TITLE & REVIEW
Grad Student
Lilli Taylor
is bitten by a vamp, and slowly transforms.
Abel Ferrara
delivers a suspenseful B&W masterpiece.
Christopher Walken (
View to a Kill
) is the Master.
Edie Falco
also appears in a small role.
This is a found footage effort about a couple of extreme sports enthusiasts
from the USA who backpack across Europe.
One of the guys, Derek, hooks up with a hot girl for a one-night stand in Paris, France.
His buddies discover him afterwards, unconscious with a strange bite mark.
The road trip continues, and the guys get all the way to Italy. Derek the bitten buddy cannot stand sunlight, and needs to sleep during the day. He cannot eat solid food, and pasta makes him vomit. However, he does not want to spend the rest of the vacation stuck in a hospital. The guys carry on with the trip, and keep filming it.
Before long Derek the bitten buddy gets a really severe sensitivity to sunburn. To balance this, he also gets superhuman strength. Nobody puts two and two together. In a twisted version of Genre Blindness they assume he is a superhero. They test his strength and speed, and video document everything. Reminiscent of Chronicle , but with a supernatural origin story rather than an alien science one.
Using vampiric superpowers to make the ultimate extreme sports video is certainly a new take on the genre. However, what the characters do not realise is that the more he exerts himself, the greater his transformation accelerates. In fact, at first they do not seem to realise that he is transforming.
Finally they Google vampires, and discover the symptoms match. They try cold cow's blood, and warm pigs blood. However, it seems like only human blood will do. The next problem is that they are Americans in Italy, where they barely speak the language and certainly cannot pass for locals.
Our heroes are not exactly master criminals. The police just have to follow their trail of destruction. Strangely it is not the Italian carabinieri, but for some reason the cops identify themselves as being from Interpol. It turns out that in a daylight police chase, a vamp is in far greater danger from the sunlight than from police bullets.
Derek realises that the only hope for a cure is if he finds the woman who bit him. He has to get to Paris, even though there are Interpol warrants out for his arrest.
A disease outbreak causes people to become blood-drinking psychos.
Technically they are Vamps rather than Fast Zombies,
but in this context it may as well be the same thing.
A band of survivors try to escape before the deadline,
without getting infected themselves.
US General Keith David ( The Thing (1982) ) wants to napalm the whole area. The clock ticks down until he calls in an airstrike. This is a blatant piece of phony jeopardy, taken from top-notch action film The Rock.
Luckily, Steven Seagal ( Under Siege ) and a bunch of special forces goons walk around in stylish black trench-coats. Like all real-life SWAT men should, Seagal comes with his own katana. Courtesy of the SyFy channel, of course.
There is also a mad scientist, an apparent reference to Italian zombie movie Dr Butcher . He only has a couple of scenes, however - he is terribly under-used, and most of the movie is a series of hand-to-hand encounters with the Infected.
This starts with a couple of senior citizens
living in a remote cottage,
where they are rudely interrupted by a bloodthirsty monster.
The old man is Lalor Roddy,
who also got killed off by the monsters in
Unwelcome
. Yes, this is pretty much his given role
for the rest of his career.
The main story started a few weeks earlier. A couple of Canadian tourists visited the village, and the locals gave them a story that also helps as exposition for the audience. The local tourist attraction is the grave of Abhartach, the original vampire that Bram Stoker based Dracula on. The film's protagonists are a pair of tweenage lads. One is the son of a tenant farmer (John Lynch - ), while the other is the son of the businessman who intends to bulldoze the cairn so a new road can go through the field. Yes, nobody has seen Rawhead Rex .
The first act of the film is suspenseful and dramatic. However, when the horror element really kicks in it is undercut by a strong element of comedy. This is not slapstick - instead it is verbal, and comes from the characters' genre blindness and refusal to accept they are characters in a vampire movie.
This was not shot at the actual location, where the real vampire's tomb has been. However, the filmmakers chose a good replacement which is sufficiently atmospheric.
In the USA, humans have accepted vampires as members of society.
Police detective Bokeem Woodbine (
Blade: The Series
) and Transylvanian Vamp Adrian Paul (
Highlander: the Series
team up to find a murderer.
The resulting story is a poor thriller that wastes its time trying to be slick.
This is set in a future where the vampires have taken over from humans as the dominant species.
It is perhaps the truest version of
I Am Legend
that has ever been filmed, although the influence of Matheson's novel is not acknowledged.
