Music: T-Rex

Most of you will know T-Rex, the pop/glam-rock tracks have remained in public consciousness down the years. Had Marc Bolan not tragically died he would have been 60 today.

Of course, Jeepster mentioned a vampire and, to mark Marc’s birthday I’m posting up just a snippet of lyrics from that track:

"Your motivation is so sweet
Your vibrations are all burning up my feet
'Cos you're my baby, mmh, 'cos you're my love
Oh girl I'm just a jeepster for your love
I said girl I'm just a vampire for your love
I'm gonna suck you

"Oh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o wow
A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a ow, wow yeah, vampire!"

Coming soon to Taliesin Meets the Vampires

I’ve decided to dig out my Bloodthirsty trilogy boxset – made up of three early Japanese vampire movies, so expect reviews of those within the next couple of weeks.

Also, with 30 Days of Night due for release in the US in October and the UK at the beginning of November I felt it about time to look through some of those graphic novels in the series that I haven’t looked at yet.

All this plus the normal array of reviews and views, make sure you keep coming back, y’hear…

Hammer rises from the grave

I picked up news of the first new Hammer film, a vampire piece called Beyond the Rave, via The Unofficial Hammer Site. The press release they received reads:


After more than two decades of absence, Hammer Films returns to horror with Beyond the Rave, an online serial that heralds the resurgence of one of Britain’s best-loved film companies. Beyond the Rave is produced for Hammer by Pure Grass Films, from an original story by Tom Grass.

Says CEO Simon Oakes, “Hammer is a great British brand; we intend to take it back into production and develop its global potential”. The new direction pledges to maintain the same high standards that made Hammer one of the world’s most respected and influential genre companies, and to entertain both its loyal fans and a new generation of horror viewers. Hammer - which has not released a film since 1979 – is also returning to feature production and has several exciting projects in development. With Beyond the Rave, the company wishes to give long-time followers and new audiences an early taste of things to come: original productions, using new technologies and featuring the hottest up-and-coming talent.

Drawing inspiration from the works of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice as well as from eighties classics The Lost Boys and Near Dark, Beyond the Rave, a vampire story set in England’s underground party scene, is a combination of traditional horror themes and contemporary setting and characters. The movie follows the last hours of freedom of local soldier Ed, who is flying out to Iraq the following morning. With the help of his best friend Necro, he spends his last night in the UK tracking down his missing girlfriend Jen, last seen partying with a bizarre group of hardcore night-time ravers led by the mysterious Melech. But as he catches up with Jen at a party in a remote forest, Ed discovers that Melech’s crowd, who are hosting the event, are looking for more than a night of fun, and that not everyone will make it through to dawn…

Directed by Matthias Hoene, known for his award-winning shorts, commercials and music videos, Beyond The Rave features performances from Nora-Jane Noone (The Descent), Jamie Dornan (Marie-Antoinette), Tamer Hassan (Layer Cake, The Ferryman, Eastern Promises), Sebastian Knapp (28 Days Later, One Point O), Les Simpson (Dog Soldiers, upcoming Doomsday), Lois Winstone (When Evil Calls) and Steve Sweeney (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). There are also special appearances by Hammer legend Ingrid Pitt, Sadie Frost (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and Phil Bush (lead singer of The Cazals).

Beyond the Rave’s special effects will be handled by Tristan Versluis, one of the UK’s best new FX artists, whose credits include Jake West’s Evil Aliens, Billy O’Brien’s Isolation, Adam Mason’s Broken and The Devil’s Chair, and more recently Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd.

Producer Ben Grass concludes, “Beyond the Rave was inspired by Tom and my own experiences of raves: the great highs, and the demons that can lurk in the dark before dawn. It's jam packed with great characters and encounters. The narrative hurtles along to a big, juicy conclusion, and all along it's peppered with great tunes and visceral action.”

Will it manage to capture that old Hammer magic? The jury is out but with it due to be on-line I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. More details as they emerge…

Blood of the Vampires – review

Director: Gerado De Leon

Release date: 1966

Contains spoilers

This Philippines vampire movie was always going to suffer when I looked at it as it is so poorly dubbed. Think of the worst examples of dubbing of a film, when bought by a US studio, and then multiply it… yup it is that bad. The challenge was going to be looking past the dubbing (and the poor sound transfer on the DVD) to see if it was going to be a little gem hidden beneath.

