Honourable mentions: Dívka na Kosteti

Dívka na Kosteti is a Czech film from 1972 that was directed by Václav Vorlícek (who appears to be making either a sequel or remake, due in 2010 according to imdb). The film was known in the US as the Girl on the Broomstick and is focused on the character Saxana (Petra Cernocká) a witch.

In terms of content it feels a touch like The Worst Witch and the film begins in a witches’ school. As such the entire thing has a monstrous (and yet comedic) Hogwarts feel.

Saxana is not the best student in the world and is caught receiving a note – that will help her cheat in her lessons. When brought to the front of the class she is unable to remember the spell to become a raven and becomes a chicken and then a cow. As a result she is punished and kept back in class for 300 years.

She is bored and speaks to the Janitor (Vladimír Mensík) who reveals how she can escape to the human world for 44 hours. She goes in owl form, is captured by a zoo and given to the head keeper’s son Honza (Jan Hrusínský) a nice young boy who, when she transforms into a girl again, takes her to his school with him. The janitor has been sent to keep an eye on her and he warns her not to drink a hag’s ear brew as it will keep her in the human world permanently. She determines to get a hag’s ear and, due to this, falls in with a bad crowd. A farcical comedy then follows.

It is the janitor who is the reason for this mention. He is described, in credit, as a retired vampire. In truth he shows very little by way of vampiric traits (and his spell casting is akin to the witches) but then he is retired. However he does mention drinking blood in the human world (as a reminiscence) and has one fang that hangs over his lip. Not very vampiric all told but worth a mention if only to highlight this unusual children’s film.

The imdb page is here.

Guest Bloggin’

I have been Guest Blogging over at the wonderful VampChix Blog. The piece is the opening part of an essay I have written on the vampire’s relationship with the divine.

The rest of the essay is available at a new project called Taliesin & the Vampire Documents. What do I intend to do with that site? The simple answer is I am unsure at the moment but as posterous allows me to blog full documents I am playing with a few ideas. Currently the essay and my Novella are both over there in pdf form.

Blood Groove – review

Author: Alex Bledsoe

First Published: 2006

Contains spoilers

The blurb: When centuries-old vampire Baron Rudolfo Zginski was staked in Wales in 1915, the last thing he expected was to reawaken in Memphis Tennessee, sixty years later. Reborn into a new world of simmering racial tensions, the cunning Nosferatu realizes he must adapt quickly if he is to survive.

Finding willing victims is easy, as Zginski possesses all the powers of the undead, including the ability to sexually enslave anyone he chooses. Hoping to learn how his kind copes with the bizarre new era, Zginski tracks down a nest of teenage vampires. But these young vampires have little knowledge of their true nature, having learned most of what they know from movies like Blacula.

Forming an uneasy alliance with the young vampires, Zginski begins to teach them the truth about their powers. They must learn quickly, for there is a new drug on the street – a drug created to specifically target and destroy vampires. As Zginski and his allies track the drug to its source, they may be unwittingly stepping into a fifty-year-old trap that can destroy them all…

Review: Let me get straight to the point with this one – I really liked this book. For a start it had vampires I liked. Main character Zginski is your atypical gothic vampire – he is a blue blood, arrogant, well turned out vampire who can turn into a wolf (but not a bat, why would he want to), control storms and ensnares his victims in a web of sexual desire that possesses them. The fact is his arrogance was his downfall in Wales – he was put on trial after he ensnared all the women of a village in such a way, thus he was publically found guilty of vampirism and staked.

Luckily, or unluckily, the ‘stake’ was in fact a thin dagger (made from a cross, though that was actually unimportant) that didn’t destroy his heart, just pierced it and so he was trapped in a deathlike sleep – until the dagger was removed. He finds himself in a very alien world. This is a world in which racial tensions still publically simmer and in which the vampires (at least the ones he meets) do not realise their own powers.