The directors are a pair of twin brothers from Australia who also work as SPFX techs,
so visual effects play a big role in this.
For example, Vamps burst into flames when staked, though strangely not when decapitated.
Ethan Hawke ( Gattaca ) is a scientist working on a synthetic blood substitute. He only drinks pigs blood, though nobody has thought of mass-marketing this as a substitute. Human blood is running out, and starving vamps are degrading into full-blown Sub-suckers.
What starts out as a futuristic drama like Gattaca turns into action-adventure closer to John Carpenter's Vampire$ when our reluctant protagonist meets Willem Dafoe ( Spiderman ), a cured vamp. Together they have to fight off the Vampire Army run by Sam Neill ( The Dish ), and perfect the cure.
Rourke (Johnny Strong -
Fast and the Furious
) is a drifter who drives across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The human race has been transformed into monsters by a virus or something.
They are more like vampires than fast zombies -
they burn up when exposed to direct sunlight.
The protagonist teams up with a bunch of cops in SWAT armour. The extras get helmets, but the main characters (who have to be photogenic and easily identifiable) do not. Their leaders are the former Chief of Detectives (Lance Hendricksen - Terminator ) and his son (Louis Mandylor - ).
At the end of the day, this has high production values and a couple of recognisable names in the cast. Some of the supporting actors do not perform as strongly, but on a low-budget B-movie you can only expect so much.
Normally low-budget horror movies suffer by being written and directed by a single person. Luckily this effort avoided the same problem by having different specialists for each task. However, there is a different example of one participant Johnny Strong is not only the star, he is also a producer and he wrote and performed the soundtrack.
This is the classic black and white adaptation with Bela Lugosi (
Plan 9 from outer Space
) in the lead role. It was predated by
Nosferatu (1929)
, the silent German pastiche that illegally copied the original novel.
However, this is the first talkie version in the English language.
There is also a Spanish-language version, made for the Mexican market,
with a second crew that re-used the original set and costumes.
Dracula (Lugosi) travels to England, where he falls foul of Doctor Van Helsing.
This is a sequel to
Dracula (2001)
, although it does not involve any of the original people.
Although the whole point of the original film was that Dracula would be final deathed by means of triple killing,
this movie is based on the idea there is a loophole.
Vamp-hunting priest Father Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee - Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story ) works for a Vatican official named Cardinal Siqueros (Roy Scheider - SeaQuest DSV ). The next mission is to destroy the corpse of Dracula before he can come back from the dead again.
A local Professor (Craig Sheffer - Nightbreed ) is afflicted with a terrible disease, so he has his students keep an eye out for vampires in the local morgues. They find Dracula's body, so they steal it.
The Professor has a small clique – Luke (Jason London - Mallrats ) and his girlfriend Elizabeth ( Diane Neal ), as well as a hot girl ( ) and the token black guy (Khary Payton - The Walking Dead ). They experiment on the body in a remote disused building that is meant to be in Louisiana, but in reality is in Eastern Europe.
When Dracula is revived, he looks like Stephen Billington ( ). Yes, this movie re-cast the only character retained from the original movie. They could not afford Gerard Butler.
This was originally the second half of
Dracula II: Ascension (2003)
, but the movie was split into two films shot back-to-back.
Five years after the events of the first movie, vamp-hunting priest Father Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee - Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story ) is fired by Cardinal Siqueros (Roy Scheider - SeaQuest DSV so he instead teams up with Luke (Jason London - Mallrats ). Together they hunt Dracula, and discover he has gone back to his stronghold in the Carpathians.
Most of the movie is about the duo's long slog across Romania towards Drac's castle. Despite being a modern country that is a member of the European Union, it has become a hell-hole torn by insurgency and civil war. The fact that Drac's vampire horde is on the loose does not make things any better.
The plan is to rescue Elizabeth ( Diane Neal ), who is now one of the brides of Dracula. Drac himself has changed again – he now looks like Rutger Hauer ( Blade Runner ) instead of either of the previous actors.
A young woman gets seduced by an unknown man.
After a softcore sex scene, she ends up dead.
Police Captain Renfield and Detective Van Helsing investigate.
The pathologist, Jack Seward (Michael Ironside -
Total Recall
), discovers anticoagulant in the killer's saliva.