The film begins at a party. Though it isn’t directly stated, the film does indicate through the running time that the party is for the return home of brother and sister Eduardo (Eddie Garcia) and Leonore (Amalia Fuentes), who were sent away by their father after their mother died. Eduardo dances with Christina whilst Leonore goes into the garden with Christina’s brother Daniel (Romeo Vasquez) where he proposes.

Leonore accepts his ring but Daniel wants to do things traditionally and so says that his father, Don Julio, will plead his case to her father. They hear what sounds like a woman scream. They go deeper into the garden to investigate and the noise now sounds like a woman ranting, incoherently, but reach a dead end. They return to the house to tell Leonore’s father but, as they walk in, he collapses clutching his chest.

The father is on his death bed, now I say death bed but he manages to last through half the film and also to be up and around, wielding a whip, albeit clutching at his chest a lot. He names Don Julio as his estate’s administrator and adds a condition to his will that the accursed house be burned to the ground. Eduardo is a little nonplussed at this change but his father decides to show him something.

There is a secret passage behind the portrait of Eduardo’s mother (Mary Walter) that leads to a dungeon area. In it is a coffin, it is opened and the body of his mother is in it. Father explains that, 9 days after she died, she returned – which is why he sent the kids away. She is a vampire, sleeping by day and thirsting for blood at night. She opens her eyes and Eduardo runs back to the house.

Don Julio pleads Daniel's case but Leonore’s father refuses to allow her to marry – anyone. He fears the family curse. She doesn’t understand until she too sees her mother, whilst the father whips the vampire and chains her up. Having seen that she spurns Daniel and the film follows their doomed love. Eduardo, in the meantime, faces his mother alone and, in a moment of stupidity, takes his crucifix off and is bitten. He becomes a vampire also, determined to turn his sister.

Now you might be wondering why the father never destroyed the vampire mother. The film is not explicit but one can guess it was because he loved her too much. The vampire lore itself is strange in places. The mother is like a raving beast but Eduardo is more together, perhaps that is because she died and returned whilst he was simply bitten and turned when alive.

The vampires have reflections and can be destroyed by stake and fire. We have already established that the vampires sleep during the day and Eduardo is obviously missing from their father’s funeral. Yet it also appears that he married Christina, whom he had bitten and who calls him master, during the day.

One thing I did notice was that a mysterious red light seems to appear over the mother when she is on the vampiric prowl – that has to make them easy to track.

There might be a dark doom hanging over the film but it literally drips with melodrama and one gets the feeling that the dubbing might have added to that but one also feels that the melodrama was there in the original form of the film. In the same respects the acting is poor and I don’t think it can just be blamed on poor dubbing. That said the film does manage to develop a very tangible atmosphere, though not enough to save it from its own soap opera feel.

It is genre interesting, however, as it has a clash between a vampire and a ghost, not the normal monster mash one would expect to see. That said, it is still pretty poor. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

30 Days of Night: Immortal Remains – review

Authors: Steve Niles and Jeff Mariotte

First published: 2007

Contains spoilers

This is the second prose novel set in the ’30 Days’ universe and the events within take place sometime after those described in the first novel, Rumours of the Undead, and after those events described in the short graphic “The Journal of John Ikos”.

The book brings in several familiar characters but is primarily centred on the vampire Dane, who we first encountered in Dark Days. Dane is a firm believer in the philosophy that vampires must remain hidden for their survival and when he hears of several blatant home invasions in the town of Savannah, Georgia, in which a victim would be brutally killed and drained and any other resident would then be abducted, he identifies the unmistakable hand of a vampire and goes to investigate before the humans realise what they are up against.

The novel follows that investigation and the subsequent events that follow in its wake. Other familiar faces that return include Eben and Stella Olemaun and Andy Grey, who was the central character in the previous prose novel.

