Your Daily Dracula – Roger Bayless as Vladimer, The Lost Platoon (1989)

Your Daily Dracula – Roger Bayless as Vladimer, The Lost Platoon (1989)

David A. Prior produced, wrote and directed a ton of ‘product’ in the video rental era – all with cookie cutter titles.  Night Wars, Deadly Prey, Death Chase, Jungle Assault, Killer Workout, White Fury, Rapid Fire, Future Zone, Raw Nerve, Invasion Force, Double Threat, Raw Justice, Night Trap … that sort of thing.  Just adding a definite article makes The Lost Platoon stand out in his filmography, even before clocking that it’s not just another busy, cheap, meaningless combat movie but also a vampire film.  I suppose the original pitch, looking at what was happening in the mid-80s, was Platoon meets The Lost Boys … though its vampires are slightly more Near Dark and its grunts are a long way from Oliver Stone.

In ‘Nicaragua, 1991’, war correspondent Hollander (William Knight) encounters a quartet of soldiers under the command of American peacekeeper Colonel Crawford (Lew Pipes) and recognises Jonathan Hancock (David Parry), who wears bits of Union Army uniform and carries a sword, from the time he saved young Hollander’s life in WWII.  Hancock and his comrades – Walker (Stephen Quadros), Hayden (Michael Wayne) and Keeler (Sean Heyman) – are vampires who move from war to war, not biting folk so far as we can tell, but generally implementing US foreign policy though it’s suggested that they are much older than the United States.  Setting the film slightly in the future doesn’t quite get round how far-fetched its politics are – here, an American army is in Nicaragua fighting for a legitimate government against Soviet-backed ‘rebels’ who get their kicks machine-gunning civilians and committing massacres while dressed up in US uniforms so the peacekeeping GIs get stones thrown their way whenever they show their faces.

The boss bastard of the militia is Vladimer (that’s how it’s spelled in the credits – it’s possible they mean Vladimir), a mean-moustached martinet who does cackling fiendishness and turns out to be a vampire too, but one of the bad ones.  So it’s a Stoker-related face-off between characters called Vlad and Jonathan.  Hancock calls Vladimer his brother – though it’s not confirmed whether they’re actual siblings or just undeadsies together.   Vladimer has a ‘familiar’ – a sadistic femme fatale called Tara (Michiko) who seems not to be a vampire, though perhaps only because there weren’t enough sets of fangs to go round.  When stabbed, Tara does a Lynda Carter/Wonder Woman turntable twirl and explodes ridiculously.  The film’s vampires can survive being shot, stabbed or standing next to a grenade when it goes off – but are seriously injured if sticks of wood are stuck in them anywhere.  It’s a miracle that they’ve survived thousands of years of wars when arrows and spears were the primary distance weapons.  Jonathan climbs up a wall by supernatural means – another Stoker lick, done with ludicrously simple non-effects – and vampires here can telekinetically pick up guns.

It’s the kind of film where enemy soldiers obligingly stand in the open firing their guns for long minutes before a good guy bothers to shoot them dead.  It doesn’t even make much of its immortal soldiers – though Jonathan has a Union outfit, they carry a Confederate flag, and they only bicker in an attempt to differentiate their characters.