Do you know those box sets, that advertise a single theme and four movies in it, for ten dollars? You know where you look at them and think, "Wow what a deal, 4 movies for 1/2 the price of one." Yeah, I fell prey to that. Being a woman, I'm always shopping and looking for the best deals, especially when I have little money. So when I saw this, I thought I got the bargain of the century. Now I know... You only get what you pay for.
Now, to be fair, the idea behind this movie was pretty good. Evil vampire marketing a "longevity" drug to the masses of the world, and a small band of individuals try to bring it to an end. In the hands of an experienced writer and director, this could have been decent. With a big enough budget, this could have been mainstream. I mean hey, if they can make a film about snakes on a plane and sell it, why not this? The thing is, the idea is the only thing good about this film.
You open up to a car chase scene. Sounds promising, right? Thing is, the car is chasing three interns on foot. Yes, you heard me, these interns are on foot and they are out running a car. They seem to run forever too, so this isn't an easy thing to watch. The three interns exchange a dialog about how they had stolen one of the last prototypes in a syringe (identified as “19h” from “Project Alpha”) that would allow them to move around in the daylight and see their own reflection. The only one identified was Victor, who is apparently the mastermind. He tells them how to get a message to him then tells them to run as he confronts the car that finally caught up with them. Victor confronts the driver, who I will call Mr. Bald Vampire (named Hopper, but of course you don't figure that out till 1/2 way through the movie...), as Mr. Eye-patch (later identified as Louie, but I like calling him Mr. Eye-patch), watches from the passenger seat. Victor and Mr. Bald Vampire tussle and Victor stakes Mr. Bald Vampire, then runs off. Mr. Eye-patch un-stakes Mr. Bald Vampire, who rises and then goes and follows Victor on foot.
We cut to a woman, whom I don't find that attractive, and she is putting on lipstick (wrong color for her, in my opinion). She then gets into her mini van and drives off. Don't ask me the point of showing this… I don't know.
There is a lot of running... Mr. Bald Vampire attacks a motorist, drinks his blood, and then continues to chase the injured Victor.
Mr. Eye-patch gets in the front seat and chases down one of the interns, who is identified as Eddie (I will call him “Intern with Glasses”), gives him a vial of what looks like to be blood, and asks him to return to Project Alpha. Eddie willingly goes along with Mr. Eye-patch... Yeah, that's exactly what i would do if I was being attacked.
The battered and bruised Victor gets enough ahead of Mr. Bald Vampire to sit under a street lamp. The van pulls up to Victor with that nurse from before. She helps him in the car and talks to him. She urges him to go to the hospital (in a dialogue that I'm sure a soap opera would reject) and he refuses. Mr. Bald Vampire shows up, gets kicked in the head by Victor, and then they start driving away. Somewhere in there he reads the nurse’s name tag (Sanda Jensen) and reveals his name is Victor. He tells her he needs a blood transfusion and she offers to take him to the hospital and have a friend of hers check him out.
At this point there is more pointless dialogue between Mr Eye-patch and Mr. Bald Vampire. Something is said about Mr Eye-patch being allergic to the Super Serum, again something that I'm sure a soap opera rejected. Mr. Eye-patch gives Mr. Bald Vampire the antidote and they leave.
Victor is in the van and rips out a page of a book titled "Basic Nursing" with Sanda's address in it. Ok, you’re a nurse in a hospital, and you are taking a class in basic nursing? God... I'm not going to your hospital. Sanda returns with a doctor that she identifies as Paul and finds out that Victor was missing. More crappy dialog... She finds a syringe lying on the floor and decides to keep it for later investigation (yeah, brilliant... just what i would do... keep an unknown syringe around). She begrudgingly makes a date with the creepy doctor.
This is where we meet Klaus, and yet more crappy dialog with Intern with Glasses, who blames things on Victor and says he was afraid. There is something that is said about Intern with Glasses being unreliable and Klaus snaps his neck, despite Intern with Glasses pleas. I've read tons of vampire books and seen lots of vampire movies... I never knew snapping a vamp's neck killed them.. but, hell, i may be wrong. The order goes out for Mr. Eye-patch to find the other two.
