Lowry_Sam wrote: Wed Jan 21, 2026 6:41 pm
I'm guessing it has little to do with actual vampires and more with zombies/monsters, but I'll use this project to finally watch Planet Of The Vampires, thoughts on whether this (and other films that border more on zombie/alien territory.)?
As for other zombie/sci-fi films, I guess my own interpretation of "vampire" film goes beyond "are there fangs" to something like "are the victims of the vampire (whatever entity that is) aware that they are undead?" Zombie films seem to be about humans whose consciousness has ended but whose bodies continue on, but a vampire film seems to require a conscious understanding in the victims that they have been changed (for better or worse).
A second consideration—which I would struggle to apply as a firm rule—might go beyond just consciousness to some continuity of "selfhood." As in, is the victim not only aware of their change, but do they carry some sense of their former self into their new state of being? Do they still have their soul (whatever that means)? In Stoker's novel, the vampirized Lucy is described as “Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” There's not enough of her character in the book to know if she still understands herself as "Lucy, but changed" or if it's just Lucy's body with a new (or no) consciousness.
I know I'm not stating this clearly, but I think the best vampire movies are a bit tragic. They don't just involve victims turning into blood-lusting beasts but also the awareness of a loss of who they once were. Do they still have inner lives? Or are they, as Dracula's brides are depicted in the novel and many films, just blood-drinking automata under the control of the vampire? The latter is much less interesting to me and is closer to zombie territory than to the Gothic.
In western vampire tradition, I think there's also generally some kind of intimate, personal relationship between vampire and victim, which I think is reflected in the individuation of the victims that you mention. In most zombie films, it's "nothing personal," and the basis of the threat is their sheer numbers and lack of individuation.
In terms of a medical analogy, zombies are a pandemic and vampires are an STD.
Do any Elizabeth Bathory films automatically qualify as vampire films? Juraj Jakubisko made the lavish Bathory: Countess of Blood in 2008 (which I found well-crafted if not anywhere near as interesting as his early films), and there's that segment of Immoral Tales as well.
I had a look through the old horror list to look for good vampire films I might have forgotten, and realized that some of the films on my very short provisional vampire list aren't even horror films.
Bathory films are included in the Wikipedia list of vampire films, so that seems like broad enough approval for inclusion. The use of the blood of others to maintain youth/life seems like a core vampire trait, even if ingestion is not the method. So please feel free to include any documentaries about Bryan Johnson!
And zedz, you're absolutely right about there typically being a relationship between vampire and victim. Or there's a distinction made between victims known to the vampire who are "turned" versus more anonymous victims who are only fed upon and left to die. I think even well before Stoker, in the Eastern European folklore, the vurdulak would return from the dead to the family first. That's what happens in the Karloff segment of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath.
Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon does a surprise swerve into obviously referencing Bathory in its final section too, in particular with the Jena Malone character!
Talking about animation with vampires, one of the foundational series that got me into anime was the English dub of Cyber City OEDO 808 and its third episode "Blood Lust" is a quite moving techno-vampire one that I would highly recommend!
I don't have time for rewatches, so here's my write up on here from a couple years ago: "I had a mixed reaction the first time, finding the action creative but the humour annoying. I don't know what changed, but this has rocketed way up in my estimation. I found it a blast all through. The humour, while broad and mugging, just lands somehow, hitting the perfect note of goofiness and charm. And the action is astonishing, approaching each set piece not as a single thrilling incident, but an opportunity to experiment with all possible variations within a single setting, revolving through an endless series of problems and solutions, with each problem becoming crazier and more insurmountable. Films like these are the authentic inheritors of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. It's impossibly entertaining; so much energy and creativity in cheap popular entertainment. It really makes you feel how comparatively little imagination and creativity went into something like Ghostbusters. Mr. Vampire has become a new favourite."
Mr. Vampire 2 (Ricky Lau, 1986)
This was pretty miserable. The original is a ceaseless whirlwind of invention that its sequel comes nowhere close to matching. Lau and co. took their vibrant action comedy and turned it into a low rent kids film. The thing’s a variation on a premise rather than a continuation, as usual for Hong Kong, with the selling point being that the jiangshi are let loose in the modern world. But as with, say, Jason Takes Manhattan, the selling point is kept to the very end to save money while the bulk is confined to a bottle. Here, pretty much everything happens in a single room, and instead of exhausting all imaginative possibilities of said room, the thing belabours single conceits in a pedestrian way and then moves on. Yet there are three separate plot lines here with three separate sets of characters: A. a trio of bumbling grave robbers responsible for releasing a family of jiangshi (father, mother, young son); B. a unibrowed taoist priest (Lam Ching-Ying again), his daughter (Moon Lee), and shitheel future son-in-law (Yuen Biao); and C. a suburban family whose daughter hides/cares for the young jiangshi in just the worst E.T. rip off you can imagine. That these plot lines manage to dovetail in a satisfying way does nothing to improve the movie’s inability to juggle them for the rest of its 90 minutes, nor explain why so many characters and stories are needed in a movie where almost nothing happens. Vampires are in one location, then they leave and are in another location, and then finally they leave and are in a third. Mainly they’re in a workroom, then briefly in a morgue, then briefly in a house. That’s it, that’s the plot. There’s a lot of manic effort here, but no imagination, no style, not even any fights or special effects. If you told me they pumped this out in two weeks, I’d believe you. It’s a bad children’s movie made poorly and cynically. It’s not even bad enough to recommend on that basis, just dull and unfunny. Avoid it.
Mr. Vampire 3 (Ricky Lau, 1987)
Here we go. Shows the wild creativity of the original. We’re back in the past, too, funnily doing the plot of The Frighteners: Richard Ng’s penurious taoist uses a pair of ghost friends got up as jiangshi to fake exorcisms for pay, only to run into a village facing a Seven Samurai situation, except with demons/black magicians instead of bandits. Lam Ching-Ying is back as a further unibrowed taoist, plus some of the supporting cast of 2. I don’t know why I’m bothering to describe the plot as it’s only the clothesline for a series of gags and set pieces. There aren’t any actual vampires in the movie—not that jiangshi are typical vampires in the western sense, but there are no hopping bloodsuckers, just ghosts and demons. I was skeptical given how dire 2 was, but this is a terrific HK supernatural action comedy. People deep fry ghosts in this movie...and then fight the waddling, snorting, occasionally clucking(!) demonic tempura. Not eligible for the list, but a must if you like the original or Encounters of the Spooky Kind.
Mr. Vampire Saga 4 (Ricky Lau, 1988)
The series finally loses its last tenuous connection to the original: Lam Ching-Ying is no longer playing a unibrowed monster hunter. He’s replaced by Wu Ma, who has crazy but unconnected eyebrows. He gets a female disciple this time, played by future Cat III erotic film star Loletta Lee. The first half is uneventful, nothing but a loosely related set of goofy hijinks and other bad comedy, none of which involves any vampires. Finally, 45 minutes in, a dormant vampire is delivered to the heroes and the thing (corpse, movie) comes to life. The trouble is no matter how good the fantasy action--and it is often very good--it’s still just things you’ve seen three times before. The rest is comedy that’s difficult to like.
