaving town. When he protests she slits his throat.

Kelly and Lear are sat in a bar waiting for Tad. When he arrives he tells them that Dee is dead. They decide it is time to get out of the town. They’ll pull the casino heist that Dee had planned first and if anything goes wrong meet up at a little town called Geeksville. They decide to make the town suffer for what happened to Dee and go on the hunt – one wonders, given what we have already seen, how the slaughter of a few people, that they commit, is making the town suffer more than their general actions.

Anyway the heist draws in the attention of the mob, their slaughter in Dee’s name draws Bem and his zealots, and the two cops are eventually drawn into the events also. Everything culminates in a cross-group shoot out near Geeksville.

The vampires are not that supernatural all told, they don’t have fangs, they can go out in sunlight and they have reflections. They do drink blood, are slightly stronger than average, it would appear, and can withstand tremendous damage. We know this when we see Dee again – in his new guise of Mr Happy – a tortured deformed creature kept as a mascot by the zealots.

The acting is fairly poor all the way through but the majority of actors were not professional. This is one thing that distances this from Strange Things as some (though not all) of the performances in the later film worked well. We got some truly awful accents thrown in to boot. The story here was weak and the locations not always brilliant (the casino was a pool hall that also seemed to be a high rise apartment building).

There is, however, on-running gore, violence, sex and nudity and many of the gore effects worked well for the low budget – although there was a ripped out heart at one point that was so ridiculously small it wasn’t plausible. The direction wasn’t always the best and we had the seemingly obligatory boom mikes in shot – indeed some shocking cases of it.

This is not the best film in the world, by a long shot, but it was interesting if only for it having been banned. There is vhs ghosting around and it was also on a double DVD that you might be able to track down. Personally I think you’re much better off with Strange Things. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The Watchers Omnibus – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:04:00 +0000

Author: William Meikle

First published 2002 – 2004

Contains spoilers

I bought the Watchers Omnibus primarily because, as well as being vampire literature, Willie Meikle is a facebook friend and I feel it is best to declare that now. However, whilst often I will avoid reviews of friends’ work I felt this was open to review in this instance.

The book is an omnibus of three novels: The Coming of the King, The Battle for the Throne and Culloden! As the story begins, in the prologue, we are at the Tower of London in 1649 and are witness to the execution of Charles Stewart – except this is not the Charles Stewart of history, the deposed king was a vampire.

The books then jump forward to 1745 and offers an alternate history of the Jacobite rebellion in a Britain very different to that drawn by our conventional histories. The friends Sean and Martin are watchmen, assigned to Milecastle on Hadrian’s Wall – a Hadrian’s Wall which is fortified against invasion. It is thought that nothing “man and only man”, as the novels describe an unturned human, now lives in Scotland.

When a human and his ill daughter arrive at the fortification the world of 'Jack the Lad' Sean and Thane's son Martin turns upside down and the return of the Boy King, plus the subsequent attempt to restore the throne, sees England threatened by an army of the undead whose every victory swells their ranks.

Whilst this has a real world setting the book is very much of a fantasy sensibility. For instance the woodsmen, whom both Sean and Martin meet at different points in the series, are very spiritual creatures, with access to magic and whilst there is a suggestion that they might be Pictish, in a fantasy connotation they were clearly elven. This mix of fantasy worked well and we even got a kind of a werewolf undertone, but tied heavily to the berserker theorem.

The books are solidly written and keep the reader's attention throughout, with well drawn (and often earthy) characters. The vampire lore is fairly familiar, sunlight burns, as does garlic and silver. A stake through the heart and beheading are favoured despatching methods. If bitten you might be treated, if quick, but likely you will turn.

I did have one question around the use of religious artefacts and in particular Christian iconography. Early on a character, called Campbell, describes how Others (as vampires are known) are held at bay by the cross. “I found they were backing away from me. No, not from me, from something behind me. I turned to see Angus advancing from the church, his silver cross held before him.” Then – in the same recollection – we hear that the Boy King has no such fears “I have long since lost my fear of it – after all, what does one dead king have to fear from another?”

This is all well and good. However there is a suggestion that Christ himself was one of the undead Blood Kings – seemingly confirmed when there is a vision of the nativity and an understanding that the three wise men were vampire hunters bringing 'gifts' of garlic, silver and stake. Indeed there is a Templar backstory along with overtones reminiscent of the theories expounded in such books as Holy Blood and Holy Grail. This all worked well enough but if Christ was a vampire why would the cross work at all? Was it just a matter of the faith of the individual with the cross or that of the vampire, rather than a true religious significance? It seems likely but I would have liked an explicit confirmation.

This was, however, a minor quibble – a query mark that did not spoil what was a rip roaring fantasy adventure with earthy characters, a great setting and vampires happy to rip your throat out. Well worth seeking out. 7 out of 10.

Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Revenge of the Monsters: Review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Directed by: Nicholas Filippi

First Aired: 2000

Contains spoilers

This is yet another Buzz Lightyear (Patrick Warburton) that features the robotic energy vampire NOS-4-A2 (Craig Fergusson).

