Just Vamps 2024! 🧛🏻‍♀️

 

Retro Just Vamps 2024!

by Kristin Battestella

It's been awhile since I did some dedicated vampire viewing! Here's a trio of toothy throwbacks varying in their vampire success.

Pale Blood – It's 1990 and our thoroughly modern vampire traveling with a fold-out portable coffin hires a Los Angeles detective agency to solve a series of gruesome copycat crimes in this Hong Kong direct to video production that shows it's age with a flat print, poor sound, and far too many hustle and bustle traffic transitions. Voiceovers that won't make sense until the end, airport minutia, anonymous driving, logistical exposition, and then more driving make for a very slow start. Punk music at the club is edgy with tense, electronic seedy to set the mood, but the music montage vignettes serve no purpose – save for a nonchalant Sybil Danning (The Howling II) as a blink and you miss her pedestrian. Berets, brooches, boxy coats, vintage cars, and a mod vampire condo provide cool nostalgia while blue nighttime lighting, red spotlights, and neon signs pepper steamy scenes. Sensationalist news crews report on the dead body at the boutique, but our ingenue detective has Nosferatu clips and knows all the vampire lore. The clever deduction is well done with debates on the puncture marks and questions why a vampire wouldn't just take enough blood rather than unnecessarily kill. Where does the blood go if he's not drinking it? What do you do if the killer is a vampire and you actually catch him? Our cruising vampire needs no pick up lines – getting right to the strobe in the bedroom, colorful pink titillation, bitten boobs, and overhead revelry. Shadows and silhouettes accent violent flashes of the bloody crimes as the splatter and psychic visions escalate. Everyone in the club watching who might be the vampire when they each have a different piece of the puzzle creates tension. The enthralled dame loves his hypnotic eyes, but he doesn't want her to fall in love with him and uses an eerie echoing voice to make her forget him. However, our photographer repeatedly demands his models touch an egg during a suggestive shoot, luring hookers who need the money into sessions they don't want to do. Toxic masculinity abounds as the women are bitten, manhandled, and harassed before being strapped to the table with bloody tubes, sinks, and drains. Locked up vampires able to poof out and levitate make little sense before a one on one fight hampered by obvious cut corners filming. The style grows stagnant in last half hour with dated cheapness, and the silly twists run out of steam. Fortunately, the revelations are surprisingly smart with a bemusing finale comeuppance. This is an entertaining midnight movie – for the erroneous hokey as well as for the ambiance it gets right.

The Reflecting Skin – Viggo Mortensen contends with a would-be vampire in rural 1950s America for this 1990 British/Canadian co-production from writer and director Philip Ridley (also of The Passion of Darkly Noon with Mortensen). However the lovely golden fields and patriotic flag waving aren't what they seem thanks to the bittersweet score, youths tormenting frogs, and bloody pranks against kooky widow Lindsay Duncan (Rome). Unique, innocent names like Dolphin Blue and Seth Dove contrast debates on killing reptiles and if the dead are angels in heaven or in a coffin being eaten by worms. Seth's father reads a book about vampires that suck the life out of you while his mother obsessively cleans in hope that soldier son Viggo's return will make their downtrodden life better. She also makes Seth drink too much water until he pees his pants, and metaphors about drinking blood, dehydration, and thirst accent the creepy farmhouse with old whaling artifacts. It's actually funny how our imaginative boy with nothing to do jumps to the conclusion that the widow is a vampire. She gives Seth a freaky old harpoon and recounts how her husband hung himself and took all the sunshine out of her life. Of course, from a child's perspective, grief making a woman feel 200 years old is taken literally rather than as sad and lonely. When another youth goes missing, the hysterical blame scapegoats and social outcasts as the repressed isolation is passed between weird twins and screaming kids. The cartoonish sheriff advertises our dad's gay encounters because surely he must be the pervert responsible for the dead body in the well, and mom slaps her husband around for having to live down his gossip. Serving was the only way for Viggo's Cameron to get away from the fiery destruction and shrewdly layered symbolism on the repression about to burst, and he doesn't appear until forty minutes into the film. Their home is ugly and smaller now and he admonishes young Seth that he is not a hero thanks to his guilt over the atom bomb. Upon discovering a calcified dead fetus, Seth talks to it and keeps it under his bed like a doll. It's both silly and worrisome when he makes a cross and spies on his brother, not understanding the sadness at the cemetery nor his intrusion upon Cameron's flirting with Dolphin. Seth's lack of comprehension grows while his empathy diminishes; he mistakes Cameron's radiation symptoms as the vampire's doing when the naked man lies as the babe in her arms. Disturbing abductions and lies happen in the picturesque daylight, and there's no one to blame but ourselves once mentally unstable youth become little monsters filled with secrets and sin. Once his brother intends to leave with his lady love, Seth won't be left behind with his dead baby doll. He makes a demented choice to perpetuate violence as the sun sets on his innocence. Obviously this is not a true horror piece, however this dark social commentary still speaks on today's horrors of war that we pretend don't exist. This is an excellent, ahead of its time vampire as mirror to nature metaphor analyzing fear and fanatics. One bereaved mother asks what's killing our children but we are – and that's the real horror.

Skip Unless You Want to Laugh

Dracula's Guest – This low budget 2008 direct-to-video production is very loosely based on Bram Stoker's titular short story, and the amateur acting and bad accents compound the overly wordy, trying to sound ye old script. The in media res opening also has Elizabeth Murray telling her betrothed Bram Stoker that Dracula has raped her with the seed of his beast, giving away the violence, death, and family secrets before going back six months earlier for time-wasting fencing and BFF sparring. Coastal photography, spooky crescendos, and tolling bells herald Dracula's realty request for a rental with high walls and no windows. However his constant scowl is... a choice...., and the men bending over backward for his commission are humorous alongside proper Victorian fathers tut tutting at an arm around the shoulder as practically fornicating in public. Admiral Murray demands Elizabeth and Bram wait a year to marry, so she runs away to be captured by Dracula. The talking back dialogue is too modern yet naive, and cutting away from danger for men talking about what they are going to do about it again wastes time whilst also hampering any attempt at patriarchal commentary. Simple sets, low budget necessities, and minimal effects are fine; but it's a disjointed hop, nonsensical skip, and instantaneous jump to Transylvania as convenient. Rather than staying with the candlelight menace, we cut away again to lovelorn Bram taking scenic strolls when his hackney old landlady does her best Una O'Connor impression. Such unnecessary elements short change the story with unintentional laughter on top of the erroneous attempt to make the rapaciousness romantic as if this were Meatloaf's “I Would Do Anything for Love.” Despite being in a dungeon with only a mattress and her corset, Elizabeth never realizes her peril. She cries out for Bram – who's being chased by French peasants through Germany on Walpurgisnacht – and that's actually the only segment from the Stoker source. Unfortunately, the poor pacing, weak writing, and character stupidity play like a parody of Billy Crystal and Carol Kane in The Princess Bride. The entire opening scene repeats in the final twenty minutes, and despite some attempted eerie sequences, there are no really scary scenes. Action hero Bram dangles on the castle ledge, putting up his fists and vowing to defeat Dracula with his Notre Dame logo looking self before the Admiral's sword fight with Dracula makes room for a bad quip between every thrust and parry. Our Big Man Vampire is easily defeated with little point to Elizabeth being pregnant and immortal with her own supposed magical abilities. If this wasn't going to be a self-aware comedy, then it should have stuck more faithfully to Stoker's story. Although this isn't a waste of time if you can laugh, it can't be taken seriously, either.