Mr. Vampire 1992 (Ricky Lau, 1992)
Lau brings back much of the original cast: Lam Ching-Ying as the unibrowed taoist, Chin Siu-Ho and Ricky Hui as disciples, and Billy Lau as some hapless, irritating authority figure. Moon Lee isn’t here, but they’ve got Sandra Ng. So this retread feels a lot more like a sequel than any of the others. The humour is impossibly crude: a young boy urinates in Ricky Hui’s face, including a close up of an actual prepubescent boy genuinely urinating on camera. Sandra Ng exorcises a man by savagely beating him until his face is covered in blood and bruises (hah?), and tries to cure a tit-obsessed sexual abuser by getting him to squeeze balloons. Actually a lot of the film’s comedy is uncomfortably fetishistic: women being flagellated with a stick, tied up and tickled, or hosed down in a white outfit to torment a tied-up man who can only watch; a man has paroxysms of pleasure from jamming his fingers into holes in bricks, ostensibly to file his cat-like nails. What makes it all so uncomfortable is it’s done in the jaunty, naive tone of a family comedy. Rather than bringing the series into a new decade by trying something new, the filmmakers just take the usual and add as much tastelessness as they can (I’m not even going to discuss the abortion subplot). Large sections of the movie were interminable, just filling time with the worst possible comedy until the vampire stuff can happen. When the jiangshi does finally make an appearance, half an hour in, there are some good fight scenes, more than in any entry besides the original. But they aren’t enough to distract from the awful comedy. The worst film in the series.
Other Films:
New Mr. Vampire (Billy Chan, 1986)
A cheap knock off released the same year as the official sequel. The story is something like a local taoist, charged with transporting a gangster’s dead brother to their hometown cemetery, is sabotaged by a rival taoist who unleashes the corpse as a vampire. Meanwhile, a hapless grave robber (star of the original, Chin Siu-Ho) gets tangled up with everything. Despite this set up, the bulk of the movie is dedicated to Chin Siu-Ho accidentally becoming spiritually bound to a beautiful female corpse, so she has to Simon Says everything he does. As a bit of comedy it’s mildly humorous for a scene or two, but not something that can sustain a movie given there’s only one available joke. I suspect an original script had jiangshi grafted on to it to take advantage of the popularity of Mr Vampire. How else to explain how the movie’s vampire remains dormant and propped up against a wall for most of the film while a completely different supernatural comedy plays out.
Vampire vs. Vampire (Lam Ching-Yin, 1989)
Our unibrowed taoist is back, and also directing. Chin Siu-Ho and a couple others are also back from the original Mr. Vampire, so this rip off is more a reunion. Once again the same slapstick comic skits loosely structured around the occult, with the last third finally developing into a plot of sorts. It’s annoying because that final plot ought’ve been the whole movie: a Hammer-style western vampire shows up in China, proving immune to the taoist magic normally used to battle vampires. That would’ve provided a movie’s worth of inventive scenarios of the precise kind HK is so good at. Instead, that plot strand is confined to the final thirty minutes and rather than anchoring a series of failures and creative improvisations, as you’d expect, turns into everyone just bashing the vampire harder and harder until he’s pulp. Said bashing can be thrilling and creative, with kinetic camera work and incredible stunts; and yet none of it fully exploits the premise’s potential. So much of the humour is intolerable, too, and there are numerous scenes where live bats appear to be mistreated. Worth noting that Hammer itself produced a film in Hong Kong, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, where Count Dracula commands an army of hopping jiangshi. Chang Cheh directed much of the action, with Hammer stalwart Roy Ward Baker handling the rest. It was more interesting than the other 70s Hammer Draculas tended to be. I’m mentioning this because I’ve run out of things to say about the movie at hand.
Magic Cop (Tung Wei, 1990)
Lam Ching-Ying, whose success in Mr. Vampire seems to’ve doomed him to a career of playing taoist monster hunters with absurd eyebrows, is a mainland cop who specializes in battling the undead. The Hong Kong police bring him in to help with a triad that employs supernatural beings. An unpromising idea in an exhausted subgenre that, somehow, improbably, makes for a superbly entertaining movie. The thing’s a parade of bizarre taoist magic, supernatural novelties, and action scenes that move breathlessly from one creative bit to another. If the pace sometimes dips with scenes of tepid comedy, as HK is apt to do, it’s always redeemed in the next scene by a novel bit of imagery or a scene brimming with enough creativity for five movies. To find gems this deep into a marathon of derivative, unpromising material is a real pleasure. Oh, and despite what the internet told me, there are no vampires here. Still very much worth seeing, tho’. I liked it better than everything else in this post save the original Mr. Vampire.
A Bite of Love (Stephen Shin Kei-Yin, 1990)
Pop star George Lam is a western style Dracula replete with cape, carriage, and even a conscience: he can’t bite living people, so he patronizes the local blood bank whose supplies are dwindling. In the mean time he romances Rosamund Kwan, tries to help an orphan child, and fends off thugs from Kwan’s dying gangster brother, Norman Chui, who wants Dracula’s blood to save his own life. The movie is all over the place: a comedy, a romance, a family drama, a gangster movie, an action movie, a gothic horror--and it switches tracks from scene to scene. That’s the HK ethos: why pick one tone when you can do them all! Dracula can also fly, use the ‘phone’ hand gesture to make actual phone calls, and has telekenesis for some reason, using it to fling thugs about. The Asian characters are generally clueless about western vampires, so there’s this amusing bit where Kwan tries to use an LD of Fright Night to figure out her predicament. The movie was filmed on location in England and maybe even with live sound. There’s ambient room noise, and the voices don’t have that typical HK flatness but sound as tho’ they’re coming from the actual room the actors are in. If so, that’s kind of neat to be getting Rosamund Kwan’s actual voice and vocal performance. Kwan’s the reason to watch something like this—she’s a charmer. George Lam, never much of an actor, is miscast as a suave European Dracula. Lam only has one emotion, really, a bemused detachment, which is fine for working class comedies or romances, but not something where aristocratic charm is needed. Anyway, I rather liked this wild bit of HK nonsense. It’s pacy, charming, low on bad humour, and always coming up with some weird plot point or other. Good fun.
The Ultimate Vampire (Andrew Lau, 1991)
Andrew Lau, director of the Infernal Affairs and Young and Dangerous series, tried his hand at a Mr. Vampire rip off early in his career. Once again Lam Ching-Ying is a taoist (no unibrow this time) and Chin Siu-Ho is his disciple. You’d think they were sick of doing this, but they’d be back the very next year for the last official Mr. Vampire movie. Carrie Ng is also here for an extended Chinese Ghost Story bit. The movie’s a grab bag of supernatural comedy rather than an outright vampire film. There’s more style and visual energy than most of the official Mr. Vampire movies, and considerably less goofiness. The finale is elaborate and exciting, too, with a hundred vampires descending on a temple. I can’t think of any special reason to see this movie, but I’d certainly choose it over any mainline Mr. Vampire entry outside of 1 and 3.