This time around we begin with outtakes from the episode Wirewolf, enough to remind us that Ty Parsec (Steve Hytner) had been bitten by NOS-4-A2 – itself not an issue due to the fact that he is not a robot. However the unique radiation of the moon Canis Lunis caused him to turn into the robotic wolf, the wirewolf.

The flashback is a projection by robotic ranger XR (Neil Flynn) and the rangers are in a hearing. The commander of Star Command, Nebula (Adam Carolla), decides there is no choice but to relieve Parsec of duty as he may be a danger to others – despite the protests of Buzz’s crew. Suddenly XR’s evil prototype XL (Bob Goldthwait) breaks in to kidnap Parsec. As the Rangers jump on XL, Buzz tells Parsec to run.

Ty does indeed run, straight into the clutches of NOS-4-A2, who places a pendant of Canis Lunis rock around his neck. He transforms into the Wirewolf and NOS-4-A2 hypnotises him into submission. Suddenly the Wirewolf breaks into the chamber and frees XL and with NOS-4-A2 they make their escape. Buzz would be after them but NOS-4-A2 has drained the energy from their ship.

They head to the palace of the evil Emperor Zurg (Wayne Knight), where NOS-4-A2 vampirises the robotic hornet guards and usurps the throne. Zurg is left with the hope that Buzz will save the day (and thus he will be able to take back his empire of evil). Meanwhile XL has to build a weapon, which the wirewolf is a key component. The beam from the weapon will turn those struck into wirewolves also. With half his crew turned it is looking tough for Buzz.

The joy of the episode is it is, again, filled with knowing nods towards standard horror/vampire genre staples. In this case it is the relationship between vampire and werewolf and the werewolf being the tortured soul. It is no big spoiler to say that Buzz saves the day – I won’t spoil exactly how – and through this we get a stake through the heart moment for our robot vampire.

Is this the end for him? It is difficult to say. There are two episodes with NOS-4-A2 that we have not looked at yet, though they might come before this. However, according to IMDb, whilst this episode aired after Wirewolf it was actually from a series prior to that containing Wirewolf… confusing but not a reason to not enjoy this for what it is. 5.5 out of 10, the kids will love it and adults will find it a guilty pleasure too.

The imdb page is here.

The Forsaken: Desert Vampires – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:20:00 +0000

Directed by: J S Cardone

First released: 2001

Contains spoilers

This is yet another movie, which has languished within my collection un-reviewed for quite some time. Not because of the quality of the film but just because I hadn’t got around to it.

I was once told that this film was, allegedly, a remake of Near Dark. If that were the case then it failed, however I have found no evidence suggesting that it was a remake of that excellent piece of vampire movie history and so we shall henceforth ignore that and move on. Not that this is particularly original as a movie, in its own right, but it isn't Near Dark and does manage to hang together well enough in its own right.

We begin with a girl, Megan (Izabella Miko), in a shower and covered in blood. Perhaps it was just a gratuitous excuse for a quick bloody boob shot but the scene was peppered with flashes of violence and blood, of knives and guns and defilement. This is important as much as we get quite a few moments of flashes – due to the telepathy shared by the vampires in this.

Sean (Kerr Smith) wants to go to Miami, for his sisters wedding. To get there he manages to get the job of delivering a $50k Mercedes. His trip seems okay until, having just had a boob flash by a girl in another car, he gets a blowout. At a garage he is told that the rim will need bashing out and it’ll take a day to get a tire. His wallet has vanished – but he has money in an envelope for a wedding present. He gets a motel and, following a strange dream, notices a car outside and strange noises, almost animalistic, from the room next door.

In the morning he picks up his car (the motel room next to his seems to be attracting flies and there are smears of red on the drapes, he doesn’t notice that but does notice that the car has gone). A hitcher, Nick (Brendan Fehr), asks for a ride. Sean refuses (it’s a stipulation of his delivery contract) until Nick offers to pay for gas up to his destination. A brief misadventure occurs with local law enforcement but nothing too serious, however it is clear that Nick sees himself as a disenfranchised member of generation X.

They stop at a rest stop and, when they get out of the bathroom area, there is a group of people around the car – and they are clearly our vampires. Now the film doesn’t make all the names clear but they are Kit (Jonathon Schaech), Cym (Phina Oruche), Teddy (Alexis Thorpe) and the daylight servant Pen (Simon Rex). They need a jump start, which Sean gives. He asks them if they were at the motel but they deny it. As they guys drive away Cym states that Nick is a hunter, Kit knows this.

They go to a bar to eat and Nick has a very rare steak. He goes to the bathroom and Sean spots a girl looking nervous – Megan – one minute she is there, the next she has vanished. When they get outside she is clearly worse for wear and trying to get a bus with no ticket. A waitress comes out as she has not paid for her coffee. Nick pays for the coffee and tells Sean to get the car. Reluctantly Sean goes along with things. They get a motel room and Nick says she is infected – he’ll explain but he needs ice. He strips her, finds the bite (just below the panty line) and places her in a bath. He sends Sean foreven more ice.