There is a goodly chunk of action sequences throughout the book but what the book does do is provide a vast amount of background to Dane himself, and subsequently Marlowe, the vampire who arranged the attack on Barrow in the original 30 Days of Night, as he turned Dane. We also get a brief appearance by Operation Red-Blooded, the human anti-vampire black ops unit, enough to realise that they seem as dangerous and psychotic as many of the vampires and enough to wet our appetite about more being centred around them.

The book introduces some interesting lore snippets, much of which is so plot specific that I don’t want to reveal it. We do, however, get the hint that, in certain situations, a vampire biting another vampire can cause a jump in the powers of the recipient of the bite – but no indication of the exact rules and detail of the phenomena. Whilst the story does wrap up nicely we are left with a couple of over-arching cliffhangers, which will presumably be addressed in a future volume.

A very nice addition to the lore of the series, I have to admit that I couldn’t put the book down. 7.5 out of 10 and a thank you to NickW, who bought me the volume.

Vamp or Not? House of Blood

This 2006 flick, directed by Olaf Ittenbach, was somewhat of an enigma wrapped in a mystery as it merged some competent filming with one of the worst dialogues ever written but it is not good enough to state that the dialogue was bad, it has to be explained and it will be, later.

The film uses a flashback technique, with action occurring and then flashes to how that scene emerged but I shall look at this pretty much chronologically. It also underpins the story with an interesting cyclic concept that I’ll get to. You’ll notice that the DVD cover says “For the Undead… there’s no place like home.” Ambiguous but perhaps it refers to vampires?

The film begins with two vehicles going along a mountain road. In the car is Doctor Douglas Madsen (Christopher Kriesa). The other is a prison van. A dying crow in the forest causes a rock to fall and smash the windscreen of Doug’s car, he spins out and causes a crash that allows convicts Stephen (Jaymes Butler), Vincenzo (Mehmet Yilmaz), Arthur (Simon Newby) and Arthur’s brother Spence (Luca Maric) to escape.

A shootout with the guards occurs, during which Spence is shot in the arm. The convicts manage to kill the guards and take their uniforms and then discover that the car has Doug in it, who rather luckily happens to be a doctor, so they take him at gunpoint as both hostage and medic for Spence. Doug, who has trouble walking the woods due to a gammy leg from a car crash as a child that killed his parents and from which he was rescued by a mysterious girl, wants Spence to go to hospital as he might loose his arm. The convicts force march North towards Canada.

Now I want to hit the dialogue here, first. The convicts dialogue is awful and that leads to what might be ridiculous performances but might also be because there was little else to do with the dialogue. Arthur is the worst offender, coming over like a stereotype of an East End gangster with Vincenzo close behind as the convict who should have been commentating on the Discovery Channel’s documentaries.

Anyway, out in the woods they hit fog and become disorientated, emerging into a valley with a large ramshackle lodge. They move towards it and see a girl, we later discover to be called Alice (Martina Ittenbach), bleeding a sheep into a bowl and then putting some form of black paste on the wound to staunch the bleeding. She heads back into the lodge and Doug realises that he might be able to use the paste to help Spence.

They burst into the lodge and catch the occupants at the dinner table. I’ll point out that the meal seems to consist of raw meat (something our protagonists didn’t mention). The Kin, as they call themselves, all wear founding father era clothing and speak in a way that is consistent with the worst dialogue ever found in a film.

Obviously this was Ittenbach’s, and his co-writer Reitmair, idea of what old English must have sounded like and consists of adding “th” at the end of most words and using the most horribly contrived contractions they could think of, which has the effect of making the speech difficult to understand, unwieldy and, to be fair, pretty damn amusing.

In a search for vampires let us note that the windows are all boarded up but, later, we note that they can go out in sunlight. There is also a shrine area, with cross, and the Kin talk often of God. Their leader or elder, Joseph (Klaus Münster), implores the convicts to leave in the name of God, which is ignored and the Kin are placed in a back room under guard as Doug, with the assistance of Alice, goes to work on Spence.

He has to amputate the arm and, in the back room, we see the child of the Kin acting strangely as he cuts. After the operation he takes out a cross he wears and we see a flashback to him as a child, post car accident, with the mysterious woman (clearly now Alice) who gives him the cross. We now know that years have passed and Alice hasn’t aged.