Which reminds me to recommend Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters aka The Era of Vampires directed by Wellson Chin. Been a while so maybe it's shit and I should re-watch it but from memory it's very atmospheric with lots of fog and supernatural fights. Decrepit, maggoty faces. Some cool almost Predator vision from the vampire's POV too.
A dead serious horror wuxia, inexplicably helmed by a man more at home in action comedies like The Inspector Wears Skirts series. A band of vampire hunters go out into the world to fight the undead. No discernible characters and a threadbare story told incoherently, but constant gory action and gothic visuals. This lies between golden age HK and the giant CGI spectacles that’ve dominated Chinese popular filmmaking for the past fifteen years. So it has similar action sensibilities to pre-handover and uses plenty of practical effects, but the budget’s lower, there’s more bad CGI, and the cinematography is darker, harsher, and more like early 2000s DTV American stuff. Mostly I appreciated having something more adult and serious after all the horror comedies pitched at a general audience, something where the monsters are meant to be horrifying and the atmosphere is dark. A low quality movie but entertaining if this sort of action is to your taste and you don’t mind a lack of story telling fundamentals.
The Twins Effect (Dante Lam and Donnie Yen, 2003)
A tedious vampire action movie with vampires and vampire hunters locked in an eternal battle on the streets of modern Hong Kong--tho’ mostly it’s a showcase for female canto pop duo Twins, one of whom falls in love with boring vampire Edison Chen while the other romances boring vampire hunter Ekin Cheng. I enjoyed Lam’s 1998 Beast Cops; it was a weird, charming hangout movie unlike anything else released at the time. This one feels like Lam saw Blade 2 and thought: what if I made it cheaper and as a rom com. It has stuff I remember from the Blade movies, like daywalkers, vampires using sunscreen, and the quest to become the ultimate vampire through some ancient ceremony, but with wacky meet cutes and dating shenanigans. This apes everything that made early 2000s genre movies intolerable: Matrix-inspired slomo and bullet time, poor CGI, professional wrestling moves, tepid rock soundtracks, and cheesy effects like whip pans, crazy filters, speed ups, etc. What this resembles is a Hong Kong flavoured American DTV production. I hated this thing. Vampires go to fancy restaurants and sip blood from wine bottles with printed lables reading: blood. Ugh. The thing’s goofy, but blandly, charmlessly so. Even an extended Jackie Chan and Karen Mok cameo couldn’t lift my spirits. A great example of how Hong Kong filmmaking gave up its soul at the start of the millennium.
Shaolin vs Evil Dead (Douglas Kung, 2004)
Directed by a man who made six of his nine features in 2002 - 2003, all with titles like Death Melody and Snake Charmer. I think he used more canted angles than regular ones. A loosely plotted film where legendary kung fu star Gordon Liu is a monk (what else?) who, along with his two disciples, one a young child, has various encounters with both the undead and his evil brother. Unlike the movies above that merely looked like cheap DTV productions, this plainly is one. Here’s what you’re in for: the kid disciple accidentally swallows a spirit egg, gets massively bloated, and then shits out a bald kid covered in shaving cream who calls the disciple ‘mom’ the rest of the movie. The bad guy needs a ‘virgin army’, so he hypnotizes a whole town’s kids to be his warriors. Gordon Liu plays a game of ‘phantom chess’ with his brother, which uses children (vampire kids vs shaolin kids) as game pieces on a huge chess board—but also everyone’s summoning bats and dragons and things. I don’t know. A lame, daft movie that has a modicum of entertainment value just for being so weird.
Shaolin vs. Evil Dead: Ultimate Power (Douglas Kung & Ken Yip, 2006)
The previous movie didn’t so much end as stop. I assumed this one would be an immediate sequel to give us a proper ending, but the bulk of the thing is actually a prequel. The first 70 minutes fill in the purely pro forma backstory of the original while the last thirty are an immediate sequel. Confusingly, Louis Fan, the evil brother from the first, is back not just as his original character but that character’s father as well, obviously in the prequel part. But then his evil brother character is also in the prequel part, just played by a different actor. None of this is announced; the movie just launches into sword battles and horse chases with an actor you watched blow up in the last movie, and without even a title card to tell you the timeline. And just to hammer home the movie’s casual disregard for basic storytelling: the very first scene of the unannounced prequel is a flashback. This is two movies, a self-serious historical wuxia and a goofy action horror, just slammed together and set before the audience. It’s the weirdest thing. Like, why am I watching an epic tale of war, loss, and betrayal, of shattered families and intergenerational trauma, as backstory to a movie where a kid shits out a ghost that becomes his child? Utter madness. If you’re undiscerning enough to enjoy the original, the lack of basic craft and sense won’t bother you any here. But I’ll pay it this complement: the fight scenes are considerably better than the first.
Rigor Mortis (Juno Mak, 2013)
Nearly 30 years later and Chin Siu-Ho is still starring in these things! A metafictional horror movie where Chin Siu-Ho plays an aging actor named Chin Siu-Ho who’s looking to commit suicide from personal tragedy and a stalled career. He moves into a nightmarish apartment block full of mysteries and kindly weirdos for that purpose, but instead finds himself dealing with the undead. Dour and self serious, with a colour grade that leaches all colour from the harsh digital photography (except when scary things happen, then sometimes everything’s red), and all sorts of hackneyed editing and photography tricks meant to seem stylish. There’re a lot of former Mr. Vampire series stars here: Chin, Richard Ng, Billy Lau, Paul Chung, Anthony Chan, plus a good role for former Shaw Brothers star Kara Wai. Outside the pleasure of seeing so many old faces in something newish, this was dull and derivative, making little out of its self-awareness of its genre legacy, and often very unpleasant. The film is dedicated to Lam Ching-Ying and Ricky Hui, saying “In your footsteps...”. I was tempted to make some crack about that, but both made plenty of garbage themselves in this subgenre.
Sifu vs Vampire (Daniel Yee Heng Chan, 2014)
Well, Wong Jing’s writing and producing, so in the first five minutes we get a joke about a guy making out with a trans woman unawares. He figures it out when he accidentally pulls out her bra padding after complaining multiple times that she smells for some reason, and then of course her voice drops two octaves, she pulls a knife, and robs him. She gives him a kick in the nads for good measure, and the already broad, mugging joke is capstoned by a freeze frame with a Batman-style “POW!” cartooned in. I have Sinners in my kevyip—why I’m sitting here watching ten-year-old Wong Jing movies on Tubi? Can someone explain these life choices? Anyway, we have Yuen Biao as a taoist spirit hunter, because apparently you can’t make a supernatural comedy post-2000 without some legacy star from the originals. Biao’s taoist, whose father was killed in front of him by a vampire during a botched reburial, refuses a cocky TV station owner’s request to help rebury the same coffin (something that has to be done every 30 years). An unscrupulous toaist is hired instead, mayhem ensues, and Biao, his hot assistant, and a pair of abysmally dumb triad members have to save the day. Same old goofy shit, minus the style and wit.