Out in the desert some youths are having beers and firing a gun, generally doing the things that youth do in this sort of flick. The vampires appear and ask for a beer. There is an altercation that leads to Kit punching through the torso of one of them and removing his heart. Back at the motel Megan reacts, as the violence begins, even bleeding from the nose. She starts to scream and Sean has to put his hand over her mouth as Nick deals with the motel owner. Nick tells Sean she is infected with vampirism – it appears she bit Sean’s hand and he passes out.

In the morning, when he comes around, Sean is not feeling good but will hear nothing of vampires. As it is they killed the motel owner and took a room the night before. Nick takes Sean to their car, knocks out Pen and has Sean open the boot. Teddy leaps out at him and then the sun takes hold of her and she quickly burns up. It is then explained that Nick is also infected, holding the infection off with drugs.

It is a telegenetic virus, thus there is telepathy between the infected and should a source be killed, before full turning, the infected will be cured. The source, in this case, is Kit – a Forsaken, one of 8 French knights. 9 knights survived a battle at Antioch. During the night the demon Abbadon came to them and offered them eternal life – 8 gained that eternal life by sacrificing the 9th. They were so ashamed that they hid the next day in caves (hence the sunlight bit). Over the intervening centuries 4 have been killed and 4 remain; 2 in the Americas. Killing vampires involves either sunlight or beheading, Forsaken must be killed on sanctified ground.

There is a connection between Megan and Kit, thus Nick is using her as a homing device and wants to head to a nearby Spanish Mission. The use of an infected person as either a vampire lure or tracker is nothing new. Let’s face it Stoker invented such an idea in Dracula, with the link between the Count and Mina. However, I was reminded, given the setting, of the plotline in Vampires - not to worry the Vampires' sequel, Vampires Los Meurtos, would go on to steal Forsaken’s “drug cocktail holding back the infection” idea.

The film doesn’t do too much new, but what it does it does with competence. The acting seems very down to earth and there is some nice meaningless violence. For some reason Jonathon Scheach, in looks, reminded me of Chris Sarandon in Fright Night and I was kind of taken with the idea of a French Crusader, turned vampire, creeping around and singing Metallica (Enter Sandman). We could have done with a deeper look into his character.

The soundtrack was loud and brash – perfect for the MTV generation it looked to represent. The film itself was never going to win major awards but it does everything it sets out to do. The film set itself up for a sequel but, given it didn’t happen closer to its release, I doubt one will ever emerge. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mentions: Body Double

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:36:00 +0000

This is a Brian DePalma flick from 1984 and probably the best way to describe it is the bastard offspring of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Rear Window (1954). That is if the child hit puberty during the eighties and decided that all the excess of the eighties were worth adopting and making its trade mark.

DePalma manages to take the voyeurism of Rear Window and make it incredibly sordid, to the point were hero of the piece Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) seems somewhat tarnished and his antics – at one point – become almost painful to observe for the viewer and yet it is drawn in such a way that we can't help but watch him watching.

The film is also amusing referential of Hollywood, the acting profession and the porn industry, for instance, when Jake is asked if he has done anything good (as an actor) he mentions a role in Hart to Hart – which Craig Wasson had been in. The film manages to be rather surreal at times. The set of a porn film actually transmogrifies into a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video and Holly Johnson himself is there singing Relax to Jake, who is playing a role in said porn film. Paul Rutherford from the band is also there.

Jake starts off the movie by having a really bad day. As a camera pans across a film set graveyard, going through the earth to the coffin in which a vampire lies. The eyes flick open and we here the director, Rubin (Dennis Franz), giving instruction but Scully does not respond – he is claustrophobic and the coffin set is a problem for him. Soon he has gone home to find his girlfriend enthusiastically riding another man, falls off the sobriety wagon and, eventually, loses the role in Vampire’s Kiss.

Things seem to pick up when he meets Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), another struggling actor who is going away and needs to sub-let the rather plush home that he is house sitting. He points out the neighbour in the nearby mansion, Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton), a woman who likes to perform for herself and who can be seen, voyeuristically, through a conveniently positioned telescope. This is the cue for Jake to be drawn into a most surreal murder – but the surreal nature of the situation actually works in the film’s favour.

We get a little more vampire action at the end, as we see some more of Vampire’s Kiss being filmed – including the use of a body double for breast shots. This also allows us to have a full on Crap Bat Syndrome moment – with visible wires and everything. Interestingly, we see the credits of Body Double running over the take of Vampire’s Kiss in a way that really worked nicely.

Interesting, if uncomfortable, crime thriller with an appearance of Melanie Griffith as porn actress Holly Body and a bit of a vampire moment book ending the films – albeit the filming of a vamp movie.

The imdb page is here.

Trailer: Daybreakers

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:21:00 +0000

This is one that has been on the radar for a while and has such acting names as Sam Neill, Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe involved. Everlost over at Vampire News picked up on the trailer.

Set in the near future where a plague has turned most of the population into vampires, the main resource is running out – humanity and the blood we produce. To a degree it sounds almost like where I am Legend might have left off after society had been rebuilt (and if there had been more than one survivor) and by the look of the trailer it seems to be what Ultraviolet failed to be.