The Kin are brought back into the room but the child is going nuts and so is taken, by the Kin, to the sleeping area and tied down. Then Vincento notices one of the adults is missing, he finds him hidden away with the arm, eating it. All Hell breaks loose and the Kin reveal their true nature, sprouting claws and fangs and being very acrobatic.

The fight is protracted but we realise that the Kin keep coming back. One has his head smashed to a pulp but it reforms and he attacks again. These things cannot seem to die. Doug is left, eventually, and is being attacked but Alice, who has not changed, helps him escape. The Kin drag her off calling her a traitor as he stumbles through the woods straight into a SWAT team who are looking for the prisoners. The fact that Alice saves him as she recognises the cross that she gave him is somewhat analogous to being saved from vampires by weilding a cross, at a push.

Now I said that the film was cyclic, and so it is. Doug is questioned by a cop (Jürgen Prochnow) who doesn’t think his story adds up and has found many different persons' blood on his clothes. From a 'Vamp or Not?' point of view, Doug does ask if the cop believes in Demons. As the cop believes Doug to be being deliberately uncooperative he arrests him as a suspect (for 30 days questioning) and has him transported to prison. The prison bus goes off the road, in another crow related accident, at the exact same spot.

Doug finds himself being traipsed through the woods by four convicts again, one of them, George (Wolfgang Müller) is injured (this time in the groin), there are also Jimmy (Daryl Jackson), Shawn (James Matthews) and Paul (Dan van Husen, who we last saw in Forest of the Damned). In the ridiculous dialogue stakes, Paul comes out top as the intellectual, scenery loving thug – yet somehow van Husen makes it work in a surreal way.

We know that they will end up back at the lodge but there are one or two things to note in the “Vamp or Not?” stakes. Alice is alone, the others are hunting. She says that they are Kin but not family and had hidden themselves away to resist temptation – but the taste of human blood has sparked a thirst in the others. Whilst we have seen them eat flesh the primary goal is explained as “Killeth they for blood.” Alice states that the thirst sleeps in her.

The film does come across as, what I imagine as I haven’t watched it, The Village meets From Dusk till Dawn. The latter is not surprising as Ittenbach also directed Legion of the Dead, which itself owed a huge dept to the Rodriguez/ Tarantino vehicle. Is it, however, Vamp?

The Kin could be a few things. They are mentioned, on the box, as undead – originally a direct vampire reference but, in recent years, more often a zombie reference. These are not zombies however. They grow fangs and thirst for blood, they do not age. This could be either vampiric or demon. The fact that religious icons do not effect them is a strike against either of those creatures, but more so demons. The fact that they say they are cursed, and that they are from different families drawn together because of the curse lends towards a communicable thing like vampirism.

They do not seem to be able to die, at all. There is a question mark over fire as one is set alight towards the end but we do not know if it recovers. It is touch and go but enough, I think, to put this film on the Vamp radar at least. To be honest, if you get past the awful dialogue, it is a competent and interesting little flick.

The imdb page is here.

Vampires get everywhere

I was having a wander around the net when I came across… The Dracula smurf; isn’t the little fellow cute with his cape and fangs!

But that isn’t the only toy to get the vampiric treatment. After working away yesterday I got home to find I had been bought a talking, shaking Scooby Doo resplendent in his cape and with a vampire bat, the proximity of which starts the shaking and talking. Many thanks to Sarah for buying that for me.

Blood trails part 3

Part three of the 30 days of night webisode, Blood Trails, is now online at FEARnet. Sharp-eyed readers may wonder why I haven't mentioned part 2, part 1 has now been split into part 1 and part 2 and so part 3 is the continuation of the story from my last post.

However, the side bar (on the linked page) has links to all other parts as it stands as well as various behind the scenes stuff. I suppose I should also warn that the content is designed for the mature viewer.

Click here for the official 30 Days of Night movie website.

Blood – review

Director: Charly Cantor

Release Date: 2000

Contains spoilers


From what I’ve been able to discover this was originally released in a much longer form and was felt, by many, to be too long and ponderous. Given that, it was edited down to its current 90 minute format. If that is true then the filmmakers edited down to a very nice character driven British drama that does something so new with the genre that it actually puts it on the cusp of vampirism, but I felt was genre enough to review rather than ‘Vamp or Not?’

