Fails as both porn and horror
My friend Warren and I rented this one years ago, after narrowing down our choices to this or The Fear. (this was long before I learned how widely loathed The Fear is, certainly before I saw it with my own eyes) I think I was a little less surprised than he was as to just how little there is in this movie that actually involves vampires. Knowing what I know today, of course, it's easy enough to peg a movie like this just by its box cover. Ah, was I ever that young...anyway, a couple of weeks ago another friend of mine was suggesting I review this, and I put off actually renting it because surely enough, Space would be showing it again in good time. Go figure, just the very next weekend, guess what was on channel 46?
Trying maybe a little too hard to get away from her well-known youngster persona, Alyssa Milano stars as a virginal coed who spends half the movie naked. She does this, presumably, to tease the male audience cruelly, to make us identify more with her rather pathetic boyfriend (Harrison Pruett) who is practically begging her to give it up. (news flash, buddy - if you've been dating for a year and a half and she isn't sure if you're right for her, maybe it's time to move on.) But it looks like her sex life is going to get a shade more interesting than the nothing it is now, because a door-licking vampire (Martin Kemp) will die (for real this time) if he doesn't get some 'tang from her within three days. (not sure WHY he'll die, but never mind)
It's all here, everything that makes bad vampire movies bad. Pretentious soliloquies about lost love. Lack of any really abundant vampirism. Weak sex scenes substituting for horror, and horror which MIGHT scare a four-year-old. And, Alyssa Milano, naked all the time. Maybe she does it for you. She doesn't really do it for me.
Embrace Of The Vampire give you an early clue as to its suckitude with the scene set in some century past where the vampire gets vamped; editor-turned-soft-porn-director Anne Goursaud seems determined to give this movie the vibe of a romance novel. Not even of a romance novel, more like its Fabio-spattered cover. Our sad antihero is with his One True Love (who rides in on a white horse, no less), and they make love in the beauty of nature; any still from this scene could be slapped onto the cover of any of these books. Then three vampire chicks (naked, of course) converge on him and suck his blood. There are three of them, but between them they still don't suck enough blood to kill him because he just comes back as a vampire to set in motion this movie's events. I expect more than that from one vampire, let alone three!
I have to admit to being easily distracted during this movie - I got the new Nevermore today, happy happy, joy joy! Still, I noted that my memories of the first time I saw this were intermingled with those of seeing Night Terrors. Warren and I rented some really, really crappy movies.
What else to say...dialogue like "Who are you?" "I am your destiny!" There's a scene with a lesbian photographer which is handled with hilarious porno-ness; I half-expected a pizza delivery guy to walk in and say "Hey, can I join in?" And, of course, that scene where the vampire licks the door, which cracked me up (for all the wrong reasons, of course).
The inherent problem with these soft-porn "horror" movies is that you can find better horror just about anywhere, and better porn in, well, porn, even soft porn (sigh...fine, EROTICA). Look elsewhere, no matter what you're looking for, unless it's Alyssa Milano naked. Also known as The Nosferatu Diaries: Embrace Of The Vampire, which is just a little bit cumbersome, and frightfully suggests that there might be more. (makes the sign of the cross and stocks up on garlic)
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