Would someone please drive a stake through the projector?

"John Carpenter's Vampires"

Reviewed by John Haywood.

Overall Rating: *

Vampire films don't usually do it for me. I need to be honest (unlike at least 90% of the characters in the film)--"John Carpenter's Vampires" had one strike against it going in. But subsequently, it struck out on its own.

The film opens with about seven or eight of the scruffiest men you can imagine approaching a run-down farmhouse. Lead by Jack Crow (James Woods), they're driving a jeep and what looks like an armored car; and though they look like rejects from a biker gang (except for an accompanying priest--who seems completely out of his element), they're actually vampire hunters--and they proceed to unload an arsenal of crossbows, spears, guns, and other gadgets from the truck, then break into the house, and start looking for vampires. Even though they say that wooden stakes will kill them, they always (after stabbing them with wooden stakes, and sometimes spearing and/or shooting them) do away wit the vampires by shooting them with arrows (hence the crossbow), then hauling them outside using ropes attached to the arrows and the winch on the jeep. (This seems to be the jeep's sole function--but it's an excuse to have it there, and they do need it later).

After doing away with nine vampires--but not finding the master vampire they expected to find in the nest--this crew has a party at the motel where they're staying (the Sun God Motel--the motel's name was the best thing about the movie), inviting numerous prostitutes and the local cop. The party won't last long, however, for the master vampire Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith)--who looks like a bad imitation of the lead singer of Marilyn Manson--crashes the party, and he is ticked. Cops, priests, prostitutes, vampire hunters--it doesn't matter. He kills almost everybody.

Knowing they have no chance of beating this vampire if they stay, Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) and Crow drag away the nearly comatose Katrina (Sheryl Lee)--a prostitute who'll have a telepathic link with Valek because she was bitten--and take off in a pick-up truck. Despite the hunters' head start, the master vampire flies after them, and lands on the back of the truck, but when he's shot (just once), he is thrown off the truck and becomes completely discouraged in his pursuit. Unfortunately, after driving all night, Crow and crew don't see an apparently abandoned horse van in the road (on a clear day) until the last minute, and thereby manage to wreck their truck. So what do they do? Carjack a car, go back to the motel, then split up. Montoya takes Katrina to a hotel in another town. Crow stays at the motel, and--to make sure his companions haven't become vampires--drives stakes through everyone's heart, cuts off and buries their heads, then burns the motel to the ground.

I can't do justice to the list of things which don't make sense in this film. In some cases, the filmmakers added numerous elements to solely to increase the violence and nudity--as if that would somehow make everything else make sense. Apparently, the group of vampire hunters has little trouble hiring about 10 prostitutes in rural New Mexico--but this is important because they have to be at the party so they can start running around topless and get killed. Everybody seems to shoot the vampires; this generally has little to no effect, but they do it anyhow. After he takes her to the motel as ordered by Crow, Montoya strips Katrina naked--he claims it was because he cleaned her up, but the real reason seems to have been to get one more naked woman in front of the camera.

But most things just don't make sense. They celebrate a job well done when they know they didn't get the master vampire. Not only do cops find prostitutes for vampires hunters, but while cops and priests will only watch the sexual antics, they will happily get drunk and tolerate this loud debauchery. There must be people who run the motel--for the lights are on and guests are staying there--but they don't seem to care that their motel is the scene all sorts of trouble, such as a loud party, mass murder, and motel-destroying arson. Bear in mind, these are problems with the first 45 minutes or so of the film.

James Woods is another mystery. Crow is supposedly quite passionate about vampire hunting--both his parents were killed by vampires. But somehow, while he says it's important, he seems about as passionate about it as I was about my old summer job delivering phone books three summers ago. He treats it as a job to do and get paid for, but not the center of his universe.

With the main emphasis on special effects, you'd think they'd at least be somewhat impressive. They're not. Except for the motel massacre, all the fights are in places that are too dimly lit to see what's happening. I'm sure there was plenty of blood and gore on the set, but not even vampire blood can be seen in the dark. True, they kill the vampires by hauling them outdoors--but the special effects people don't seem to appreciate that when you've seen one vampire explode into flames, you've seen them all.

In fact, just about everything in the film is seen more than once. The vampires and vampire hunters have much in common besides mutual hatred--they enjoy fighting in run-down or abandoned buildings, causing mayhem in motels, and abusing catholic priests at every opportunity--and they get plenty of opportunities since almost every scene is in an appropriate building and priests are everywhere. Nearly every line in the film contains some sort of bad language--usually the f-word. The final nail in the coffin is that the fight scenes are repetitive beyond their similar sets. Every fight seems choreographed in the same way--if there were any differences (and from the results, I'd say there were not). you don't see them in the dark. It gets dull. The first scene was sort-of exciting despite being hard to see. The later fights were boring. Only the climactic fight was different--it involved fewer people, and therefore was much less impressive than the earlier fight scenes inevery way.

John Carpenter has directed good films in the past--most notably, the endearing and engrossing "Starman." Unfortunately, his most recent work as a director was on "Escape from L.A.," which was almost as bad.

To be fair, a lot of the people who were at the theater seemed to like the film. It could be that we're talking about horror film fans coming away from their Halloween weekend film. Maybe they just found the foul language, violence, and nudity sufficient. Or it could be that I was just seeing the initial reaction--I know that the more I thought about it, the more I realized was wrong with it (in the time it took me to write this review, it lost half a star). I don't know; all I know is that it's putrid. When it comes to "John Carpenter's Vampires," I say he can keep 'em.

Page created: 5/4/99

Copyright © 1998, 1999 by John Haywood.