The film begins with a girl, we later discover she is called Lix (Lee Blakemore), strapped to a chair and muzzled. A needle is pushed into her arm and blood drained from her. This plays with our expectations. We expect that a vampire would drain its victim and yet the victim here is muzzled. A close up of a stray hand passing dangerously close to the muzzled mouth indicates danger.

We cut to the drainers, Don (Paul Herzberg) and Janie (Amelda Brown), with a third man named Guy (Michael McKell). They seem on edge, sweating and they are waiting for someone. When he finally arrives they pass him a bottle of blood and he tests it, declaring it good and paying them for the bottle.

Two men, Carl (Adrian Rawlins) and Doug (Phil Cornwell), pull up in a car. Doug picks up a knife. They break into the house cellar and try to free Lix but she says she is hungry and cannot leave. They have a brief run-in with Don and it is clear the men know each other. When they get Lix to the car she devours a blood pack.

Lix is taken to Carl’s home, to live with his family and to be given a normal life. As the film progresses we discover what Lix is. Carl was a research scientist on Project Elixir., The aim of the project was to genetically manipulate a human – Lix, it emerges, was actually grown artificially - so that their blood was a curative for all our natural ills. Instead the blood became a highly addictive narcotic.

The reason that this falls into the vampire genre is that when Lix losses blood, by draining or by accident, she feels a hunger. Indeed she states at one point that “It’s only when I’m hungry that I can see clearly”, and so she craves human blood as much as an addict craves her blood. To assuage her hunger she must consume nine times the blood she lost – though why this is the case and why it is consumption and not transfusion is never answered.

The film is a study in addiction first and foremost. It quickly becomes clear that Lix and Carl become attracted to each other. Perhaps part of this is guilt as Carl gave Lix to three lab technicians to save her from termination when the project closed 15 years earlier and those were, of course, the people that locked her in a cellar for most of her life. After she cuts her finger he tries her blood and the film follows how this effects his life, his work and his family in much the way it would if the drug had been more conventional. Of course this is a drug that can physically say, “I love you.”

His addiction grows and the withdrawal is shown to be painful. As such, her drastic need for replacement blood leads to a raid for blood packs, highway robbery in this case, and very well done compared to similar scenes in other films that are often played for laughs. Of course it leads to much more drastic measures later.

The soundtrack to this was excellent and the direction worked nicely. This is not a happy film and, in many respects, not a horror film. It is a drugs drama put into a horror setting but the true horror comes from the breakdown of Carl’s life rather than anything they do – their actions are only a symptom. The acting is excellent, which is what makes this film as all the actors make their characters believable, and I was left with the feeling that I had stumbled over a real hidden gem.

Not a film to leave you with warm, fuzzy feelings but a great film none-the-less. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Bloodrayne 2: Deliverance (unrated director’s cut) – review

Director: Uwe Boll

Release Date: 2007

Contains spoilers

I sit and type this with feelings of guilt coursing through me. You see, back when I reviewed the film Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe I suggested that perhaps Natassia Malthe would have made, given that performance, a better Rayne than Kristanna Loken did in the first Bloodrayne movie and then, later, she was cast as Lokken’s replacement. Whilst she did, all in all, make a better Rayne – I’ll get to her performance later – I just pray that, with that notion, it was not I that set in motion the death of the beautiful Miss Malthe’s career, for this film could well be a career killer.

Yes, Uwe Boll is back and Rayne has been transplanted to the Wild West, what has happened in the intervening years is not explored (other than a sepia shot of a castle, followed by one of a boat and then a lot of the old West in the credits). The film begins with shots of mountains and then a guy enters the town of Deliverance. First two things you notice is that the weather and lighting with the mountain shots and that in the town are different, secondly it is how shaky the camera is. I mean it, all the way through the movie the camera shakes, it is really annoying and it has no stylistic value.

Anyway the guy, played by Chris Coppola, is either called Pyles or Potts – the name changes in the movie back and forth, how is that for script continuity! He is a reporter who has gone to Deliverance to report the coming of the railroad but really wants a taste of the Wild West.