Vampire Cleanup Department (Chiu Sin-Hang & Yan Pak-Wing, 2017)
Chin Siu-Ho again! Man’s gotta eat, I guess. Richard Ng is here, too, as Chin’s partner in the titular department that cleans up after vampire attacks and does a bit of vampire hunting/prevention while they’re at it. Babyjohn Choi (you read that right) plays a street sweeper who gets bitten by a vampire, proves immune, and is recruited by the department to help fight the undead while also falling in love with a cute hopping jiangshi. Some other legacy actors round out the cast: Yuen Cheung-Yan, younger brother of Yuen Woo-Ping, is a toaist priest, while one of the original Five Venoms, Lo Meng, is the weapons master. The kind of action/horror/comedy/romance hybrid HK used to excel at, but done without much energy or excitement. The only thing here from the old days, beyond the actors, is the intolerable goofiness. Just another bit of bland, forgettable filmmaking from this era of Chinese entertainment.
Well I can guarantee that no one will be putting Goliath and the Vampires [Maciste contro il vampiro] (1961) on their list. Neglecting the hundreds of dollars worth of unwatched discs I have, I've been watching tons of Italian peplum films on Tubi and Plex. I prioritized this film for this list, but it might be one of the worst peplums I've seen. Ho-hum action, the only really interesting part being the "vampire"—who is like Skeletor if he had a small army of zombie soldiers—materializing out of clouds of red smoke. He also takes the form of Maciste to fight Maciste, but gets his face ripped off to reveal his fanged, skeletal face.
Sergio Corbucci had some involvement, which is probably what is keeping it circulating, but it's not like any of his signature is apparent here.
That's it. I swear. I've watched nothing but HK vampire comedies for the past three weeks. I can't do any more. It wasn't supposed to be like this. I was just going to watch seven of them. But there's always one more. It never ends. There shouldn't be this many. I need to watch something else now. For my sanity.
Kung Fu Zombie (Hua Shan, 1981)
A low rent chop socky action comedy, a lot of whose humour just involves fast motion. The fights are also ludicrously sped up, tho’ otherwise have decent choreography. Don’t let the title fool you: in Chinese folklore, vampires are created from zombies under certain conditions. Here, a criminal the hero helped put away tries to get revenge by having a toaist magician raise the dead. When the criminal is killed in his own trap, his ghost threatens the taoist into reincarnating him, eventually resulting in a vampire. The film is terrible, there’s no avoiding that, but the energetic commitment to its material and the sheer momentum makes it very watchable in the face of its cheapness and ineptitude. The thing moves feverishly from set piece to set piece, never lingering on any one scene or conceit, indifferent to narrative, emotional, or even editing logic. Its one and only dictate is to never stop moving. You won’t laugh much, none of the fights stand out against its competitors, and the thing’s sometimes unbelievably tasteless--but you’ll never be bored! I mean a vampire kicks a man’s head clean off and then drinks from the fountain of blood. Where else are you going to see shit like that?
Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave (Lee Chiu, 1982)
A Hamlet-ish beginning as the ghost of a young man’s murdered father returns to enjoin him to take revenge. The murderer has a black magician in his employ, tho’, so the simple revenge plot serves as a parade of bizarre supernatural imagery as the young man tries different magical strategies to get his revenge. There’s less comedy and a lot more gothic horror than the previous movie, but that’s in no way saying it isn’t ridiculous from start to finish. The black magician for instance summons Dracula by burning a fistful of western bills. Dracula is immune to taoist magic, so the hero resorts to throwing garlic that explodes on impact like little garlic bombs. Towards the end, a chorus line of women help defeat the black magician by throwing their sanitary napkins at him, the blood helping break his magic spell. The thing’s also an endless stream of fighting, supernatural or otherwise, much of it pretty good. Not as breathless and manic as the last movie, but a good companion to it with its cheapness, stupidity, and winning sense of imagination and excitement. I rather liked it.
The Close Encounters of Vampire (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1986)
The famed Yuen clan decided on a Mr. Vampire clone for some reason. Their 1982 black magic comedy, The Miracle Fighters, was a joyous indulgence in unrestrained creativity, and I figured if this movie had even a bit of that one’s ethos, it’d be a treat. I’d have to guess this was made exclusively for money, then. How else to explain how rushed and dull the thing is. There aren’t even any good fights. Justly forgotten.
The Haunted Cop Shop (Jeffrey Lau, 1987)
Jeffrey Lau comedies are wild and manic even for Hong Kong. He’s been that way from the beginning, apparently, at least to judge by this movie, his first. And who helped him write and produce this pile of goofy supernatural shenanigans? Wong Kar-Wai! Yes, before Wong decided to become an art house darling, he worked with his friend Jeff Lau to make popular comedies, in this case, one about a police station haunted by the demonic spirits of Japanese officers who killed themselves during the occupation of China. Naturally, the vampiric Japanese general is unleashed during an auspicious day for spirits, forcing the hapless officers to contend with endless supernatural intrusions. The plot, like any HK comedy, is not a coherent, developing story, just the occasion for a series of often unrelated gags. Lau’s an interesting case in how he combines dense webs of allusion to Hong Kong culture, society, and history with comedy pitched at the lowest common denominator. The style here is wonderful, the gags breakneck and frequently ingenious, and the music, characters, and general tone crude and juvenile (eg.: trying to convince a vampire you have AIDS so he won’t bite you; killing the chief’s beloved dog so you can feed its meat to your colleague to give her bad luck). ‘Collision’ is the best way to describe a Jeff Lau comedy. Plots, characters, and tones don’t develop or even sit alongside each other: they collide. Horrific violence and slapstick comedy, complex verbal play and childish clowning, sophisticated visual language and dumb conceits, gothic horror tropes and frat boy antics—it all just smashes together at velocity. Seriously, one moment a taoist priest has his arm ripped off in a geyser of blood, and ten seconds later everyone’s putting their underwear on their heads to hide from the vampire. A sensibility all its own. Not as good as Lau’s later Chinese Odyssey pair or even The Legendary La Rose Noire, but much better than his pair of gambling films with Stephen Chow. A pretty fun movie considering how lame it also is.
The Haunted Cop Shop 2 (Jeffrey Lau, 1988)
More of a direct sequel than you’d expect: Jacky Cheung and Ricky Hui are back as incompetent police officers dealing with the undead, only now their police station officially recognizes the existence of ghosts and vampires and is committed to hunting them down. There’s more crass humour and less gothic horror. Sample joke: a hot vampire trying to seduce Ricky Hui can’t bite him if her breasts are groped because it sends her into paroxysms of ecstasy, meaning the scene alternates between her chasing him and him feeling up while she moans. The scene crescendos with Hui literally fucking the vampire into submission to keep her from biting him before his partner can get the door open, eventually declaring, “I can’t hold it anymore, just bite me!” I have to admit, as unfunny as it is, there’s something impressive about such a total commitment to tastelessness, to not only dreaming this scenario up but taking it that far. And then to cap it, the whole thing ends in a genuinely creative bit about using a set of mirrors to direct sunlight into the depths of the police station, killing the vampire in the weirdest bout of coitus interruptus I’m confident has ever been filmed. I’d like to think Wong Kai-Wai himself wrote that entire bit. That the scene doesn’t conclude but inaugurate an outbreak of total chaos is representative of the film’s impossibly manic creative energy.
