VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS (2002) It's no Fright Night Part II One minute into this movie, and I'm thinking, you have got to be kidding. Not only is Jon Bon Jovi replacing James Woods (worst sequel hero comedown ever, surely a record doomed to stand until the last star burns out at the end of time), but he's got this stake-propelling gun which looks like a toy. You cannot be a badass when your weapon is a toy. He fires it twice, but look at that thing - where's the second stake? It's not like there's room for an ammo clip when the stakes are a foot long. This is the most clumsily plotted movie I've seen in a hell of a long time, and yep, there's even a prominent psychic link angle in the plot. Most of this psychic link is focused on the girl, natch. Women in sci-fi/fantasy, at least the ones who aren't villains, always get the "girly" powers. They get the psychic links, they get to make plants grow, they have healing powers...girly, girly shit. There's little to connect this to John Carpenter's film, except that he's serving as producer here and there's still the basic vampire-hunters-for-hire-in-the-hot-desert-sun theme. Bon Jovi plays a new vampire hunter, who always works alone, lives in Mexico but doesn't speak much Spanish, seems to like Cheerios. One day he gets a call requesting his services, but they insist that he work with a team. It's a trap, right? Nobody but the viewer guesses this until there's about 20 minutes to go. So Bon Jovi goes out to hunt some vampire, but everybody who was supposed to be on his team turns up dead. So he assembles a team of amateurs - a teenaged kid (Diego Luna), a vamp-bitten woman who takes an experimental drug to allow her to walk in the daylight (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a beefy priest (Christian de la Fuente), and later on, the black guy (Darius McCrary) who, seeing as the actor doesn't have any hit records, can be expected to be the first to die. Later on they're joined by an old man with a bow and arrow (Honorato Magaloni). Their prey is Una (Arly Jover), who can move at super-fast vampire speeds to slaughter an entire diner while Bon Jovi's in the can. This skill does not serve her well in the climax - actually, it doesn't serve her at all. I'd never seen Jon Bon Jovi act before, and I wasn't expecting him to be very good, but I wasn't expecting him to be this bad - he displays all the range of Keanu and the intensity of Ben Stein. He seems bored, and I'm sure he thought that was a cool acting decision on his part ('cuz, like, tough guys are always bored when they're not in the middle of the action, right?). McCrary seems to fare a little better at first, at least seeming to enjoy his work. But it's hard to take him seriously after one scene while they're camped out in the middle of nowhere, when he wakes up, sees a strange women sitting next to him, and she starts coming on to him, but he doesn't notice anything unusual about the situation until she chomps him right on the dick. As the vampire, Jover does do a fine job with barely any dialogue; she's sexy in the right predatory way, and isn't required to do much else. Later On Bon Jovi gets himself partially vamped so that he can sneak up on Vampirella without her hearing his heartbeat. But he brings along an uninfected human, whose heart must surely be thumping like a scared rabbit. After shooting stuff up, he sends the human away, steps forward and literally announces himself. Tell me again why he partially vamped himself? If the acting is bad, and the plot is terrible, then even the props suffer from a comedown in the league of that provided by the actors (remember James Woods' badass crossbow?). Bon Jovi has some sort of infrared scope that allows him to see people. Never mind that this is the blistering hot Mexican desert which is, not uncommonly, hotter than the people in it. How is it that dead people still register as blue even though, since they're dead, they should be the same temperature as everything around them? And why didn't they see Una buried in the sand when they saw the others? The winch that drags staked vampires out into the sun fails no fewer than three times in this movie, quickly becoming a tired contrivance at a par with The Car That Won't Start. Written and directed by Carpenter protégé Tommy Lee Wallace, this is the worst movie of his I've ever seen, worse than Halloween III, worse than a high heel right in the eye. Well, maybe not as bad as the high heel IN your eye, but probably on a par with getting a disfiguring gash from one around the eyebrow. BACK TO THE V's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE