Bloody Tease – review

Director: Brad Sykes

Release date: 2004

Contains spoilers

Bloody Tease? Bloody awful more like. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. There is another thing I find hard to resist and that is a gimmick… I can be a sucker for a decent bit of packaging, for example. This film has a gimmick but I didn’t know about it until the disc arrived. It’s not the packaging – it’s the fact that the film is viewable in 3D – they wish…

I duly dug a pair of 3D glasses out and, well it just didn’t work… Perhaps that is unfair, perhaps it is an issue between Pal and NTSC… I doubt it very much. Besides, from what I can gather this wasn’t shot for 3D, just ‘treated’ afterwards… what a waste of time.

So, back to the 2D presentation and, well bloody awful remains a catch phrase as we enter the world of vampire strippers (who rarely strip). The film starts in the strip club called Fetish Jam… a tacky little place which was about as unconvincing as a set as you can get. Beyond that, there are three dancers, Treasure (Elina Madison), Monique (Allison Beal) and Serena (Monika Wild), and only one customer, Greg (Matt Nespoli), who is having a birthday celebration. The girls vamp out and attack.

Now, two major negative things struck me as I watched this… beyond pitiable acting and uninspired cinematography through video-cam… As the film progressed the poor plotting and script directions that made little sense were a major problem but the immediate thing was the absolute lack of extras. The club is empty, constantly, but the next scene is at Irvine State College and one has to ask, where are all the students? Less than a handful wander in the background, through the entire film and the place feels deserted.

Anyway Ken (Steve Beaumont Jones) and Sammy (Dan Wells) are at this college and Sammy wants a girl. He also thinks Ken should get a girl, despite the fact he has a girlfriend, Jessica (Juliet Bradford). Ken won’t cheat on her – like Hell, whether he is with her or not and whether he will cheat or not vacillates within the script more than a bent politician’s opinion at election time. Ken reads that Greg has been murdered – stabbed in the neck by something bigger than a knife, says the paper – and does the obvious thing, rings Greg’s landlord and secures his house. There are three bedrooms so Sammy brings geek stereotype Martin (Michael Sharp) into the equation.

A man watches the girls enter the club. As this scene progressed my heart fell further. His name is Bob Gecko (Joe Di Angelo) and he is out to avenge his brother who, ten years before, was killed by vampires in bar. Surely not, thought I, they cannot be referencing From Dusk till Dawn and the Gecko brothers. Perhaps, perhaps not… evidence later on suggests they might have been. However, he goes in with a gun and ends up vampire chow.

Ken wants to join a fraternity and the frat demands you send in an outrageous video to be considered. To help Martin they decide to go to Fetish Jam, get a stripper to come back and video Martin with her. The girls have a fresh meal come in but they do not attack… oh no. Martin gets slapped by Serena and Treasure goes home with Ken, has sex with him but doesn’t attack him. Confused? Any reaction you’d have thought these vampires would have is discarded for the sake of stretching the film out.

The boys, the next day, have a party and invite the girls. Treasure doesn’t come. Ken gets drunk, with the shadow of a boom mike behind him, Sammy beds Monique and she doesn’t attack. Then Serena takes a very drunk Martin to bed. Sammy and Ken watch on the video as she attacks him. They go to his room, eventually, and she is gone leaving Martin dead on the bed.

Sammy and Ken go to the club and see Monique attack a drunk guy (Joe Haggerty) and then leap over their car (it seems). They retreat, convinced that the girls are vampires. Ken wonders how they will explain Martin’s body to the police – and I wanted to scream at the screen, “You videoed the attack!” There is a nice line when Ken remarks that Martin was a cool guy and Sammy mumbles back, “I wouldn’t go that far”. Sammy worries that Martin will come back as a vampire but the body suddenly decays.

Let us stop for a moment. A vampire victim decays… Later we see a victim decay to nothing. How did the police find Greg and Bob’s bodies (we hear about both finds at different points)? A little consistency in your new lore please. Obviously it is a boon for a vampire if their victim turns to dust but that also means you can’t have ‘police find the body’ story lines.

Of course the vampires have not attacked yet… the film would be over too soon… and so Ken quizzes his horror film fan friend about vampire movies so they can work out how to kill the girls. Sammy lists a whole bunch of films and in order they are: the aforementioned From Dusk till Dawn, Near Dark, Fright Night, The Lost Boys and the Subspecies series. Then Ken pipes up, don’t forget Dracula. Ah, says Sammy sagely – there have been three versions. {Three!!! The nerve!!!} Okay, so he lists the three and we have 1931 Dracula, the Hammer films (saying the Christopher Lee one and then stating that this was a series of films, undermining the 3 count previously given) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. From this they glean that sunlight always destroys vampires (ahem! not in Bram Stoker’s Dracula it didn’t – please don’t list a constant from a film, when it clearly wasn’t the same), plus they can use crosses, holy water and stakes through the heart.

Off to the club. Ken holds up a cross, Treasure reacts and then laughs whilst Sammy fails to stake Monique. The guys leg it. The vampires, again, do not pursue – we are not ready for the finale as the boys have to google the club, discover about Bob Gecko and go get his book. The book tells them of a new breed of super vampires, immune to garlic, holy items, sunlight and staking through the heart. What can kill them? Taking their eyes out…

Except it isn’t taking their eyes out, it’s taking an eye out. This really is a species improvement, not. Rather than staking the heart – fairly difficult to get to I’d imagine – (super)nature has conspired to allow them to die if an exposed organ is taken out by pushing a pencil in it. Not that we see any actual eye/pencil interaction. If you’re thinking you’d get to see a thumb pressing into an eye, forget it. Also it made little sense when one girl gets got in the eye, turns to demonic vampire form and still has both eyes! She dies anyway.

The acting is earnest in parts but not great. Dan Wells comes across as an irrepressible cheeky chap but that’s about the best I can say. The effects are, in the main, awful but I liked the fangs and some of the blood from mouth scenes. I’ve mentioned the God awful sets, the absolute lack of extras leaving us in an empty world, the plot problems and intimated, at least, that the dialogue left something to be desired. For a film about vampire strippers we get precious little T&A.

As I sat down to write this I was going to offer it 1 out of 10 just for the fangs. However, I’ve had such good fun writing the negative review that my enjoyment level for the film in general has been raised… thus I’m going for 1.5 out of 10. Not even the gimmicky 3D could have saved this – had it actually worked.

The imdb page is here.