Originally slated for a September 2009 release, some websites are suggesting this has fallen back to Jan 2010, but the trailer has piqued my interest and I actually think I might let myself get a little excited about this one.

First Impression – Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:03:00 +0000

Based on the anime from 2000 and completely ignoring any of the lore or background the subsequent series Blood + introduced (as the series is deemed alternate universe), this Chris Nahon directed film is the latest vampire offering to hit the big screen and, given the pedigree of coming from the producers behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I was hoping for something a little special.

Unfortunately, what I ended up with was a film desperately looking for an ending, some general storyline clichés, bad cgi and a bit of a problem with the actual action. This does include spoilers but the story was thin enough to mean it doesn’t really matter.

The film, set in 1970, starts of with promise, a scene on a subway train in which Saya (Gianna Jun) despatches a demon (the term chiropteran is lost). The scene was faithful to the anime and gave an opening atmosphere that worked well. She is met by her contact from the mysterious Council, Michael (Liam Cunningham), though subordinate Luke (JJ Fields) believes that Saya has killed a human and is out of control. The undercurrent of distrust is not explored deeply enough in the film and so when said distrust is used as a plot device it feels too plot-lite.

Saya is a halfling – as they term it in this – half demon/half human and like her demonic brethren needs blood to survive. The Council provide bottled blood for her and in return she despatches demons as she searches for the one called Onigen (Koyuki). There have been three murders at a school on a US airbase and Saya (despite being older than all the Council operatives put together) is sent undercover. At the school we meet Alice (Allison Miller), daughter of base commandant General McKee (Larry Lamb).

There is a lesson where Frankenstein is discussed and Alice’s insights into the nature of the monster is obviously to make her open, as a character, to interacting with Saya later. Saya quickly gets a sense that two of the students are not all they seem. Alice is left to 'spar' with said students by aikido instructor Powell (Colin Salmon, who was in the Tales of the Crypt episode Cold War), clearly they aim to kill Alice. Saya has checked their records – for what purpose, given the records will be forged, isn’t actually revealed – and comes to the rescue, locking Alice out of the room and killing the demon girls.

The blood is very cgi but I could live with that for the point is made that demon and human blood are different. The fact that it looked almost lumpy worked – it just didn’t work later, when we saw human blood and it looked the same! Alice has spied the events and gets her father but the Council operatives (posing as CIA) are already on the scene, cleaning up. Alice follows Powell who very quickly reveals he is a demon – as is everyone in the bar he is in.

Saya to the rescue once more and a rather large action scene that was marred a little by fast cuts and some camera shakes, though it also went into slow-mo at times. All told it wasn’t that bad, compared to some, and some of the film techniques were clearly used to disguise the fact that Gianna Jun is not a martial artist. However, I just expected more from a film from these producers. After Saya has despatched a lot (and I mean a lot) of demons, Powell changes into his true form and nicks off with Alice. This leads to a roof top chase that was spoiled by the fact that the cgi was so bad. The true demon form was badly created and the actual interaction with the set looked too cartoony. Following this he tries to fly off and we get a runway chase, which takes us to where the original anime ended (of course there were elements not in the original during this first section, as described).

And here we fell over. It became a film looking for a plot, a purpose and an ending. Some of the flashback scenes to Saya’s youth worked – especially a ninja demon battle involving her companion/trainer Kato (Yasuaki Kurata). There was a Luke and Darth moment with Saya and Onigen that was just so obvious as to be clichéd and thus not a spoiler – after all her half demon side had to come from somewhere. There is a set piece with a truck that seem lifted from Underworld Evolution, which then morphs into the train piece from Wanted – though was more satisfying and less film damaging than the Wanted scene.

The ending just kind of petered out. The film wanted to do clever things – the human character is called Alice and there are references made to Through the Looking Glass but the script failed to capitalise on this. There was a moment when, despite having seen her fight and heard her called halfling, Alice feeds an injured Saya her blood and we wonder why she would do that, where did this knowledge that Saya would need this come from? The acting wasn’t brilliant, though that might have been as much to do with script and direction as it was to do with the actors' skills. Gianna Jun seemed dour, perhaps even stoic, and distant but that works for the character.

It sounds like I am down on the film but it certainly isn’t the worst film I’ve seen at the cinema this year – Lesbian Vampire Killers will take some beating where that dubious honour is concerned – but it failed to be what it might have been. The imdb page is here.

Vampire Assassin – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:11:00 +0000

Director: Ron Hall

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

There are two things desperately wrong with the DVD cover of this film. Firstly it is how much the figure on the cover resembles Blade, long leather coat, shades, katana and glave. If I were Marvel, I’d be a little concerned that my copyright had been impinged. The second thing is that if this is meant to be main character Derek Washington, as played by writer, director Ron Hall – well let us just say there are some delusions with regards body image.

We are in low budget vampire land again and this one, let me tell you, was a struggle. I mean I really just wanted to fall asleep as I watched it, but not in the pleasant embrace and warm cocoon of the lullaby, rather in a desperate attempt to relieve the boredom that spread through my bones at an alarming rate.

