Film review – the Subspecies series

A Daily Dracula special …

Your Daily Dracula – Anders Hove as Radu Vladislas (or Vladislav), Angus Scrimm as King Vladislas (or Vladislav), Subspecies (1991)

After the fall of the Ceausescus, Romania became a place where foreigners could film cheaply – and naturally foreign filmmakers realised it would be an idea to make vampire movies on location there … hence Stuart Gordon’s Daughter of Darkness, the terrible skit Transylmania, back-to-back Dracula II (shot in Romania, set in New Orleans – go figure) and III, and the excellent, unusual Strigoi.

First to get to the castles was Charles Band’s Full Moon, which did a ton of films there … and even established a mini-franchise with Ted Nicolaou’s Subspecies.  There aren’t as many Subspecies films as there are Puppet Master movies but it’s up there with Trancers and exceeds Ghoulies, Dollman, Evil Bong or Demonic Toys for instalments.  It even has a kind of expanded universe, roping in the one-off Vampire Journals.  Ted Nicolaou, a sound recordist on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, had directed TerrorVision for Band and – perhaps because his ‘aou’ name suggests Romanian heritage – found himself sticking with the whole series, writing and directing five films (‘based on an idea by Charles Band’) and a spin-off.

The mythology is set out in this opening film, which begins with vampire Radu (Danish character actor Anders Hove – of Mifune, The Idiots and Nymphomaniac) assassinating his father King Vladislas (maybe Vladislav, it wavers across the series though settles down to being slas rather than slav) to become boss of the castle.  His particular trick – perhaps because his mother was a sorceress – is snapping off his extra-jointed taloned fingers so they can turn into rubbery little minions created by animator David Allen (continuing the Ghoulies-Puppet Master Charles Band fetish for little scuttling scowling monsters) and do harm.

The mcguffin of the series is the Bloodstone, a chalice-totem thing which contains the refreshing but addictive blood of saints and can top up the evil mojo of whoever licks it like a big orange lolly.  Into the sparsely-populated scenario come three pretty young folklore students – Americans Michelle (Laura Tate) and Lillian (Michelle McBride) and Romanian Mara (Irina Movila) – who Radu thinks would suit him for vampire consorts on the model of Dracula’s three wives.  He’s even got white shroud dresses in for when they’re transformed.

Set against Radu is his brooding good guy half-brother Stefan (top-billed Michael Watson, straight from 182 episodes of General Hospital) in an Anne Rice set-up which also features in Dracula Rising, To Die For, The Vampire Diaries and a bunch of other variants.  It’s ambiguous how close the Vladislases are to the Vlads – Vlad Dracul is mentioned though it’s not clear whether he’s the same person as King Vladislas.  Radu is presumably named after Vlad the Impaler’s brother Radu the Handsome – though in this set-up, Stefan has the looks and the haircut and Radu gets stringy rat-hair and skullface make-up.

Aided by Karl (Ivan Rado), a human pal with a long stake and shotgun shells packed with rosary beads, Stefan tries to oppose his brother and does a shit job of it – the two blondes are quickly fanged, the local exposition-spouting crone (Lili Dumitrescu) is decapitated, and even heroine Michelle (who has a seriouslt great jawline and cropped dark hair look) is nibbled to such an extent that Stefan has to turn her into a notionally good vampire at the end.  If vampires can be good, maybe it was a tad premature to decapitate and impale the two blondes before they had a chance to bite anyone.

Though this isn’t a film which thinks terribly deeply about anything – some scenes stumble on the basic problem of depicting people doing things with props, the subspecies effects (reshot in the US) never gel with the location footage and local colour involving a funerals and a folk horror ceremony with masks and chanting don’t impinge much on the basic plot.  What the film does have – and would become the central pillar of the franchise – is Hove and his long fingers, nasty looks and whispery way with threatening dialogue.  Scrimm’s Vampire King, in a ridiculous snwofro, is disposed of early and Stefan never really establishes himself as any kind of character … but Hove is a first-rate baddie.

And, yes, those Romanian locations look great.

Bloodstone: Subspecies II (1993) and Bloodlust: Subspecies III (1994)

The next two instalments were shot back to back and constitute one thin storyline stretched over two short movies – which means a lot of standing around talking.  No one is convinced by the ‘death’ of Radu at the end of II, which barely gives him pause before picking up the plot in III.

