Your Daily Dracula – Thomas Ian Griffith as Valek, Vampires (1998)

Your Daily Dracula – Thomas Ian Griffith as Valek, Vampires (1998)

Along with the comic book picture Blade (1998) and the TV series spin-off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), this adaption of John Steakley’s disposable novel Vampire$ reflects a shift of emphasis in the vampire sub-genre comparable to the mutation of the gangster movie whereby the flamboyant hoods of the early 30s were replaced as central figures later in the decade by equally flamboyant G-men often played by the same actors (Cagney, Robinson) who had snarled their way to stardom in the earlier movies.  The idea then was that violence which had provoked the criticism of the censorious when carried out by criminals was magically deemed less offensive if the crooks were on the receiving end and the tommy guns were weilded by vigilante-ish representatives of law and order.  This current cycle similarly recasts the villains themselves as old-fashioned monsters of the night without a shred of a redeeming feature or anything approaching a complex characterisation, and concentrates on the vampire slayers, whose inflexible moral superiority is leavened for audiences by their striking of an assortment of  upposedly appealing rebel poses.

In the opening sequence, James Woods’s Wild Bunch-style team of vampire slayers surround an isolated farmhouse and, after taking a blessing from their padre, charge in like a combination of SWAT unit and lynch mob.  Crow’s favoured method of vampire-killing is to shoot his prey with a crossbow bolt attached to a steel wire, which is then winched so that the screaming ‘goon’ is hauled out into the sunlight like a landed fish to be frazzled by the traditional spontaneous combustion.  After wiping out this first nest, the team retreat to the Sun-God Motel for a party with gallons of beer and a Peckinpah-ish gaggle of topless hookers, which is interrupted when the pasty-faced Valek, who models a black spaghetti Western duster and a hippie haircut, turns up to slaughter everyone with his bare hands.  Carpenter stages both massacres, of vampires by humans and humans by the master, with a few effective initial strokes lifted from Leone or Peckinpah but then hurries through the death-counts (as he does with other major sequences, including the crucial ritual at the finale) with elliptical fades that serve only to render the action confusing and minimise any dramatic impact it might have had.

Valek, supposedly the world’s very first vampire, is a sadly feeble opponent: DTV action star Thomas Ian Griffith has height and a snarl on his side, but his master plan — which has much in common with Stephen Dorff’s ambitions in Blade — is rather vaguely presented and nothing at all is made of his potentially interesting pre-vampire careers as a priest and a revolutionary.  The film has to be carried completely by the vampire-killers, and at least James Woods (taking advantage of a rare top-billed role) sneers his way through cynical speeches about how loathesome his enemies are.  As with a lot of 90s action movies, much of the tension between heroes and villains seems to arise from homosexual panic: Crow characterises vampires in the sort of terms that might be expected from a dedicated gay-basher (‘if you wear cloves of garlic around your neck, one of these buggers will take a walk up your strata chocolata while he’s sucking your blood’) and taunts Father Guiteau by asking whether violence gives him an erection.

The thin script by Don Jakoby (also responsible for the vampires of Lifeforce and the vigilantes of Death Wish 3) paints Crow and his gang as brutal, macho thugs scarcely more appealing than the one-note monsters.  Woods spends much of the film battering his supposed allies or innocent parties while sidekick Daniel Baldwin’s contribution is limited to stealing a car at gunpoint and being offensive to a hotel receptionist, blurring the moral lines so much that the final revelation of how deeply corrupt his superiors are has no weight at all.  In this atmosphere, ‘attitude’ is a coded term for simple obnoxiousness, and the treatment of women — we only see whores and vampires, and the ‘heroine’ gets to be both — is especially reprehensible.  The interesting but underused Sheryl Lee, who gets to be bitten on the inner-thigh, spends much of the film naked and/or in bondage, treated as disposable by either side, her burgeoning romance with the man she bites relegated to the feeblest of sub-plots.   Carpenter, whose decline over the last ten years has been alarming, still has an eye for widescreen imagery, a knack for getting the plot rolling swiftly (only to have it fall apart) and an ear for apt music (he contributes an effective bluesy score, abetted by some of the musicians from the Blues Brothers band), but Vampires is rarely as exciting as it would like to be and never remotely approaches scariness.

(first published in Sight & Sound)