It starts off in a scene from the past as vampire hunter Gustoff Slovak (Mel Novak) hunts down loads of vampires. Note the electricity arcing from them when they die… why? There is never an explanation so I guess it is down to the fact that they wanted a death effect but didn’t have the budget to pull off dusting. Looks silly though… Anyway, it was a night that would change everything for hunters – or so we are told. Why? Because Slovak tastes the blood of a vampire… Would it cause him to turn? Well that’s not much of a secret as we find out in a couple of minutes that he is the baddy of the movie.

Washington is a cop in a car and tries to summon his teams. No one answers – something has gone wrong, he tells himself and subsequently us (in case we missed it). Does he call for backup? Oh, no he’s straight in there with no regard for his own safety as that is just the type of guy he is. In the house there is a small fountain (presumably producing blood) as well as blood on the floor, with a ring… the significance of which was lost on me. Slovak appears and uses telekinesis to push Washington over. He is found by other cops and put on administrative leave for talking vampires.

Now, online I discovered that his father had been murdered and he was witness to it as a child (we know his father is dead from the dialogue, but little else). As a result he has a fear of blood – that one wasn’t evident at all. Seems that Slovak was called Jackoff – which, whilst not the same as the imdb character name, seems more relevant(!) – and a counterfeiter. All this came from the Wikipedia stub - none of it was related by anything within the actual film.

In film he meets an internet news person called Samantha – she was a pointless character generally. He tries to enlist the help of a group of slayers, who start off saying they ain’t cheap and within seconds are trying to kill him for no good reason… that is until he slips, or bumbles more like, through a door and then they declare that they have underestimated him. Don’t forget about them, he’ll fight and kill them all later, even though they are all meant to be vampire slayers!

He goes against Slovak on his own… Attacking the vampire isn’t difficult as he knows where he lives! However he gets himself captured – and as an aside at least they kept him locked down with chains, rather than use a small amount of tape as in Vampire in Vegas. He is rescued by a student of famed vampire hunter Master Kao (Gerald Okamura) and becomes a reluctant student of the weird old guy.

Why reluctant? Well it seems he feels that he can do this on his own – except he clearly can’t, he had to be rescued once already and he went to the mercenary vampire hunters for help. Whys and wherefores are lost, however, in the on rush of inconsistencies and bad dialogue – on rush is generous, to be honest, its more like playing spot the story and when you do realising that it is inconsistent with the last bit you managed to spot. He was right to be reluctant, however, when it turned out that Slovak trained Kao – but I’d given up trying to work out any rhyme or reason when that one was revealed.

As for lore. We do not get too much. A bite will turn someone anywhere between 24 – 48 hours. Unless you are a cop, bitten in an all out assault on the precinct (that looked suspiciously like a warehouse). In that case you’ll turn in minutes so as to add peril for the hero, and then you might even turn if the vampire shot you rather than bit you! Slovak has telekinetic powers, but none of the other vampires appeared to have such gifts. Slovak can stop bullets by flicking his cape – which just had me thinking of batfink ("Your bullets cannot harm me! My wings are like a shield of steel!" - and all that) that brief thought of a childhood cartoon character was probably the most enjoyable bit of this for me!

Washington can chant incoherently and make water become blessed. How? Who knows and, in fact, who cares? I have already mentioned lightning exuding from slayed vampires and I think that’s about all folks. The acting was wooden throughout and I suspect that Samantha was dubbed. The martial arts was poorly choreographed. This is a turkey, avoid. 1 out of 10 awarded for the sheer audacity of the DVD cover. Incidentally, the cover of my edition is exactly as that pictured above but for a flash that says "full screen" and the title is shown as Vampire Assassin in singular rather than the plural as the cover pictured shows.

The imdb page is here.

Dunraven Road – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:53:00 +0000

Author: Caroline Barnard-Smith

First Published: 2009

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: “In the sleepy backwater of Dunraven Road, a group of hedonistic friends are trapped in a deadly prison of their own making. When Zach, their enigmatic leader, brings his long term plans to fruition and paves the way for a sadistic vampire cult, their fragile world begins to break apart. Fuelled by dangerous passions and an insatiable craving for ‘red’. The group must decide whether to succumb to the sweet lure of the abyss, or stand and fight for their very survival.

The review: In her acknowledgments, Caroline Barnard-Smith refers to her own book as “this strange little novel” and indeed it is that – though that is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed this is quite an unusual piece. As the novel begins we are in a world (despite senior citizens being killed in a manner that the press calls Vamp Attacks) focused upon the beginnings of a fledgling vampyre type group – one that we know will become murderous at some point.

Most of these young people are hooked to a drug called red – a liquid hallucinogen with very addictive qualities and the thickness and consistency of blood (we later discover the source of this). However what I found was that the characters were fairly non-sympathetic. Zach is a sadistic and petty character, his friend Justin came across as a doormat, the two girls Kirsty and Sapphire come across as victims and a criticism could be that there isn’t a strong (human) female character. We also have Paul, a junky and self destructive artist, unrequitedly in love with Sapphire and beholden financially to Zach, his dealer.