Either the filmmakers looked at Subspecies and realised Anders Hove was the best thing in it and should be promoted to lead or had a really bad time with human haircut Michael Watson because the opening of II constinutes a real shake-up as the top-billed star of the first film is represented by a special effects mannequin which shrivels when staked and then Radu compounds the killing of his good guy brother Stefan by ripping his bones to dusty bits and throwing them all over the crypt.  Take that …  The only other survivor of the first film is recast, though oddly – Denice Duff, who replaces Laura Tate as ‘fledgling’ vampire Michelle, looks very little like Tate … but Melanie Shatner, who turns up in these two films as Michelle’s human sister Rebecca, does have short dark hair and a jawline.  Perhaps La Shat, famous for being pulled into a demon fridge by horror claws in Cthulhu Mansion, was down for Michelle but baulked at having the series’ manky, slimy fangs in her mouth.  At the beginning of II, Michelle escapes Radu’s lair with the mcguffinstone and makes it to a Bucharest hotel where she places an international come-and-help-me call to Rebecca and is then found dead in the bathtub by the cleaning staff (the fact that vampires are corpses in the day isn’t often featured in horror films).

Reassembled by his animated fingerbobs, Radu pursues Michelle – the script kind of suggests he’s sweet on her in a sick sort of way (‘Love is for mortals, not for such as we’) which gives his cardboard baddie some sort of nuance Hove plays the hell out of even as he’s slobbering blood and slime over his dental architecture.  We also meet Circe (Pamela Gordon), Radu’s mother – a short zombie hag with a collection of trinkets and not much time for Radu’s new minion.  Rebecca drafts Mel from the US Embassy (Kevin Blair, who gets to be the brushcut plank this time round) to help her track down her now vampire sister – ‘Aside from the fact that we committed a felony that could get me permanently banned from the foreign service, it was a my pleasure’ – and the vampire hunter band extends to a policeman (Ion Haiduk) who has learned English from Columbo and Streets of San Francisco and an academic (Michael Denish) who gets back-stabbed soon after he’s run out of vampire exposition.  Dialogue howlers liven things up … ‘Spurn me, and I’ll torment you to eternity!’  … ‘Excuse me, but mythical objects by definition are not real.’ … ‘Give it to me or I will desecrate her in ways which will haunt you forever.’

III just carries on with this stuff, picking up the plot in mid‑crisis and lurching towards more horrors as Radu tutors Michelle in night life, while Rebecca, Mel and the gang – who now include a CIA guy (Michael Dellafemina) who doesn’t last long after snarling ‘heads up, Granny’ and riddling Circe with bullets – trying to blast a way into the castle and effect a rescue.  The hits keep coming … ‘Sever the ties with your mortality, Michelle, and all your pain will turn to pleasure.’ … ‘One day, child, when Radu tires of you, you’ll belong to me. Then you’ll know horror.’ … ‘There’s no love between the living and the dead. What you feel is hunger.’   In Subspecies, Nicolaou managed a few Nosferatu-ish moments with the sinister silhouette of Radu cast against walls – and those spiderleggy fingers stretching out – and so II and III are full of variations on this, with vampires turning the shadows and doing all sorts of elementary shadowplay tricks which work reasonably well but pall through overuse.  III almost forgets to include the actual subspecies until the last moment.  The finale has Radu shot full of silver bullets, set on fire by the rising sun, thrown off the battlements of a castle and impaled on a tree.  So that’s the end for him, then?  Drips of burning waxy gloop from his corpse coalesce into – yes! – subspecies and cluster around the bloodstone, which Michelle (zipped into a body bag) has left behind even though it’s the only thing which could obviate her need to murder punk rockers and village violinists for sustenance.

Vampire Journals (1997)

‘Cassandra, I admire your depravity but you can’t carry on like this in a public thoroughfare.’

Nicolaou also wrote and directed this offshoot shot on Bucharest locations.  It’s a slow, affectless movie which conflates of role-playing scenarios with Anne Rice’s goth gloom (‘absinthe and poetry were my foolish passions’) with a decapitation theme poached from the Highlander films.