This is a strange steampunk version of the original story. Van Helsing is the live-in lover of Mina Harker, and Mina is the lawyer assigned to help the exotic Count Dracula to purchase a home in the city. Jonathan Harker is relegated to being a conspiracy theorist. The most original aspect of the re-casting is the fact that Van Helsing is a gay woman. This may seem like a box-ticking exercise, but the Dracula story has been done so many times that it definitely needs a new angle.
The cast are a bunch of unknowns, cast for their looks - no doubt for the softcore porn audience. The budget is Television-level, since it was was shot in Eastern Europe, but this makes the weird anachronistic steampunk setting work even better.
A young American woman attends college in eastern Europe.
Suspicious people she encounters include Professor Victor Webster (
Continuum
) and Gypsy woman
Keegan Connor Tracey
.
Anton Yelchin (
Green Room
) is a teenager living in Las Vegas with his single mother (
Toni Collette
). His life is a stereotypical American High School experience, complete with girlfriend
Imogen Poots
and a couple of pre-Bad Neighbours Frat-boys - nerdy best buddy Christopher Mintz-Plasse (
Kick-Ass
) and annoying Dave Franco (
Warm Bodies
).
Our hero gets suspicious when a new neighbour (Colin Farrell - Daredevil ) moves in next door. Before long he discovers that the new guy is a murderous vampire. Predictably, nobody will believe him.
Our hero calls in the local vampire expert - a theatrical magician named Peter Vincent (David Tennant - Dr Who (2005) ). Yes, the old-fashioned former horror movie actor character from the 1980s version has been updated for the Twenty-First Century.
This is not a sequel to the Colin Farrell movie, it is a remake.
Charlie and his best mate Ed are American exchange students in Romania.
Their college dorm room has a view that looks into the bedroom of his Professor -
Jamie Murray
. It turns out that, despite her being an English actress attempting an American accent,
she is in fact Erzebet Bathory - yes, old
Countess Dracula
herself!
The most impressive and original sequence is when Ed shows Charlie a web comic of Bathory's origin story. This is a great example of visual exposition, and adds a few new touches to the backstory. Bathory came to the USA aboard the Hindenberg, and was responsible for the Black Dahlia murder! Eventually she got homesick and returned home to Bucharest, where this film is set.
The boys call on Peter Vincent for help. He has been updated to a Web-TV Ghost Facer type, which is a lot more modern than the old 1980s-style actor-turned-TV presenter.
Despite being a remake of a remake, shot on the cheap in Eastern Europe, this is actually quite a decent film. The Romanian setting actually works for it, as does the cynical genre-savvy approach of the script.
This is a remake of the black and white silent movie
Nosferatu (1922)
. While the original was at best an homage to
Dracula
, and fell foul of a copyright claim by Bram Stoker's widow,
this newer version is a straight-up version of the book.
It even uses the names,
although the final act in Europe is taken from the 1922 movie
- with dialogue taken from the original.
Jonathan Harker visits Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski - ), a freakish bald man with pale skin and unusual dental traits. The Count travels to Europe, while Harker is left trapped in the man's decaying castle. Eventually Harker escapes and gives pursuit.
The climax involves Harker's fiance Lisa ( Isabelle Adjani ), who outsmarts the vampire and traps him in a subtle but breathtaking scene.
The ending is also a twisted one, which is shockingly memorable and well-executed.
The main difference between this movie and the original, other than the title character's name, is that Klaus Kinski's portrayal is more sympathetic. Note - within two years, Kinski's daughter ( Nastasja Kinski ) starred in Cat People .
This is set in a dystopian future.
America is a post-apocalyptic wasteland,
like a western with vampires instead of Native Americans.
In parts it is like The Searchers,
as the heroes try to save kidnapped damsel
Lily Cole
.
The Sheriff (Cam Gigandet - Twilight (2008) ) gets help from a Priest (Paul Bettany - A Knight's Tale ). The Priests are a special unit of vampire-slayers. Unfortunately their leadership does not believe in the rescue mission, so they send Maggie Q to bring Bettany back.
The villainous leader of the vamps (Karl Urban - Dredd 3-D ) used to be a Priest himself. Underneath his black hat (yes, not exactly subtle) he still has the symbolic tattoo of the crucifix.
As befitting the Western movie cliches, the searchers get reluctant assistance from a snake-oil salesman (Brad Douriff - Child's Play ). And like all anachronistic sci-fi westerns these days, this has a climactic battle aboard a speeding steam-train.
