Your Daily Dracula – Michael Bailey Smith, Blood Shot (2013)
An expanded remake of a 2002 short, writer-director Dietrich Johnson’s Blood Shot is terrible in all the best ways, answering the question ‘what if Nosferatu starred in a Steven Seagal movie?’ as a hulking bald pointy-eared vampire (Michael Bailey Smith) goes to war with an Islamic terrorist cell depicted so broadly that Team America World Police seems politically nuanced. An evil sheik (Brad Dourif) has come to America with his entourage – which runs to a harem of belly-dancers, a cadre of midget bombers and the usual sweaty kill-crazies – in order to blow something up and Sam (Lance Henriksen) of the CIA’s vampire department uncoffins his only agent in order to thwart the scheme. Rogue cop Rip (Brennan Elliott) is ridiculed by his colleagues for believing in vampires, but he’s determined to kill the monster running loose in the city – unwilling to accept that this bloodsucker is on the side of the good guys (well, America). The creature even has the approval of the President (an oddly-cast Christopher Lambert).
A bickering buddy cop picture with mortal enemies forced to team up against a bigger threeat. Elliott and Smith (Ben Grimm in Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four) are funny as grotesque caricatures of action and horror archetypes … the burned-out cop and the gun-toting undead. Dourif plays the bin Laden figure as if he were cast in the Road to Morocco, with (deliberately?) bad make-up and full desert gear, and chews more scenery than Smith does necks. The low-budget, over-the-top action scenes are at least consistently ridiculous. It aspires to the kind of genre mix some 1980s Charles Band movies had – Tim Thomerson could have played the cop – but suffers from a rather blurry look which is all too typical of mid-teens cheapies.
At one point, the vampire whispers his name but we don’t catch it.
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