Good guy vampire Zachary (David Gunn) — given to dramatic statements like ‘I am God’s most desolate creature, a vampire with a mortal heart, a predator who feels pity for its prey’ — is pitted against evil bloodsucker Ash (Jonathon Morris), who finds ‘the smell of death’ intoxicating and runs his coven from a chic, underlit club in Eastern Europe and has co-opted club owner Starr Andreeff as a Renfield surrogate (‘the woman in the car was no vampire, but she reeked of evil’).  The vampires feud over soleful concert pianist Sofia (Kirsten Carre) and ‘the Sword of Laertes’, a vampire-slaying weapon which gets swung about a lot.  In an aside, Ash admits that he’s the get of Radu of Transylvania – which sets up his guest turn in the next Subspecies …

A precis montage of Vampire Journals features in Charles Band’s Decadent Evil – which is debatably another spinoff from the Subspecies family tree, though that features a new evil queen vampire Morella (Debra Mayer).  That had a sequel, Decadent Evil 2.  The Bandverse vampire saga is extended and complicated through the character of Dr Ivan (Phil Fondacaro), dwarf vampire hunter, who appears in both Decadent Evil films and also Evil Bong, Ravenwolf Towers and Puppet Master: Axis Termination.  It’s possible – even likely – that the SubSpecies strand of the Full Moon portfolio has more spinoffs beyond the reach of a cursory internet search.

Subspecies IV: Bloodstorm (1998)

Because Ted Nicolaou stuck with the mini-franchise, the Subspecies series demonstrates an unusual degree of story consistency and a soap opera-like tendency to twist the plot to cope with cast comings and goings.  Though the heroine was recast after Subspecies, Nicolaou takes care to explain the inevitable inconsistencies which arise when the entire plot of four films takes place over a week or so but the movies were produced over seven years.  The vampire Stefan (Michael Watson), hero of Subspecies, didn’t return in the back-to-back Subspecies II Bloodstone or Subspecies III Bloodlust – and was summarily staked and disintegrated in the first moments of Part Two.  Melanie Shatner and Kevin Blair (now Kevin Spirtas) don’t come back from this brace of quickies so their characters are casually written out in a car crash between sequels – though bodies lie around representing them.  Fledgling vampire Michelle (Denice Duff) is still in the light-impermeable body bag she got zipped into at the end of Part Three.  Inspector Marin (Ion Haiduc), killed in the previous film, is back as a vampire in a comic subplot left hanging, as if more instalments were expected (there’d be a long gap before Subspecies V Blood Rise in 2023).  This even picks up on the obvious mistake made last time in leaving that dang bloodstone behind at the site of Radu’s burning-impalement-squelching.

The main attraction, as always, is cadaverous Anders Hove as the Brando-voiced, Nosferatu-fingered vampire master Radu Vladislas – it’s a performance which works despite the variable make-up (here, his skullface looks too rubbery and he sometimes resembles Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein Monster).  Between Subspecies III and IV, Nicolaou made Vampire Journals, which established in a throwaway that its villain was turned by Radu – and Ash (Jonathan Morris), music-loving Bucharest nightclub owner and Anne Rice knock-off, shows up here, clashing with his former master when Radu wants his subterranean holdings back.  Oddly, Nicolaou doesn’t explain how Ash survived being killed at the end of his own film – though his possession of a key artefact (the Sword of Laertes) indicates this isn’t a prequel.  The sword, like the Bloodstone (which drips ‘the blood of the saints’ and is addictive to vampires), is a mcguffin passed around among the undead.

The Radu-Ash conflict, with several treacherous disciples, is only a sub-plot, and more attention is paid to Michelle, who is rescued from the crash site by Dr Ana Lazar (Ioana Abur) and taken to the Vitalis Institute, which is run by half-vampire, all-bastard scientist Dr Niculsecu (Mihai Dinvale, who played a different character in Vampire Journals but still has that Sandor-from-Dracula’s-Daughter terrible haircut).  Michelle gets bled as part of the doctor’s unethical eternal youth experiments and there’s a tangle of alliances and betrayals between four main vampires who are sort of interrelated (Floriella Grappini’s Serena is the other holdover from Vampire Journals).  As in all these films, there are nice moments – Nicolaou’s special frill is having his vampires turn into living shadows rather than bats, which makes for a special effect of Melies-like simplicity – but too much standing around glumly ranting as the music works overtime.  Glimpsed only briefly in the earlier sequels, the actual subspecies – little imps which spring from Radu’s broken-off fingers or spilled blood – don’t get any screen time here.  In the end, Radu is decapitated and his head is stuck on a fence to burn in the sun, but that sort of thing didn’t stop him before.  Duff gets a voice-over which sort of ties up the plot …

Radu Reviews (2012-14)

So there’s another iteration of Radu.  Allison Pregler used to do z-movie review segments under the name Obscurus Lupa on Channel Awesome (you can find them, like so much else, on youtube).

