John Carpenter's Vampires

Let's run down the various mistakes the producers, director, stars, casting crew, catering services, &c made on this movie, so that future generations may perhaps be spared these errors. (Not that this will happen, unless anyone who is reading this becomes a movie mogul. But one can only try.) First of all, it is generally a mistake in a horror movie to delineate your main characters such that the despicable villainy, unregenerate misogyny and casual, merciless violence of the HEROES outshines that of the villains. The whole point of a horror movie is that we, the audience, do not want to see someone who has been placed in grave peril by a psycho of some sort get killed. Therefore, when the heroes are the characters engaged in a drunken revelry in a small-town motel with whores supplied by the local sheriff, one cannot feel too much sympathy for them as the outstandingly superhuman vampire comes into the room and kills almost all of them in extremely graphic fashion.

This type of behavior becomes comprehensible, though, when we realize halfway through the film that this is actually a Western, except the villains are vampires instead of Mexicans and the overseeing organization is not the United States government but the Catholic Church (which affiliation means the audience gets to see a priest get drunk at the above-mentioned revelry). Evidence for this can be found in John Carpenter's guitar-dominated soundtrack, James Woods' blue jeans-leather-jacket-and-sunglasses attire, and the fact that everything ends up in a shootout.

Actually, "John Carpenter's Vampires" is remarkably similar to "From Dusk Till Dawn," also set in the Tex-Mex netherworld, also by a director who has made much better movies (that time, Robert Rodriguez) and starring actor(s) who have made much better movies (that time, Harvey Keitel, George Clooney and Salma Hayek; this time, James Woods). "From Dusk Till Dawn" also featured drunken revelries with whores, a priest pressed into combat versus vampires, incredibly prolific profanity, and lots of shots of nearly- (and sometimes just plain) naked women; in point of fact, the only real difference between these two movies is that in the earlier movie the whores themselves became the vampires, which must have saved on casting costs.

But anyway. The second mistake major made in this film was placing the only actual scary scene in the movie as basically prefatory material to the bullets-n-wooden-stakes action that follows, thus deluding the audience for just long enough. This first scene, in fact, is so good that I thought I was going to enjoy this film much more than I actually did. So if you are a devoted theater-hopper you might find a way to enjoy this film. Otherwise, everyone knows you put your best scene at the very end of the movie, like "Assassins," so that you come out of the theater having forgotten all the endless mediocre filmmaking that preceded it.

The third, and ultimately the most fatal (I mean, any of them would have been fatal by themselves, but this one is really fatal) mistake is that this movie takes itself too seriously for its content, and not lightheartedly enough so that you can just laugh at all the stupid, pointless stuff going on (this is assuming you are theoretically capable of doing this). This was the only redeeming feature of "From Dusk Till Dawn": there was a saturation point at some point during the movie where everything just seemed silly, and I laughed and laughed through the last thirty minutes of that film (not that I am recommending this film). "John Carpenter's Vampires," on the other hand, can't decide whether to use Catholic images and lore and try to make a struggle-against-Satan movie, or make a movie about what a paragon of virility James Woods, or be silly like "FDTD." I always go into the theater trying to enjoy whatever I see; this is one of the perks about not doing this for a living. But from any angle you try to approach this movie—as kitsch, as overblown sincerity, as celebration of cinema-type manhood taken several steps too far—it refuses to give you what you need to enjoy it. "John Carpenter's Vampires," well, sucks.

Attractive Man Count: 0.

Attractive Woman Count: 0.

Overall Grade: F. A big fat one, too.

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