MODERN VAMPIRES
All right, review #600!

  Maybe these vampires are a little TOO modern when one of them returns to her childhood home in one scene and ends up crying out "You were a terrible fucking mother!  I wish I never came back here!"

Co-executive-produced by star Casper Van Dien, so you know it's quality, Modern Vampires gives us, well, modern vampires.  They're headed up by Dracula (Robert Pastorelli), and Dallas (Van Dien) is just an ordinary-joe-vampire.  Dracula and his minions want one vampire (Natasha Gregson Wagner) dead because her petty crimes threaten to expose the existence of vampires to humanity, which will surely exterminate them.  Dallas wants to save her.  Meanwhile, Dr. Van Helsing (Rod Steiger) just wants to kill every vampire he sees.

Yep, everything that's annoying about "modern" vampires is here in spades, folks.  Again reduced to mere party animals, these guys have been around for hundreds of years but still haven't developed musical tastes that demand more than two-chord rock and BOOM BOOM BOOM techno at its most simplistic.  There are lame vampire sight gags which aren't really gags; there isn't anything inherently funny about a vampire brushing his fangs, you've gotta DO something with that, and the goofy music just doesn't cut it.

Modern Vampires tries to balance serious and comic ideas, and fails with almost all of them.  Van Helsing has an appropriately tragic background, but he's made sympathetic enough to make one scratch one's head at his ultimate fate, which is obviously meant as a "feel-good" moment.  Why did they go through the trouble to make him so sympathetic?  (for that matter, it entirely goes against one of the principles upon which the plot is based, so what the hell?)  Maybe asking for logic like that is asking too much of a film which has a vampire not killed by sunlight, merely rendered immobile by it.

Van Helsing even recruits some Crips to go vamp-hunting with him, which you'd think would make for some comic moments in even the most clumsy of hands.  Oh-ho, you'd be wrong.  These scenes are painfully unfunny, culminating in an awfully stupid scene where the gangstas gang-"rape" (I put that in quotes 'cuz she's literally asking for it) a vampire woman.

You'd even think that Craig Ferguson as one of the vampires would be good for a chuckle, but no.  Why is it that this Scot only seems to get roles as Englishmen?  There is one laugh in a scene in a clothing store, but it's flailed out for way too long.  The rest...well, writer Matthew Bright couldn't stay away from lines like "I was wanting Italian tonight", so what does that tell you?

Modern Vampires was directed by Richard Elfman, who tries to "liven" things up with some cute flash-cuts of "deep" images (rose blooming, solar eclipse, etc.) during vampire bites/sex.  Nice try.

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