Shaolin vs Vampire (Gordon Liu, 1988)
A Japanese company seems to’ve hired Gordon Liu to direct and star in a Japanese tv movie for kids. It looks shot on tape. Gordon Liu is the only guy in his village who doesn’t believe in vampires, but then his daughter brings home a cute little Jiangshi at the same time an evil wizard plots to destroy the town using vampires. There’s one Japanese actor, Yuki Kudo, and then I’m guessing a lot of HK actors, because their mouths don’t match the Japanese dubbing (they’re uncredited on IMDB). Mr. Vampire must’ve been a hit in Japan, not just because this whole thing exists, but because there’s a shot-for-shot recreation of a notable scene. The movie’s bad, innocuous, but bad.
Who Cares? (Max Lee, 1989)
Good fucking question. It’s low rent Girls With Guns mixed with jianghshi horror comedy. A bunch of grave robbers steal a magic bead, unleashing a vampire. Meanwhile police officers Sibelle Hu and Kara Wai are taking on a violent triad who seek the bead while the grave robbers die one-by-one in mysterious circumstances. It’s three different movies awkwardly jammed together...again. Decent fight choreography marred by poor framing and editing, and some real wildness that comes way too late in the film. The triads assassinate a guy by dumping ice blocks down the steps in front of where he’s eating to...crush him, I guess? It’s hard to say what they were going for. The funniest part is that the movie’s decision to just dump ice blocks down the steps for real shows them shattering into small harmless pieces almost immediately, foiling even the most heroic efforts at suspension of disbelief on behalf of whatever tiny audience exists for this film. And this is all filmed from multiple camera angles like it’s meant to be a big, stunning effect. The scene ends with a close up of a piece of blue-painted foam being tossed into the actor’s chest, he falls down on the ice in a paroxysm, blood leaking from his mouth, and so ends the least convincing assassination in movie history. But that’s not even the wildest moment. There’s one scene where our lead police officers just stand there watching a guy die. They speculate briefly on what’s killing him (an invisible vampire), watch him for a bit in silence as he thrashes, screams, and leaks blood, and then when he finally dies, shrug their shoulders and walk off. It’s insane.
Mortuary Blues (Jeffrey Lau, 1990)
Jeez, Lau made eight movies in his first three years. In this one, an island village rich from having stolen gold from a government galleon hundreds of years ago, killing the officials and burying both under the village, must perform a yearly ritual to keep the bad mojo at bay. This year, they invite an opera troupe to perform on the auspicious day while a pair of grave robbers try to open the hidden tomb. The vampire and his minions are unleashed, townsfolk are killed, and the opera troupe members plus the local police endure endless spiritual escapades. I don’t know how much more I have to say about Jeff Lau’s style of comedy. Whole families are slaughtered, young mothers are sacrificed mere seconds after putting their kids to bed, and then the next moment a guy smokes poison herbs thinking it’s pot and turns Lou Ferrigno green, or a dowdy woman’s sudden toplessness causes general vomiting. What even is tone? Lau seems to’ve run low on inspiration for all these supernatural comedies, because he borrows gags from Haunted Cop Shop 2, including the groping bit (here a ghost’s buttocks). This also has the most extended shit joke I’ve ever seen, where seemingly every person in town gets diarrhea one after another in a major set piece. It just goes on and on until the thing starts to become funny just through the sheer absurdity of its extent. The movie turns into an Indiana Jones parody 2/3 of the way through, because...? There’s a rare starring role for famed director/choreographer/Seven Little Fortunes member Corey Yuen, plus plenty of mugging from Sandra Ng and Lowell Lo. The movie builds to a wonderfully elaborate, theatrical, self-reflexive finale, a mash-up of modern movies and classical performance. I’m still kinda in awe at how much skill and craft was lavished on the most childish bullshit.
Doctor Vampire (Jamie Luk Kim-Ming, 1990)
I enjoyed A Bite of Love enough to have hopes for this one, a comedy about a doctor bitten by a vampire while on business in England and slowly turning into a vampire when back home. But the thing’s so tepid. There’s no wildness, no invention, no crazed creative energy that made Hong Kong filmmakers throw in everything they could, coherence be damned. It does pick up right at the climax, tho’, where the stunt team and second unit have plainly taken over, so we get Dracula shooting laser beams from his eyes, doctors battling vampires with giant hypodermic needles full of glowing green acid, magical statues transforming people into Peking Opera heroes, and reams of incredible stunt work. Outside of that, the movie’s lifeless. Sample jokes: a vampire assaults various women in a hospital while sporting a massive erection poking through his hospital gown. A chesty vampire’s killed by having swords stuck through each of her breasts.
Vampire Kids (Kenny Ha & Keith Lee, 1991)
Very much a Mortuary Blues riff, with Sandra Ng, Amy Yip, and co. on an island (this time as castaways) accidentally awakening a dormant vampire after they steal some treasure. A perverted sex comedy for long stretches starring Cat III erotic star Amy Yip, but then also a kid’s movie with cute hopping vampire children who get up to hijinks. It can be very hard to tell the intended audience of a Hong Kong film sometimes. Jeff Lau comedies aren’t funny, but there’s a style and energy to them that you really miss watching something like this. The jokes are just as unfunny, but they seem slower, they go on for longer, and there’s never an interesting camera angle or transition. That feel of endlessly ratcheting invention doesn’t happen. Mediocre films like this, however tedious, can be clarifying.
Any updates on Nadja screenings? Grasshopper's website says there will be a screening at Alamo Drafthouses on 2/17, however there's no mention of the film on Alamo's website & that day's calendar listing for my local one is completely blank.
Hammer vampire films are a blind spot of mine, so luckily there are some on streaming options. Twins of Evil was solid and effective. Vampire Circus was very good indeed and conjures a strange, surreal atmosphere. Is there much value in Countess Dracula? I've got Kiss of the Vampire and Lust for a Vampire on my list too.
Countess Dracula, while not a favourite of mine, is worth a watch, moreso than either Lust for a Vampire or Kiss of the Vampire. The latter is merely ok, while the former is pretty bad, one of Hammer's worst 70s films.
Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil, along with The Vampire Lovers, form a loose trilogy.