The non-sympathetic nature of the characters fit within the bleak worldview of the disillusioned and disavowed generation X, but made it difficult to find one to pin your attention to. Paul and Sapphire are placed in the centre of our world view as a reader but I did struggle to care for them. Enter the vampires.

We end up with two groups, the Ancient Order are evil vampires manipulating events for their own ends. These are our real vampires (as opposed to the good vampires I will mention, rather than as opposed to the mortal wannabes). The lore is sparse:

“…‘Shouldn’t the sun burn you, or something?’

“‘Myths and fables… …Same goes for garlic and wooden stakes in the heart. Fire will hurt us, or starvation.’”

We also discover that a trauma to the brain is also deadly. The vampires can take on the form of another person and they use red as a way of making victims placid. However the Ancient Order are not the force they once were. There are few new vampires created and feeding in a world where technology seems pitied against them, cameras line the streets and DNA can be tested is proving more and more difficult. They are shades of what once they might have been.

The kin are good vampires – actually described as vegan. They subsist on a concoction made of fruit juice and herbs. In fact the concoction actually seems to have kept them rather healthy. They fear the Ancient Order and hide in plain sight amongst humanity. There were interesting characters amongst the vampires who, perhaps, could have withstood some more exploration – though their enigmatic nature was perhaps the point.

There is a very strange and unusual form of slaying that is introduced but I will not spoil the book by saying any more. Its unusual nature, however, fit in well with a book best described as quirky. 6 out of 10.

The Legend of Blood Castle – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:06:00 +0000

Director: Jorge Grau

Release date: 1973

Contains spoilers

I have read that this is one of the most accurate tellings of the Erzsébet Báthory story. It is not. Not for the inaccuracy twixt film and history/legend but because it isn’t the Báthory story at all. It is made clear in the dialogue that this Erzsébet (Lucia Bosé), who is a marquise not a countess, had an infamous ancestor who bathed in virgin’s blood also called Erzsébet. Indeed her surname isn’t given but we can assume that she and her husband Karl (Espartaco Santoni) share the name Ziemmer.

Thus this is inspired by the Báthory story – and the main character is inspired by her crimes – allowing Grau to move into uncharted territories and giving a license to do what he liked with the story, with impunity, though he takes many elements of the legend. He also plays with other traditional vampire myths and historical vampire stories. It is this rich detail that really makes this film, although there are times where there are so many concepts one wishes that he had paused for breath and explored them a little more, and the detail starts in the first scenes as the opening credits roll along.

We begin with a procession of villagers and a naked boy upon a white horse. Karl, watching from a window, calls this the Test of the Horse and it is an immediate launch into traditional vampire detection methods – where a virgin horse ridden by a (naked) virgin is used to find the vampire’s tomb. This occasionally appears in films (in a variant, at least). We saw it in the 1979 Dracula and also referenced in Subspecies. This sets the tone of the film, exploring a lot of traditional elements whilst also referencing the more modern vampire that came from literature.

The grave of the vampire is found and dug open. We see the corpse, arms upwards fingers bloodied (as though trying to get out of the coffin after being buried alive, I’ll return to this). Without thought he is quickly staked and blood comes to the mouth. We see a young girl, Irina (Raquel Ortuño), approach a guard. She asks him to collect some of the vampire’s blood for her when the crowd has gone. She gives him a bribe and a pitcher in which to collect it. Witchcraft? The film does have hints of witchcraft but this part is based on traditional vampire myth.

We see Irina and her friend Inge (Ghike) making bread with the blood. This is blood bread – a traditional vampire deterrent and we can quote the entry in the Vampire Encyclopedia: “The custom found in parts of Poland centuries ago, where bread was supposedly made from the blood of a vampire. Considered a powerful means of protecting one’s family from attacks of the undead, the bread was made by gathering a small amount of blood from inside the coffin of a destroyed vampire, normally possible because of the great amounts of blood that were said to gush from the body. The liquid was then baked into a kind of bread. Consuming it was said to make the person invulnerable to the vampire.” Interestingly Inga is not meant to be there, she is not of the household, but then the housekeeper (Ana Farra) gets more upset when it is apparent the girls method of making the bread is incorrect.

A magistrate (Ángel Menéndez), with a name in the English language dub suspiciously like Helsing, arrives at the inn. He is intercepted by Karl who craves intelligent conversation. At the castle Erzsébet complains about becoming old and the housekeeper mentions the acts of her ancestor – whose husband preferred making war. Karl prefers his falcons and we see a glimpse of Karl becoming obviously excited as a falcon rips its prey apart. In the inn Karl goes to bed. The innkeepers daughter Marina (Ewa Aulin) is clearly interested in him and an old witch, Carmilla (lola Gaos), gives her a love salve. She goes to Karl and he is interested, but he grabs her neck violently and it is clear he is a psychopathically sadistic individual – she leaves his room. In the morning the witch looks at Karl and tells Marina that death is in his eyes. The references in character names to both Dracula and Carmilla need no further comment.