Cut to Vince (Jamie Switch) and Bernadette (Carrie Genzel) with their kids in their homestead. Two things to note here, firstly the scene is dragged out, I think to make us bond with the characters, but as Vince and Bernadette are only going to last five minutes there was no point in the extended dialogue interspersed with silences. Secondly we should note how dark the scene was and then realise that lighting was not a number one priority in the night shots of this film – not good in a vampire movie as most of it is at night, in fact I had to lighten all the night time screenshots for this review.

Anyhoo, already bored… Vampires kill parents… yadda, yadda… kids taken… vampires take over Deliverance, turn Sheriff into vampire… hold kids hostage to make the townsfolk compliant …

Okay a little glib but so was the story. Rayne was friends with Vince and Bernadette – how and why is not looked into – she discovers the bodies and immediately meets a man (Michael Paré) who tells her that the killer was a vampire (like she didn’t know, especially having seen the fang marks) and his name is Billy the Kid (Zack Ward). Incidentally, at the very end of the film we discover that the man is Pat Garrett. Boll has been criticised for bringing in these icons of the West, though he didn’t write the script. It is not so much that he shouldn’t have used them but that it made no sense to. They could have been any old outlaw and good-guy, however why a centuries old vampire would be called Billy the Kid… How do we know he is centuries old? Because the dialogue tells us that he can heal from gunshot without feeding so he must be really old.

Rayne goes it alone, kills a few vamps, gets caught and then is going to be lynched (for reasons unknown, you’d have thought they’d have just killed her, they are vampires and a token hanging seems silly). She escapes; Garett helps her and then feeds her some blood in order to help her heal from the bullets she caught as she legged it. They then go and get help in the form of the Preacher (Michael Eklund) and some guy whose name I didn’t catch and back in they go. The whys and wherefores of how they recruited the two were just plain bad scripting through and through, watch and you’ll understand.

What is it all about? When the railway comes Billy is going to use the town as a staging post for turning all the passengers into a vampire army… give me strength, the concept is just so silly…

In respect of vampire lore there is nothing really new. The vampires seem to go a grey colour and veiny when dead, which was nice. Bullets do seem to stop most vampires for some reason, yes I know that Rayne’s bullets contained or were smeared with garlic and holy water but a vampire is shot by a plain old bullet at one point and dies. In the Rayne universe water of any type burns a vampire (the script alludes to this), so one wonders how the final showdown happened at all given that it was raining! Actually, as I mention that, what in the world would have possessed the brimstone gang (as they are referred to) to enter the town at night, why not go in during the day and drag the vampires into the sun?

I did like how reflections were handled, but I always like films to show that it is only the vampire that is missing and not their clothes – I don’t like the effect enough to raise my opinion of the movie, however. Seemingly if a vampire bites you then you turn but not if it rips your throat out – which means Vince and Bernadette should have been spooking around as their throats weren’t ripped. Oh, it also seems that any old fool can cast a blessing. Either Preacher is a con-man posing as a priest or he is a priest gone bad (there are wanted posters of him after all) and yet they ask him to bless the equipment.

The script was poor, not just in overall story and the logic thereof but the dialogue was very poor. Whoever thought that the parting shot of the film should be a weak cock gag needs to go hang their head in shame.

Acting wise nothing stood out too much, any limitations were probably down to the material, but I need to look at Malthe as Rayne. I have read some comments lamenting the fact that Lokken wasn’t in the role and, to give the earlier actress her dues, she did seem more comfortable in the action sequences than Malthe. That said she played Rayne like a little girl lost and Rayne needs to be sassy. Malthe brought that sass to the role, which to me makes her the better choice for the role and, again, I have to state that any limitations seemed down to the material and critically one other factor…

Direction… I want to give Boll a chance but this was poor. There are long lingering shots that are unnecessary and break up action. They are aping the spaghetti western but they are out of place and show no comprehension of the style they ape. Not only that but they are way too long, the timing is completely off. In a similar example of poor timing, there are also shots that should have lingered that cut away in seconds, such as finding the corpse of Vince where, in my opinion, the camera should have lingered for a few more moments. I can only assume that the shaky camera work I mentioned was at Boll’s instruction and not because the cameraman didn’t know his trade. It isn’t good.