Indeed they avoid the sun – why would you test the burning to a crisp theory – whilst he can walk around in daylight with impunity (though it hurts his eyes a little and robs him of most of his powers). However, despite this the vampires are real vampires. These are not romantic fools; they are blood drinking sociopaths for the most part and, again, this was something I really enjoyed.

As I read the book I could see the movie; grindhouse style, gritty and nasty. Bledsoe’s razor-sharp writing helped. However, for readers of a gentler persuasion, the racist language used by many characters and sexual violence might be off putting.

The blurb mentions a powder and, without giving too much away, this was our brand new lore that really worked well. A drug that robs the vampire of their bloodlust, makes them lethargic and depressed and brings out all the weaker aspects of their personality. I will also mention that I loved the coda scene – a brutal final twist of the knife. Personally I’d love to see Zginski on the big screen and eagerly await a sequel. 7.5 out of 10.

K2 – review

Director: Gabriel Pelletier

Release date: 2001

Contains spoilers

If Karmina was a romantic comedy then this, which was the sequel, was more a straight comedy. It also only featured the character Karmina (Isabelle Cyr) lightly.

A few years have passed since the last film but Linda (Diane Lavallée), the wife of custom officer and turned vampire Ghislain (Gildor Roy) is still having therapy over the death of their son, Patrick, at the hands (or should I say, fangs) of Vlad (Yves Pelletier). The shrink clearly is bemused by her story of vampires.

As it is Ghislain has bought a rather nice castle in the suburbs for them (later we hear he took out a 93 year mortgage, the advantage of eternal life) where he brews the potion that allows vampires to live as human beings and then uses his job as custom official to send it overseas to the other vampires. Like Ghislain, Vlad has chosen to remain in Canada. Karmina and Philippe (Robert Brouillette) have moved to Transylvania, with Karmina’s parents the Baron (Pierre Collin) and Baronne (Sylvie Potvin), where along with Esmeralda (France Castel) they put on vampire shows for tourists. Karmina and Philippe now have a baby who has never actually been in vampire mode because of bottles of potion.

Linda wants Ghislain to turn her but he won’t, he believes her too unstable and, anyway, Esmeralda has forbidden the making of new vampires. Linda, however, is determined and steals the book of spells that has the recipe and magic formula for the potion. She threatens to burn it and, when Ghislain prevents that, boots him out and tells him it is over.

Heartbroken Ghislain goes to see Vlad – in order to get a place to stay. Vlad is being somewhat of a scamp, and that’s putting it lightly. He has discovered that a little potion mixed with vodka allows him to use eye mojo and mesmerise women. He takes Ghislain out for the night and then we discover he is up to his neck with a local mobster called Proulx (Julien Poulin) – as the film goes on they end up owing Proulx a considerable sum of money. Worse still the tanning shop that Vlad runs is dodgy and he has been using Ghislain’s name rather than his own. Indeed our soviet vampire from the first film has adopted the worst excesses of Western consumerism in this film.

The Transylvanian vampires are running out of potion and cannot contact Ghislain, so Philippe volunteers to go back to Canada. Karmina is worried that he might run out of potion or forget to take it – he has never actually spent any time as a vampire – but he is confident that won’t happen. He gets to Linda and Ghislain’s home and Linda spins him a tale about Ghislain running off with a younger woman. She goes about hiding his potion and trying to seduce him as the effects wear off.

He bites Linda, who bites him back. The exchange of blood turns her and unleashes two monsters. She wanted to be turned for one reason only, to gut Vlad. Philippe becomes drunk on blood and power (and later turns a floozy, much to Karmina’s disgust when she arrives towards the end of the film). When Linda and Philippe slaughter the patrons of a swingers' club the police believe that it was the work of Vlad and Ghislain and are after them, plus a news reporter is after them due to Vlad’s dodgy business practices and their troubles increase when Philippe and Linda turn the gangsters into vampires…

This was good fun, perhaps not as fun as the original but pretty darn close. We have a definitive ‘crucifix answer’ when Proulx holds Philippe and Linda back with a pin badge crucifix. In the last film there was a mention of vampires not being photographed and in this we discover that video tape cannot capture them either. Through the turning of Linda we see that swapping blood is necessary to create a vampire.