In reviewing the first four Subspecies films, Pregler perfected a hokey Anders Hove voice and clearly found another alter ego – so she put on a wig and a dark coat, some grey streak make-up and (when she remembered) gruesome horror gloves and hosted seven segments of Radu Reviews, in which Radu from Subspecies – when not vilifying whiny useless Michelle (Pregler isn’t a fan of hers) – reviews a series of extremely marginal films, mostly short educational or propagandist efforts … Radu is bewildered by Super Christian and Super Christian II: Behind the Mask (Christian propaganda), No Zones (road safety), Dinosaurs! A Fun-Filled Trip Back in Time (not Jurassic Park), The House that Drips Blood on Alex (with Tommy Wiseau), Visitors from Outer Space (a McDonald’s promotional cartoon), Potty Power Princess (singalong toilet training) and Turtle Tunes (a Ninja Turtle spin-off).  Pregler also brings on a plushy ‘finger demon’.

Subspecies V: Blood Rise (2023)

‘Get your vile hands off my flute!’

Twenty-five years on, Ted Nicolaou (writer-director-editor) and Anders Hove and Denice Duff (stars) were back – not with a continuation of the saga but a prequel which filled in a lot of gaps in the backstory.  Shot in Serbia in new old castles and caves and woods, it’s kind of like extended Subspecies fan fiction but not much the worse for it – narrated by Hove and telling a story which straggles over hundreds of years, it has something of the feel structurally of Anne Rice adaptations but has a relatively fresh storyline given that it’s about a squabbling extended family of vampires and their enemies.

It opens with the birth of Radu – who is taken from her mother Circe the sorceress (Yulia Graut, less scabby and hairless than the character from II and III) by crusaders who snip the baby’s talons and ears and massage his facial knobbles with ointments so he can grow up to pass for human and become the church’s top demon buster.  An older Hove now looks quite a bit like Angus Scrimm did as Vladislas in the original film, though in an unexpected return the boss vampire is now played under Nosferatu pancake by Kevin Spirtas (who used to be Kevin Blair, the handsome plank from II and III).  Over hundreds of years, Radu keeps bumping into the same people and breaks with the church to become the long-fingered vampire we know.  The not-quite-mentioned-before key player is Helena (Duff), mother of hero-of-the-first-film Stefan (seen as a kid played by Jakov Marjanovic), who was abducted and ravished by Vladislas and eventually turns into a vampire who bites Radu and gives him her blood to effect his full transformation … which makes her at once his stepmother and master and long-term love interest-tormentor, with the casting of Duff signalling that Helena’s death won’t be the end of Radu’s woes since she’ll be reincarnated and put an end to him (so that stuck-on-a-post burning severed head from IV still stands as the last of Radu).

As if this weren’t enough, we see Radu in a slightly soppy mood putting the bite on troubador siblings Ash (Marko Filipovic) and Ariel (Stasa Nikolic) to set up the character from Vampire Journals.  Also, the church’s replacement demon hunter Diana (Olivera Perunicic) shows up to destroy her predecessor and also gets turned into a vengeance-seeking vampire who might well be a continuing character if this goes on.  I’ve long since stopped even trying to be a Charles Band/Empire/Full Moon completist – the end credits list this as Full Moon # 384 – but have sampled enough of their output in recent years to twig that this is a classier item than their usual throwaways – shot in widescreen, with an orchestral score reworking elements from the earlier films (by now, the series theme is an earworm), relatively decent performances from the holdovers and the local cast, decent if sparing (and non-digital) make-up effects (messy bloody fangs), and an air of seriousness and ambition you don’t get in Evil Bong 777 or Knockouts in Lockdown.  It’s still talky, avoids action scenes and fails to include any of the actual subspecies, but I’m still inclined to cut Nicolaou slack for his long-term commitment to the franchise.  As made-in-Eastern-Europe prequels to horror franchises go, I rate this above The Strangers Chapter 1.