I gave the first film the benefit of the doubt but this one had just too many flaws. I said the film is likely a career killer, but Uwe Boll seems bullet proof and so we wait with baited breath for Bloodrayne 3 (ostensibly to be set in the second world war). However, as they gave away the second PC game with the first movie and the first game with this, one can’t help but wonder what game they can give with the third, if it is made, in order to boost sales as there were only two Rayne games made.

1.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Let the Right One In – review

Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist

First Published: 2004

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: “Oskar and Eli. In very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds, they became friends.

“And how they came to depend on one another, for life itself.

“Oskar is a 12 year old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city’s edge. He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at school, and wets himself when he’s frightened.

“Eli is a young girl who moves in next door. She doesn’t go to school and never leaves the flat by day. She is a 200 year old vampire, forever frozen in childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood.”

The review: Having read the blurb you’d be forgiven for supposing that this Swedish novel, which was translated into English for publication in the UK this year, was going to be a kids book, after all the two main characters are around 12.

Nothing could be further from the truth, this is a horror purely and simply, with some unusual and, at the same time, familiar vampire lore. However the horror of the book is split into two distinct areas. Despite a ritualistic murderer on the rampage in the first half of the book, which the reader knows is tied to Eli and her helper Håkan, the true horror of the first part of the book is mundane in nature. The bullying of Oskar is brutal, for instance, and his response disturbing. Oskar is no angel, a habitual shoplifter, it seems that he has been driven to the verge of murdering his tormentors and has become obsessed with serial killers.

Amongst the other characters we meet are his neighbour Tommy, a teenage thief and glue-sniffer, who resents his mother’s relationship with police officer and church-goer Staffan, who, himself, has barely repressed violent tendencies. Indeed, it is difficult to find characters that are not deeply flawed and yet, despite the flaws or maybe because of them, you find yourself becoming sympathetic to many of the characters and their plights.

Håkan himself is the most unsympathetic and disturbing of characters, posing as Eli’s father he is rather too fond of small boys and has had trouble in his past because of it. It is clear that he wants more from his relationship with the vampire than she is willing to give. A warning to those wanting to read this book, at this point, that some of the Håkan scenes are rather strong in content.

As the book progresses we never leave this suburban nightmare behind, Lindqvist drawing a living, black-hearted city around us. The horror from the hearts of man is over-whelmed, however, with the horror of the vampirism around them. I do not want to give too much away but I do want to look at the lore Lindqvist creates.

The vampirism is an infection, Eli does not see herself as a vampire or undead as she is still, very much, alive. However there can be undead vampires, we discover later, vampires whose minds have died after the infection has taken hold.

They are not, however natural creatures. They are stronger and faster, when fed, and can control their bodies in order to create fangs and claws: “The bones crackled in her hands as they stretched out, shot out through the melting skin of the fingertips and made long, curved claws. Same thing with her toes… …A shooting sensation in her teeth as Eli thought them sharp.”

They need a direct invitation to enter somewhere and the invitation has to be given for any entrance way to a domicile, therefore if they have used the door they cannot use the window without another invitation. The reaction when this is breached is very unusual. We see Eli, at one point, enter a building uninvited, no mystic force blocks her way but, once in, her blood begins to weep out of every pore and orifice until the invitation is given. If it had not been, she would have, presumably, died.

The other ways to kill a vampire are by sunlight or fire and by a stake in the heart. The reason for the stake is also unusual and its use theoretical as we do not see one actually used, but they are mentioned. Once a person is infected new cells begin to form around the heart, forming a secondary brain that is entirely dominated by the infection. The stake will kill the infection’s brain, the base intelligence that is able to drive them forward to kill. We get an indication that there might be conflict issues with the secondary, instinctive, brain and the more morally centred human brain.

We also discover that cats naturally hate vampires and may attack them on sight. Also vampires, or Eli at least, love puzzle games – a trait owing much to the tradition of vampires being obsessive compulsive, one feels.

Another unusual aspect was that rather than have Eli as a 200 year old trapped in a child’s body, Eli is very much a child still, frozen mentally and emotionally.