The magistrate is there for the posthumous trial of the vampire and this is interspersed with the actions of Erzsébet. For convenience I shall split these up. The vampire’s corpse is in the courtroom and his name was Plogojowitz (imdb suggests Plojovitz) – a reference to the case of Peter Plogojowitz, a historical vampire case from 1725. He is questioned (of course he does not answer) and witnesses are called. Of those officiating Karl seems amused by the concept of a vampire but Doctor Silas (Silvano Tranquilli) is fiercely unconvinced. He mentions plague and Plogojowitz being buried alive (presumably because of his bloodied fingernails). Later he quotes Voltaire who stated that vampires were actually userers and their ilk who “did not live in cemeteries, they preferred beautiful palaces”.

Carmilla talks of a parchment, potion and pendant she sold to Plogojowitz. The pendant was cursed, all who wore it died within a year, thus she never wore it herself. The most damning evidence comes from the widow Plogojowitz (María Vico) and her daughter Nadja (Franca Grey). Nadja states that her father came to her after his death and kissed her – not as a father kisses a daughter. He then bit her neck, to drink her blood, and shows the cut left behind. Later Karl realises that the marks are from the broken links on a chain she wears. Plogojowitz is sentenced to be beheaded, his head burnt and the ashes scattered in the river. After the trial Karl determines to wear the pendant to disprove the curse and collects the potion and parchment from Plogojowitz’ home.

Meanwhile Erzsébet has, in anger, struck Irina and the resultant nosebleed splattered her hand with blood. For a few moments it seemed that the skin became whiter. She tries to use dove’s blood – something Irina uses to firm her breasts – but it has no effect. The housekeeper suggests maiden’s blood is necessary. During these scenes we get more evidence of Karl’s instabilities as he seems to be on the verge of violence with Inga before letting her leave his home.

Erzsébet experiments by arranging for an infant girl’s hand to be cut. She rubs the blood on her face – even licking at the blood from the corner of her mouth. Later we hear that the experiment was successful but, of course, how could she possibly avail herself of more blood. Interestingly, unlike Hammer’s Báthory adaptation, Countess Dracula, Grau does not have Erzsébet getting very noticeably younger. This might all be in her own head and when she later ages, it is how she sees her own reflection. It seems to me, given how strong the references and research was in the film that this was a commentary and vampires and reflection - though in this case it meant that she couldn't stand her own reflection.

Suddenly Karl is dead and placed in the family vault. Then Erzsébet helps the man from his coffin – it is clear he is alive and well. The jump jars and almost feels as though part of the story is missing. Actually the events leading to this are relayed at the end of the film but it did make the story jerk cinematically. Essentially he fakes his own death, using Plogojowitz' potion to put himself into a deathlike trance, and has agreed to help Erzsébet get the blood she needs, thus renewed youth, in return he gets to leave (it seems with Marina). It is clear that Plogojowitz was buried alive, having imbibed the potion, though I wish Grau had explored this more.

Of course I mentioned that it was clear that Karl was psychopathically a sadist and he seems to gain the (possibly sexual) release he needs from being able to act like a vampire and become a murderer. The villagers all believe the marquis has returned from the dead. There is an interesting moment, when he kidnaps and murders Nadja, that had bats being found on her otherwise empty bed – he had left the shutters open on the windows – causing the mother to scream. This, like the Dracula and Carmilla reference, was for the modern audience (boys later torture a bat calling it a vampire to underline this point) as bats were not really part of traditional lore. He becomes more and more comfortable with his role and we see both controlled and frenzied stabbings as well as an actual biting the neck open.

However, Erzsébet’s sanity struggles with the enormity of her crimes and her own guilt. She becomes haunted by the dead, although it is clear that these were meant to be no phantoms but figments of her own imagination, hallucinations born of the guilt she felt. Indeed, in many respects, Erzsébet could be seen to be the victim here – married to an emotionally distant husband, himself fighting his own violent urges, and encouraged by the housekeeper – whose motivations are unclear (but probably thought she was doing the right thing by her mistress). Of course she is still a criminal, a murderess though she did not kill any of the girls herself as she arranged their deaths for her own vanities.

There is so much referenced in this that the film is a vampire fan's joy. The film itself, unusually, has very little of the gothic sumptuousness that one would expect. Grau draws a cold film around us – and this works as the subject matter suits such coldness. The jump in narrative is problematic on first view – though after that one knows that the narrative has been less jumped and more delayed. As for the DVD, Mya Communications should be commended for making this available – but one thing irked.