Carried by the energy of the performances. But it’s painfully earnest, derivative (of Jordan Peele and siege horrors like Demon Night), and not fleet enough storytelling-wise to properly marry its parts. Like most of its detractors, I found it undercooked. I’d assumed this’d be an allegory for cultural appropriation, which the movie seems to set up, what with the first few vampires being white racists who absorb music. But then the vampires turn out to be immigrants from an oppressed group, and they form a kind of music collective not unlike the melting pot of the party where black jazz and Peking opera mingle (a complicated oner meant to be bravura, but which came off as self important and strained). Music, vampirism, racism...I dunno, the movie is all over the place. It’s also very into the idea of the conventional family, with characters either dying to protect it or, in a trope I’ve always felt uncomfortable, dying because the death of a child means the parents may as well pass on themselves, there’s nothing left for them. Why such a bland and forgettable film should strike a cultural cord like this one, who knows. I suspect a lot of people will fondly revisit this in five years and wonder what they were so on about.
Innocent Blood (John Landis, 1992)
Vampire Anne Parillaud feeds on future Sopranos cast members in 90s gangland New York. Something like a romantic horror comedy, tho’ its comedy is lame, its horror is given little attention, and Anne Parillaud, while an inspired choice on paper, looked too uncomfortable amidst the mafia stereotypes to generate any heat. Landis can still make a breezy film, there were some chuckles here and there (the morgue scene), and he shoots excellent SFX and makeup work. But the movie felt unconvincing. That said, Robert Loggia single-handedly rescues the movie from its own vapidness with a hell of a comic performance. He’s the thing’s real star.
We are roughly half-way through our allotted time period for this list, so I want to remind everyone to continue watching, reading, and considering. I don't want to extend the deadline because I want to stay out of the way of the decades/years list deadlines and the proposed musicals list redux.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (André Øvredal, 2023)
Takes a minor episode from the novel Dracula and expands it to feature length. The Demeter is of course the ship that brings Dracula to England, shipwrecking on the coast of Whitby with only the captain’s body still aboard, lashed to the wheel. Much as in the novel, the narrative of the movie is told in retrospect from the captain’s diary after the ship is discovered. A promising idea for a horror film undone by constant mediocrity. From the script to the characters to the shot choices, everything is predictable. The movie’s laborious manner of working through its plot leads to an excessive two-hour run time for what is nothing more than a straightforward Alien style monster movie, as Dracula only appears as a monstrous bat creature. The main character (Corey Hawkins) is an enlightened, Cambridge educated black man who knows astronomy and medicine, a set of facts the movie periodically throws in the other characters’ faces to flout racist assumptions that, for the most part, go unexpressed. The movie’s need to be inoffensive makes it inadequate to deal with the actual face of 19th century racism. The other main character is a gypsy woman, played by Aisling Franciosi (an actress I’ve been fond of ever since I saw her in The Fall, but who’s given little to work with here). She’s there to flout sexist assumptions (she comes in clutch in a number of typically heroic moments despite the presence of burly sailors) and, of course, poke away at the main character’s thoroughly modern rationalism. Again, the need to be inoffensive forces the movie to paper over the realities a beautiful young woman would face aboard a ship crewed by crass, drunken manly men. Not worth seeking out the scant pleasures available here.
Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell, 1988)
It being Ken Russell I knew I was in for something extravagant, but I was surprised to find an arch comedy. It really plays up its own ridiculousness, tho’ what else can you do with a story like this of pagan snake gods and virgin sacrifices in the midlands? You can tell where Ken Russell’s interest lay: in the hallucinations and dream sequences that pop up throughout, full of blasphemous and transgressive sexual imagery, and less so the traditional horror plot. He makes a lot of this ridiculous, people playing snakes and ladders, or sucking the poison out of snake bites, or eating jellied worms, and other silliness. And let’s not forget what might be one of the highest dick-joke-to-run-time ratios in cinema. Sure, there’s something amusing about posh British aristocrats bemusedly floating through gothic horror plots, and Hugh Grant and Amanda Donohoe do seem to be having fun, but it’s not enough if you’re going to invest no energy into your plot, or if your humour mainly rests on the first cliches that pop to mind when you hear the word ‘snake’ (yes, there’s snake charming, mongooses, poison sucking, phallic jokes, Indian imagery, whatever you can think of). Plus all the hissing, rattling snakes are harmless boas and pythons—tho’ I guess that’s not so different from vampire films having their scary vampire bats be played by harmless fruit bats. Russell certainly had his upcoming Lawrence adaptation, The Rainbow, in mind while making this, as he invests Lair of the White Worm with a Laurentian atmosphere of regenerating natural sexuality opposed to inhibited, hypocritical christian values among the gentry. Amanda Donohoe has a fun monologue about Christ locking up his wives (ie. nuns), leaving them to masturbate in the dark. None of this entirely coherent--the figure of sexual openness is still a fanged monster menacing pretty virgins, no matter how charming. But it’s something.
Vampyros Lesbos (Jess Franco, 1970)
There’s no way Franco wasn’t going to try his hand at a lesbian vampire film. I don’t think Franco’s a good director, but his fevered, impressionistic montage style here kinda works. The thing’s certainly better than The Blood Spattered Bride, which it superficially resembles, being about another repressed housewife who has erotic dreams of a mysterious vampire woman who eventually enters her life. The former was a confused pseudo-feminist fable that took more pleasure in degrading its female character than in its weak moralisms. Franco’s film aspires to something more psychedelic and Freudian. Like so many of these films, sexuality, especially queer sexuality, is compulsive and obsessive, non-rational and disordered. Yes, the movie takes a ‘shit just happens’ storytelling philosophy, and the kind of delirium Franco conjures can be found widely in Italian film, including much better movies like Perfume of the Lady in Black and Footprints on the Moon. Franco’s style is stiff and creaky, even at its best (the man loves his zooms and tripod swivels). At one point an actress sits back in her chair and goes half out of frame, and it takes the camera operator a few beats to realize he should reframe her. Your enjoyment depends on how much you like luxuriating in a very particular atmosphere, because there isn’t anything else, not story, characters, or horror. I found myself vibing with this one.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Ariane Louis-Seize, 2023)
A droll, absurdist Quebecois comedy about a teenage vampire, riddled with compassion and a burden to her parents with her inability to hunt, seeking a titular suicidal person to consent to be food. Who she finds is a moody high school weirdo that, as you’d guess, she befriends. Much of the comedy comes from inverted conventions and cliches in coming-of-age movies. The family are just trying to usher their shy, socially-anxious daughter into adulthood...by trying their best to get her to murder transients. There’s a conventional teen romance, where the two dance around their growing desires, building up the courage...except it’s to kill/die. All this is carried off with a slightly absurdist deadpan tone. The movie doesn’t build to anything transgressive or subversive—this is ultimately an affirming movie, where repressed outsiders grow into themselves—but it has fun fucking around with teen rom-com conventions. Recommended.