If the book had a flaw it is that the writing can, on a few occasions, seem to get clunky, for want of a better description. I suspect however that this had more to do with the translation process from Swedish to English than a fault with the original prose. It is only a minor issue, however, and not one to put a reader off exploring this excellent, innovative but highly disturbing novel.

7.5 out of 10.

Many thanks to Jim-fish for putting me on to this one.

Vampire Junction – review

Directed by: Jess Franco

Release date: 2001

Contains spoilers

When I first heard about this movie I was filled with nervous trepidation. There is a vampire novel called “Vampire Junction” by S.P. Somtow and the concept of Franco trying to piece together a movie of that novel, with its deep Jungian symbolism, was too much for my poor mind. A quick check, however, put my mind at ease – only the name is the same.

So what is it, other than a fairly modern Franco film? Imagine for a moment ‘Salem’s Lot filmed with the surrealist overtones of Twin Peaks, put into a Western setting with more than a heavy dose of nudity and sex. Pictured it? Good. Now throw that picture in the mental dustbin because, whilst that might be what Franco was trying to produce (conceivably), what he actually made was an incoherent mess.

There seems little point in going through the plot, as there wasn’t really one… but I live to accept challenges such as this, so here goes…

We start with a car, it is raining. The film then hits all sorts of weird filters over the driver’s face, the driver being the journalist Alice Brown (Lina Romay). A discordant avent-garde jazz soundtrack overlays. Images appear of naked female vampires and a male vampire (Viktor Seastrom) in cowboy hat and cloak. The vampiric imagery is also in the strange, psychedelic filters. The filters might have worked, over the introduction piece, but Franco smears such effects through the film in a haphazard and sloppy manner, making you wonder which moron let him know you could do such things.

A male voice overdubs, it is the voice of Dr Spencer (Steve Barrymore). He was a family doctor and travelling salesman who got lost in the rain and ended up in the desert town called Sh*t City (I kid you not). He has been there five years, we later discover, in a town controlled by the vampire Father Flannigan (whom we never see).

Alice is there to interview him, why we never discover, but he seems depressed and, when she goes to get her bag out of the car, he is sent to his room by his wife, who is a vampire, until Alice leaves. So, we have the makings of a mystery, perhaps, a lone doctor trying to stem the tide of vampirism… you wish.

The next time we see Spencer he is dead, ostensibly stabbed by a statue of a native American chief – or so it appears. Strangely we get another voice over by him after his death, but there you go. Anyhoo, Alice doesn’t seem that bothered by the fact that he is dead and the plot kind of peters out at that point.

There is an attempt later to bring plot back in, when Alice’s laptop types itself to her and tells her to meet Father Flannigan in a nearby forest. We could ask what a forest is doing near a desert town, we could ask why it is made up of palms in a nice, organised, garden like manner, we could ask why there is a tennis court in it. But why bother. She doesn’t meet Flannigan, but does meet his messenger who tells her that Flannigan fights his nature so sometimes is a vampire and sometimes is a saint. She is also told that he can be contacted through his website (the address is given but it doesn’t work in real life – a shame as that might have been at least a little interesting). Nothing more is said about Flannigan and nothing more appears regarding him plot wise.

We discover little about the vampires other than they can disappear and reappear, they have a liking for eagles (rather than bats), they have reflections, they can go out in daylight and they have yellow fangs. Ok, comedy fangs are one thing but fangs that look like they were bought at a bargain Halloween sale is quite another!

One thing the film does have is sleaze aplenty. Oodles of naked female flesh is on show and it is hardcore compared to most non-adult flicks with several extended girl on girl scenes. However it is too artsy to be called pornographic and lacking any form of sensuality also bars it from being called erotic. It is sleaze, no more and no less. It also made screenshots of this movie rather tricky to get.

This is Franco at his very worst. There is no narrative within the film, when there is dialogue it is poor and badly delivered – though in fairness I don’t think English was the first language of most of the cast. The soundtrack works, in an odd way, in that it fits the movie – thus it would fit little else. This is one for completists (either collectors of Franco’s work or vampire movies) but there is little other reason to waste your time and eyes on what amounts to one great big WTF moment.

1 out of 10, reflects that the filtering at the beginning worked before it was overused and the fact that the soundtrack worked with the unintelligible mess on screen.

The imdb page is here.