The storyline may be derivative, but this is still a well-shot action-adventure film. If you are looking for an enjoyable if brainless action flick, you could do a lot worse than this one. There is lots of CGI which takes no account of the laws of physics, and as a result the action scenes seem quite cartoonish. However, they are very pretty and nice to look at. Perhaps this is because it is based on a Korean graphic novel.
This is set in the USA but filmed in Poland.
There are no actual giant redwood trees involved.
The title seems to refer to red woods in the sense that
the woods are the scene of bloodletting.
The film starts with a prelude that sets the tone. A woman helps an injured man into a mysterious temple. Unfortunately this leads up to a human sacrifice.
The main story concerns a couple who go hiking in the woods. They meet a stranger (Nicholas Brandon - Buffy The Vampire Slayer ) who claims to be a Park Ranger. He certainly does not seem to be the type.
That night, things get reminiscent of the prelude sequence to Dog Soldiers . The difference being that instead of werewolves, they discover the woods are full of vampires.
Frank Whalley (
Broken Arrow
) is out hunting in the woods when he gets attacked by a
Nosferatu
. The good news is, they turn to ash when hit with sunlight.
The bad news is, Whalley gets bitten.
Luckily he manages to hide in a nearby shed as the sun starts to rise.
The shed is in the back yard of the protagonist's house. Its new inhabitant changes the life of the protagonist, a teenager who is bullied by everyone - his grandfather, the cops and the High School gang. His best friend, Dahmer, wants to use the vampire to get even with his enemies.
This is narrated by a tweenage boy
who tags along with the middle-aged man
who saved him from monsters in the apocalypse - like in
Zombieland
. However, this has a much more serious tone - like in
The Walking Dead
. Also, this time it is blood-drinkers rather than brain-eaters.
The pair are driving north to Canada, rather than West to California. They team up with a couple of women - a raped nun ( Kelly Mcgillis ) and a pregnant girl ( Danielle Harris ). They also run into a klan of bible-thumpers led by Jebediah (Michael Cerveris - Fringe ).
The whole point of the first movie
was to find sanctuary in Canada,
and then to live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, for there to be a sequel
this happy-ever-after ending has to be destroyed.
A gang of vampires come looking for revenge. They destroy sanctuary, but let the tweenage boy go. After all, the only choice he has is to find the middle-aged man. Naturally, the vamps are following him.
Steven Williams ( The X-Files ) pops up at one of the surviving human settlements.
Vampiric Count Mardulok (David Carradine -
Kill Bill (2003)
) and his minions live in a town in Utah.
They all have to wear shades and sunblock, but it keeps them safe.
The plan is to build a factory that can produce synthetic blood - like in
True Blood
a couple of decades later.
There are some strangers in town. Bobby Briggs from Twin Peaks and his GF, Elizabeth Gracen , are camping nearby. Also, a nerdy young vamp-hunter (Bruce Campbell - Evil Dead ) arrives in town.
Like a lot of low-budget supernatural suspense films,
this was written and directed by one person.
Unusually, that person turns out to be
Francis Ford Coppola
- who also produced it. How the mighty have fallen!
Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer - Willow ) earns a living by doing book-signings at bookstores. He ends up in a small redneck town where the nearest thing to a bookstore is a shelf in the hardware store. Sheriff Bruce Dern ( Hateful Eight ) pulls him in to investigate the Vampiric murder of Virginia ( Elle Fanning ).
Baltimore has to pay alimony to his wife (played by Kilmer's RL ex-wife Joanne Whalley ). As a result he talks his Publisher (David Paymer - Chill Factor ) into accepting the book. Unfortunately this means he has to solve the murder. Luckily he is helped by the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin - Dorian Grey ).
The story's reliance on dream sequences (rendered in monochrome, like in Sin City ) makes it inaccessible to a mainstream audience, who find it confusing.
This is a predictable straight-to-video/DVD rehash.
Jon Bon Jovi (Ally McBeal) tries to fill the James Woods role
as he tracks an uber-vamp across Mexico.
This is set in Budapest,
in a world where Vamps have come out of the closet.
Former vamp-hunter Jonathan Harker (Andrew Lee Potts -
Red Mist
) teams up with policeman Neil Jackson (
Blade: The Series
).
The plot is pretty much a rip-off from Blade 2 . Humans and vamps are being attacked by gargoyles - stone-faced flying vamps. But who created the virus that turns vamps into gargoyles?