Heidi, Klaus's girl, gives him a scrapbook of his family home. He reminisces. Again, I don't know the point.
The third Intern, who i will call Evil Intern (who was identified as Tom...), attacks a guy going into a hotel room. Yet a 3rd pointless scene. Victor takes some sanctuary in a church and goes to confession, where he is told faith will preserve him. Outside, Mr. Bald Vampire can't get in, due to the smoke pouring out of him. No point to this...
We go to a cemetery, and Victor promise his father’s gravestone that he will make things right, then realizes he left the antidote somewhere. Instead of looking for it, he runs to a warehouse and holes himself up there, drinking rats’ blood and waiting for the sun to go down. I guess this is supposed to all be character development?
God, I wish i could finish the intro here, but I can't considering there is still more characters to introduce before the end of this. The sad fact is we are still in the first 15 minutes of this movie. Perhaps I should give you the long and the short of it. I'm sure reading my detailed summery is making you want to pluck out your eyeballs and spread them on your toast. Basically, it goes like this: Victor realizes he left the syringe in Sandra’s van, goes to her apartment, breaks in and requests it of her. She acts like there is nothing abnormal by this. When they get ambushed by more vampires, Sanda gets injected with the Serum and they leave. Followed by some more crappy dialog stating that the serum she got injected with turns her into a vampire, unlike the popular belief that it will extend a person's life by 50 years. They go track down a "brilliant chemist" named Dr. Lee Fong to see if he can help with determining how much prototype "antidote" they need to take to be normal and then... um... what's the point of this again? I think i lost it in the meaningless crap. Oh yeah: to stop Klaus spreading the super-serum. Yeah, that gets lost at this point.
So there you go, that's the first 30 minutes of the movie. I'm not going to go deeper, in case you actually want to see this piece of shit.
There are some positives to this film. It's obvious this movie didn't have a huge budget and that the director/writer had never done this before... or since from what Internet Movie Data Base says. Still, he was trying to think outside the box. He had a car scene from inside the actual vehicles (don't watch if you get motion sickness easy). He tried to get some different angles of the camera and keep the gore to a very minimum, but at the same time... it was very amateur.
The story idea was good... don't get me wrong, I just think he should of pitched it to some more capable writers... like a band of monkeys. Still, I was laughing through most of it, simply out of how ridiculous it all was, so I was at least entertained by its moronic tendencies. You do get to see a side shot of a woman's rather small breast, and Sandra and Victor fuck at some point, but they don't really show anything worth seeing in either scene.
The negatives in this movie surely outweigh the positives. There are a lot of unnecessary shots of more nameless and even minor characters that won't play into the plot at all. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever really caught the real point of this movie. The acting suits a soap opera, and the dialog was rejected from one. Car/motorcycle chase scenes went on too long with no real point to them and sometimes for no reason.
Real life logic is gone completely and not in your usual horror sense. Even for a horror film it's pathetically far fetched! Snapping the neck of a Vampire? Last I checked, that's not a way to kill one. There isn't even an attempt to making this even believable, which just increases its ridiculous nature. For example, Mr. Eye-patch watches things a lot from the sidelines. He just sat and watched as Mr. Bald Vampire gets staked by Victor, and when Victor stabs another guy with some scissors later in the movie (it's not as cool as it sounds, trust me), Mr. Eye-patch watched with a holy hell, look on his face. There are a lot of people outrunning cars, and other bits of nonsense.
There is quite a bit of cliché evil cackles, and lots of drinking blood, licking blood off their fingers, and excitement over blood, especially by people who just swore they wouldn't ever like drinking blood.
Oh, and the acting... did I mention the acting was atrocious? A great number of the cast in this movie are complete unknowns, having not done a movie before or since. I can hear a soap opera calling these people in for casting calls. All Victor needs to do is to learn how to arch his eyebrow and he's a perfect candidate for “Day's of Our Lives”.
Sound is crap. It's hard to understand what's said and the music overpowers the voices.
To sum it up, it's a funny movie. One you can heckle and not feel guilty about ruining anyone's time for. Don't watch it if you’re looking for some sort of real horror, because you just won't find it.
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