Vampire (Shunji Iwai, 2011)
Psychopathic vampire seeking consenting suicidal person to deceive. Or is he merely a delusional, blood drinking serial killer? This was the ambiguity in Martin, but there’s less ambiguity to Iwai’s film. Kevin Zegers’ Simon poses as suicidal on various forums, looking to set up suicide pacts with other members. Instead, he drains their blood into jars and drinks it. I was a fan of Iwai’s Picnic, a movie that similarly mined its characters’ peculiarities and delusions to build a fantastical, unreal atmosphere in an identifiable social reality. I suspect Vampire would’ve worked better in Iwai’s native Japan. The movie shows all the problems with writing scripts and directing actors outside one’s native language. The acting and dialogue are stiff and unconvincing, and this in a story already straining at credibility. On top of that, the movie is disjointed, a collection of scenes rather than a developing story, and it sets itself a tone of beautiful melancholy and loneliness at odds with the grotesque material and alienating characters. The movie doesn’t do nearly enough to make its delusional predator sympathetic or even understandable—he’s a sentimental douchebag who preys on the vulnerable while mournful piano music plays. Meanwhile, he’s surrounded by oddball characters whose behaviour the movie declines to explain. There are some deeply unpleasant scenes, like a fellow vampire serial killer raping a woman as he drinks her blood, shown in graphic detail. All I can think is the movie is trying to brute force your sympathy for the lead by including characters massively worse than him. For a movie like this to work, it requires a precise touch, the exact touch that made Picnic so enthralling. Iwai doesn’t manage it and the movie collapses as a result.
Leptirica (The She-Butterfly) is a Yugoslavian TV-movie from the 1970s that has a unique and particularly Serbian twist on the 'vampire' legend - Sava Savanović. This shows the ordinary working lives of the community, punctuated by an underlying sense of unease, and a quite shocking finale.
Vampirism, cannibalism, addiction, fetishization—something like that. It shares a lot with the werewolf film, too. So it’s a portrait of generalized monstrousness and the pressure that monstrousness puts on relationships. Unlike Cronenberg, Denis does not gift her monstrous characters with the ability to articulate their feelings. Their sorrows and compulsions go unexpressed in language. The film maps the surface of their feelings—looks, poses, gestures; their skin, their hair. Even their brief daydreams reveal object worship. Monstrousness as a surface and a behaviour, but not so much a psychology. What you get is primarily an aesthetic, one that mixes the poetic with a disturbing combination of eroticism and brutality. I don’t know that the film has much to say dramatically, but as an expression of a complex and powerfully felt emotional state, it’s fascinating. And there’s a bare honesty here that most erotic vampire films don’t bother with. Even a movie like The Addiction, which is a very raw movie, fits its story inside a specific conceptual structure. Denis doesn’t bother with such structures. She gives you the beauty and the ugliness unadorned and leaves you to feel your way through what’s happening. Genuinely one of the most horrifying films I’ve ever seen.
Blood and Roses (Roger Vadim, 1960)
Adapts le Fanu’s Carmilla, the ur-text for lesbian vampire films. Wooden acting, creaky story, elegant style. Despite Vadim having a classier reputation, his work here is not so different from genre hacks like Margheriti or Freda, and well below the phantasmagorias of Bava (or, turning to England, the muscular work of Terence Fisher). The film is too stately for its own good. I understand the luscious, romantic effect it’s going for, but that pacing leads it to sleepwalk through much of its plot. For such a short film, the vampire doesn’t even show up til 30 minutes in. Fisher got through the whole first act of Stoker’s Dracula in about 15. And while the movie looks lovely, I couldn’t help wishing it’d been more garish, thrown in a green light or two, run a bit of smoke past the camera. I guess I wish the thing were a bit trashier, less concerned with being respectable. The movie just isn’t all that exciting.
The Night Flier (Mark Pavia, 1997)
A vampire flies around the country in a Cesna, killing people. This becomes an urban legend that grizzled tabloid reporter, Miguel Ferrer, obsessively seeks to prove real so he can make it back on the front page. Bears all the hallmarks of its made for tv origins: flat, overlit photography, amateur acting, chintzy synth score, low rent story, lame ‘zinger’ dialogue. It feels like a weak Tales from the Crypt episode blown up to feature length. Only Miguel Ferrer (whose perpetually irritated performance I could easily believe was just his real feelings about having to be here) and the effects work from KNB feel like from a proper movie. It has one of the more interesting vampire design since Max Schreck, like a man slowly degrading into a malformed bat or something. And that’s about all this dull movie has going for it. The bulk of it is just Miguel Ferrer travelling about, talking to locals, punctuated by the occasional gory car crash or angry hick in a vain attempt to disguise how uneventful the movie is as it lumbers to its pre-ordained conclusion. Yes, there are ‘scary’ dreams (or were they?!), angry dogs who may or may not be there, and a murderous, razor-clawed ghoul who prefers sending the hero napkin messages like ‘STOP NOW!’ than doing the obvious and making him. God this movie’s so lame.
Tales From the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood (Gilbert Adler, 1996)
Speaking of Tales of the Crypt, here’s the second full length movie wrought by the popularity of the HBO adaptation. The odd thing about these movies is that, visual style and tongue-in-cheek humour aside, they don’t resemble EC-style stories. They’re gory monster movies. This one in particular feels like someone saw From Dusk to Dawn and thought: I can do a cheaper version of that with Dennis Miller and Corey Feldman, directed by a guy with no experience in film and whose most notable credits were two episodes from the later seasons of Tales of the Crypt. It even has super soakers full of holy water! Gale and Zemeckis came up with the story, which means they sat in their office one day and thought to themselves: vampire prostitutes! The gore work is extensive and often impressive. Angie Everhart shoves her meter long tongue down a guy’s throat, into his chest, and uses it to push the man’s heart clean through his ribcage. Between that and the rampant gratuitous nudity, this is a straightforward exploitation film, but done with such glibness and goofy irreverence that, on some fundamental level, the film can’t commit to itself as a film. Like it’s apologizing for existing. And for a movie this bad I understand the impulse. But there’s a difference between, say, poking fun at your material like Ken Russell in Lair of the White Worm, and shrugging at your audience and saying in effect: ‘what can you do, eh?’
I had a few more viewings planned, but I'm pretty tired of watching non-stop vampire films at this point. This'll be it.
Climate of the Hunter (Mickey Reece, 2019)
An uncategorizable indie film with an unsummarizable plot. The situation is that two aging sisters are visited by a man from their past who may or may not be a vampire. The film is then subdivided into chapters, each one playing through some family or interpersonal drama. Cosmology, high literature, mental illness, romance, awful food, and family dysfunction all mix into this film’s odd melange. The thing has a very particular tone, one similar to Reece’s Every heavy Thing, which I saw at last year’s Fantasia Festival. It’s hard to describe, but it balances the dramatic and the surreal with the ridiculous and the droll to make this uneasy, sorta funny, sorta serious manner where you’re not exactly sure how sincere anything is. The movies aren’t comedies or parodies, but neither are they entirely serious. This particular movie is full of self-aware characters with sharp tongues and acid outlooks, and the drama can be painfully direct. At the same time, the characters can also be pompous or superficial, so that you aren’t sure they’re not the butt of a joke. I’m happy I saw this—I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vampire film like this one.