Two scenes are restored into the English dub from the Spanish. As such they are subtitled, fair enough. The DVD has the Spanish, Italian and English soundtracks and yet no subtitles for the film (other than the two scenes). Other than that, ideally a digital restore would have been done but, all in all, it is great that they have made this rare piece of vampire cinema available. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Vampire in Vegas – review

noreply@blogger.com (Taliesin_ttlg) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:42:00 +0000

Directed by: Jim Wynorski

Release date: 2009

Contains spoilers

Jim Wynorski is a prolific director with, looking at his imdb page, an eclectic directorial career which careens between low budget horror and softcore porn. We know him through Not of this Earth, Transylvania Twist and Vampirella – all of which have received low ratings when I’ve reviewed them. Tony Todd is an actor whom I have much time for and yet the times he has appeared on this blog... well one has to question why he got involved with such films as Bloodwars and Absence of light. We were not necessarily onto a winner with this flick, therefore…

The film begins with a hooded figure, candle light and much wandering around collecting bits of flesh in a cup. However there is a voice over and it is marvellous. It is splendid because the shadowy figure is Sylvian (Tony Todd, though in this scene we do not see his face and thus physically it might be James Richards Sr – Todd’s stand in) and the actor’s voiceover works. It’s the advantage of having a good actor, Todd’s voice is fabulous and his delivery excellent. The fact that the scene looks more than a little cheap is forgotten under his velvet tone. He gives us a bit of vampire society background as he makes a concoction to feed to a captured vampire – note that the captured vampire has rows of fangs, all the vampires later are of the two side fang variety – as he experiments, trying to create something that will allow himself to walk in the day. He fails – but that was then and this is now…

Out in the desert, near Las Vegas, a couple are camping. They hear screams – it is just before dawn. They investigate and see three women tied to stakes and a limo parked nearby. In front of the women is Dr VanHelm (Delia Shepherd) – a biochemist working for Sylvian – she has administered her latest concoctions and is waiting for the sun. In fact the sun less rises, than is high in the sky already and emerges from behind cloud – an issue in the film one feels. One of the vampires burns to dust, one melts to goo and one explodes. As the campers phone the police VanHelm is told that she is failing – she has three days to get a result.

Jason (Edward Spivak) and Rachel (Sonya Joy Sims) are about to get married. He is going on a camping trip with his buddies Dino (Frankie Cullen) and Eddie (Jonathon Conrad) – except his buddies are secretly going to take him to Vegas – and so, of course, they’ll soon discover that vampires are real! Dino’s gal Nikki (Brandin Rackley) doesn’t trust her bloke and so has put a GPS tracker on him so that she and Rachel can find out where they have really gone – that is called stalking in my book! The boys will get attacked in a vampire strip club (as you do or, at least, as many a horny young film character does) and Rachel and Nikki will get got as they stalk them into said club.

Now we throw into the mix two cops, Stanton (Ted Monte) and O’Hara (GiGi Erneta), who start investigating what seems to be a nothing case (alleged combustion of bodies in the desert) until they discover that the ash is human with bone fragments two hundred years old and the goo is human also – DNA matching a missing persons case. They are quickly converted into believers in vampires and go to see an acquaintance of Stanton’s – a mechanic who happens to confirm that vampires are real – it is a leap of faith (some mechanic or other who happens to be vampire slayer) tied to a plot hole (Stanton says that the vampires have killed 7 already and, given the film hasn't shown them 7 deaths, we wonder who, how and where!)

Why does Sylvian want to daywalk? He does so because he wants to run for Governor – and later President but by then he believes that vampires will rule the world (that's his modern reason anyway). His campaign is being run by Renfield (Bill Sunflower) and, mentioning Renfield, lets look at the lore (and the inconsistencies therein). A bite from one of these vampires will turn you – that is established – and the only way to prevent it happening is to kill the vampire who bit you. Yet Renfield (and a bent cop) are kept in line by being bitten – they call it their fix – but one wonders how they then do not subsequently turn.

Vampires can develop CGI wings and then woosh off faster than the eye can see, so no flying effects needed. Staking (as well as sunlight) seems to be a good method of killing these vampires – Jason gets one with a pencil. Drinking vampire blood, as a human, will also give you vampire powers. Presumably you are then turned or maybe not, as we get one person who has not been given the daywalk serum, in daylight with vampire powers but not burning. This might be another inconsistency or, more generously, he might not be fully turned. We don’t know.

Garlic affects them and also causes vampire goo to shimmer. As big a problem (as the lore/story inconsistencies) is the cheapness level of this film. The vampire expert shows the cops some stakes that he says are of such quality that they will not break on you but look exactly like bits of tat cut from cheap lumber (which is what they are). Sylvian needs to get some O –ve blood for VanHelm (because being a bio-chemist for a company with Government contracts precludes her getting it for some reason) and it comes in a baggie in the hospital.

Talking of Van Helm – her lab is a warehouse that you can knock on the outer door of, no security or anything like that. She has electrified fences in her lab to conveniently get fried on (like that would happen – remember this is not the mad scientists lair but a big company’s laboratory). When she has Jason strapped to a table because he has O –ve blood, he is less strapped and more gaffa taped – but the tape barely reaches over him – seriously sit up and he’d be free. At that point it was clear they just weren’t trying.

Plot inconsistencies, cheapness and some poor performances plague a film that is redeemed only by the presence of Tony Todd. His moments keep you mildly interested as his quality shines through, but all in all I’d have been no poorer as a human if I had never seen this film and no less entertained. 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.