Vamp or Not? Vampire Vixens From Venus

This 1995 flick, directed by Ted A Bohus, suggests two things in the title. One, that it is a sci-fi, and two, that it is about vampires – albeit alien vampires. Obviously there is some doubt here or this would be a review. Whilst the guidelines I set out some time ago for ‘Vamp or Not?’ probably need amending, expanding and generally tweaking the final guideline mentions “But the title indicates it is a vampire movie” and I suggest that this is “the worst reasoning for whether a film is of the vampire genre or not”.

The film starts with a spaceship and some really awful space flight effects. That said the entire thing is so bad it has a kind of cartoonish value to it. The ship passes the moon and enters Earth orbit, going into stealth mode. This is the ship of the titular vampire vixens from Venus.

The occupants beam down and they are three ugly looking aliens. Their dialogue is subtitled but the content of said subtitles does indicate that this is going to be a film of the most low-brow humour. A fiddle with controls at the wrist and they transform into beautiful buxom ladies, ish… The leader Arylai (J. J. North) transforms properly. Shirley (Theresa Lynn) turns into a rather large lady and needs her controls sorted and Omay (Leslie Glass) cannot transform at all, at first.

Their reason for being on Earth is soon revealed when Arylai and Shirley flag down a car, with a sequence involving Shirley hitching with her thumb down and having to get her boobs out (I said it was lowbrow). The man who stopped is teased by the aliens to get him excited and a device is placed on his head to draw out some form of fluid/hormone – I’ll look at the aftermath of extraction and what they are after soon.

Anyway, the only thing that stands between the aliens and their goal is Detective Oakenshield (Leon Head) and his new partner Jack (John Knox). Oakenshield is, unfortunately, distracted by a woman he has just met, Miss Shampay (Michelle Bauer), he is also a klutz. Oakenshield is a British detective who, after an unfortunate incident at Buckingham Palace, has moved to the U.S. He is portrayed as a Clouseau-esque character and my problem with this was it was so clearly an attempted rip-off of Seller’s classic character, with only the Nationality changed.

Back to the vampiric question, we have had alien creatures before who have drained life force or fluid and we have classed them as vampires. However, the extraction method tended to be natural and this is artificial. It is true that we have vampires taking from their victims by artificial methods but this tends to have an anti-aging, feeding, medicinal or life lengthening effect.

We have had vampires who attack their victims due to the narcotic effect of the act and their own addiction, rather than wanting/needing to feed for sustenance. In this case the aliens are extracting something that can be used as a drug. What exactly they are draining is at various times called fluid or essence but it seems to be necessary to life and more potent when the (male) victim is aroused.

However, our aliens are not addicted. They are drug dealers and they are stealing this essence to sell. In this respect this is a low budget, puerile comedy rip off of Dark Angel (1990). The fact that they are not doing this for their own food-source or addiction tends to move me away from vampire.

The victims react to the process in a strange way. They seem decayed almost but that process does not stop and very quickly they become a fleshy pod. This is described as dead flesh – though they are pulsating – and that dichotomy is ‘answered’ in a throw-away line that in truth answers nothing. Over-all a device that has no discernable logic. As these pods do nothing, they do not feed into our discussion further.

Over-all I cannot suggest that these are vampires. They are not feeding and they are not addicted (that we know of). They are not genuinely parasitical in the classic sense, though one might argue they are in a socio-political sense. Such an arguement would be too deep for a film of such shallow basis, rather they are exploiters and horny human males are the thing they exploit to deadly effect. Not Vamp.

The imdb page is here.