El Conde (Pablo Larrain, 2023)
An historical fantasia that reimagines Augusto Pinochet as a centuries old vampire whose early (and somewhat cowardly) experiences with the French revolution inspired him to fight all revolutions across history. Having faked his death in 2006 following his arrest and indictment, he lives as a decrepit old man on a farmstead, flying into town every night to cut people’s hearts from their chests to be blended later for sustenance. Like many an old and sentimental filmic vampire, Pinochet is tired of immortality and seeks to die, while his family plots in various ways to inherit his hidden wealth. The portrait of the dictator that emerges is a simple one: he’s vain, greedy, and a leech who used his position to enrich himself while employing sadists and psychopaths. His family is little better. Large sections of the film are given over to various members of the Pinochet family admitting to their crimes because their interrogator, a young nun posing as an accountant, flatters their egos and plies them with their own vain self-justifications. This is not a fiery satire--it’s more prankish and urbane. How could it be otherwise with such a careful, elegant visual style? The movie is beautifully shot in atmospheric black and white, full of controlled camera movements and precise compositions, all set to famous classical and modern compositions. Its best barb is its most allegorical: the Catholic church’s inadequacy, full of a righteousness that in no way protects it from abandoning its outward principles for the seductions of the powerful. Yet the way this theme is expressed, with such beautiful and rapturous style, allows it to be forgotten as you luxuriate in the sound and images. There’s also a pretty good shot against Britain and Thatcher. But it’s the images and atmosphere you remember, not the satire. As satire, it’s tepid. As a piece of art house elegance, it’s enjoyable.
Dracula (Luc Besson, 2025)
I understand this has been read as an apologia for the director’s many relationships with considerably younger women, some underage. If so, Besson hasn’t done much of job of it. The age-gap aspect is implicit in most vampire romance films of this sort, and Besson does nothing to emphasize it. Caleb Landry Jones and Zoë Bleu Sidel are only five years apart in age, quite a bit less than the 27 years between Jack Palance and Fiona Lewis in Dan Curtis’ Dracula, the 12 years between Frank Langella and Kate Nelligan in Badham’s Dracula, or the 13 years between Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a movie Besson freely rips off. The movie also does nothing to disguise that Zoë Bleu Sidel is a woman in her 30s. Compare to Eggers’ Nosferatu, which cast a woman obviously in her early 20s and plays her off against an ancient Dracula. If Besson were attracted to precisely this aspect of the story, I wouldn’t expect him to emphasize it less than the other notable versions, none of which have the reputation for defending sexual impropriety. Sure, there are scenes where Dracula is able to turn roomfuls of women into mindless sexual zombies, but he does it with a magic perfume rather than raw sexual charisma, so I’m not convinced this is meaningful. Far more unpleasant and suggestive is the prologue’s scenes of Vlad Tepes’ victory against the Ottomans, where Vlad’s infamous impalings, usually a symbol of mediaeval savagery, become a stirring image of European triumph against a hoard of trembling Muslim invaders (three of whom try to rape Vlad’s wife). Never thought I’d see Vlad the goddamn Impaler reclaimed as a cultural hero against immigrants. Especially given Stoker’s novel, famously about that very same fear of immigration, applies Vlad’s own sobriquet to the invading foreigner! Politics out of the way, the movie is bland and derivative. In the past Besson was a reliably stylish director, but here turns out flat, anonymous work occasionally spiced with visual cliches out of mid-2000s DTV films. The photography embraces that crisp, textureless feel of modern digital work, where every cranny of a given room is so perfectly illuminated that gothic atmosphere becomes impossible. Everything about the look of this movie feels inauthentic. Which may’ve been the point, Besson deciding there was no way to compete with Eggers’ Nosferatu, ie. the likely reason his movie was greenlit, and decided on something more traditionally artificial. The thing is also full of bizarre tonal shifts, including a comic montage showing Dracula perfecting a perfume that makes whole rooms of European ladies break into choreographed dances before trotting off after Vlad like after the pied piper. Vlad also employs a troupe of CGI gargoyles like this is Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (one of them pulls off a pro wrestling move in the climax). At one point, a vampire vixen does a Naruto run at Christoph Waltz, and after being beheaded, continues to choke him while spewing blood everywhere like this is Evil Dead 2. A dull, silly movie that does nothing to justify its existence in an already overstuffed field of Dracula adaptations.
Dracula 3D (Dario Argento, 2012)
Speaking of formerly stylish euro auteurs trying their hand at Dracula and failing badly. Jesus Christ. This is a hodge podge of a movie, an incoherent mixture of other Dracula movies, assembled by a man who’s stopped seeming like one of his own untalented imitators and now just resembles an anonymous DTV hack. It’s like Argento doesn’t even know where to put the camera anymore. Or how shoot coverage. A lot of the dialogue scenes play out in the master for some reason, sometimes with the actors full on turning their backs to the camera to look at someone entering. This has some of the worst photography I’ve seen in a while, just a blown out digital mess, sometimes little better than an amateur wielding a commercially available camera. At times the key light was so harsh it looked like someone was shining a flashlight right into the actors’ faces from just offscreen. So imagine my shock to discover Luciano Tovoli is the cinematographer. Luciano Tovoli! The man behind the technicolor dreamscapes of Suspiria and the harsh monochrome nightmare of Tenebre. I’m not going to to pull the same shock that Claudio Simonetti is back to rehabilitate the theremin because that’s not so weird a choice from him. But all the same, how seriously can you take a movie with a theremin score? It’s choices like that that frustrate any attempt to figure out what Argento is going for. While at times it seems like he’s going for serious horror, at others he’s doing a romantic drama, a gory exploitation, and, most unaccountably, a cheeky, semi-comic resurrection of the Hammer formula, replete with endless low cut tops and heaving bosoms as tho’ this is meant to be goofy, nostalgic fun. He even has Dracula turn into a giant CGI mantis at one point, and I don’t know how seriously I was meant to take that. Besson had the same trouble with tone—do these men not trust the material enough, or their own ability to tackle it, so they throw in a weird comic tone as a way to hedge? Oh, and I had an uncomfortable realization: every time I’ve seen Asia Argento in one of her father’s films, she’s gotten naked. I can’t imagine anyone needs persuading to avoid post-80s Argento, but nevertheless, please, don’t see this movie.
One Dark Night (Tom McLoughlin, 1982)
A moody, slow paced 80s horror where Meg Tilly’s sorority pledge spends a night in a mausoleum that happens to house the remains of a recently deceased ‘psychic vampire’, who resurrects himself and several of his corpse pals by feeding on Tilly’s fear. For such a silly premise, the movie is committed to setting up its horrors with a patient accumulation of plot and character details until, finally, after an hour, the thing bursts into grotesque life. So the movie requires more patience than it’s able to pay off. It’s hard not to feel that the first act has been stretched to an hour, while the more interesting second and third acts are compressed into the final 35 minutes. So the script needed a better draft, and yet once things get going, there are some effective scenes that show a surprising sense for timing. Director McLoughlin would go on to helm the best Friday the 13th film, Jason Lives, which makes sense as I’ve always thought that movie had a good sense of timing, both comic and otherwise, in a series whose directors and editors were always lax and sloppy with their timing.