The vampires are actually able to survive a full on explosion and, when shot by a silenced pistol, don’t even seem to notice. However sunlight is deadly, indeed even a sunlamp is deadly when in vampire form. That said Vlad’s wondrous perma-tan when in human form (as the potion makes them fully human bar a few side powers) is great.

Later in the film we get a vampire baby, when the supply of potion runs out in Transylvania – a sight that is always creepy no matter how much the filmmakers might aim for cute! The comedy works really well – bar some cultural references that a Montreal resident would get but went over my head – that said it didn’t curb my enjoyment of the film. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

;)Q

Karmina – review

Director: Gabriel Pelletier

Release date: 1996

Contains spoilers

I think it is a testament to a film that, even when dubbed (and the dubbing being not particularly great in places), you still enjoy it – especially if it is a comedy. Karmina is a French-Canadian production and the DVD has a French or English language option. Subtitles would have been better, but hey…

We begin in Transylvania and the dialogue here is odd. It seems to be a combination of languages (including English) with hard coded French subtitles. After a while one of the characters, the Baron (Raymond Cloutier), declares he hates subtitles and they shatter. The film then goes into French (or English dub). That is a little way in, however, and we begin with a hunchback character pushing a cart through the woods and spilling the body parts it contains out for the wolves before heading back to the castle.

In the castle Karmina (Isabelle Cyr, who was also in the Hunger episode a Matter of Style) is chased by her mother the Baronne (Sylvie Potvin). Karmina throws herself from a window but, being a vampire, this has little effect (what, with her being undead and all that entails) but to make her ignobly land face first in the dirt. She flies back up to the window to face her mother.

The problem is that the Baron has arranged for her to marry Vlad (Yves Pelletier), a communist vampire, partly due to the fact that the Americans (who the Baron hates) are going to build a burger factory on his doorstep – why marrying Vlad should help prevent this wasn’t clear but the dialogue ties the two events together. The castle is full of vampires and one is reminded, in look, of the vampires from the Fearless Vampire Killers. Indeed the whole look of the film is wonderful.

After waiting for Karmina to come down (not realise that she has fled, by horse drawn car, to the airport) Vlad goes to her room. He stands outside the door, hearing her say that she will soon be coming out. When the Baron arrives at the room he has less patience and blows the door of its hinges. Inside a cage is a bird that has been taught to respond as though Karmina is saying she is coming. The Baron’s anger reverberates around the castle.

A coffin is deposited on the luggage carousel at Montreal airport. A sniffer dog alerts the guards and they open it but it is empty. Karmina is stood behind them. She takes her passport (that states she is 140 and has no photo) to the guards and uses eye mojo to make them stamp it. Karmina has reached Canada. We then see her on a rooftop, eating pigeons, until she spies a woman walking below her.

The woman enters her apartment, puts on a dating video, fixes a drink and is looking in the mirror as Karmina comes up behind her – not casting a reflection. The woman turns and… launches herself at Karmina giving her a hug. She is Esmerelda (France Castel) – Karmina’s aunt – but, wait, I did say aunt and yet she had a reflection and is in a photograph. She has developed a potion – from a plant whose roots must draw from a corpse (and thus she has a coffin in her greenhouse to feed the plants) – that makes vampires human (ish). Their complexion becomes human, they lose their fangs and nails, they can walk in sunlight, stand crosses and reflect – for as long as the potion lasts.

If Karmina is to stay with her she must use the potion. On her first day out she becomes fascinated by her own reflection. Riles a gang of skinheads and ends up in a church, where the organ music played by Phillipe (Robert Brouillette) moves her so much she flies (though still human in appearance). Of course Vlad is on her trail and he turns airport security guard Ghislain (Gildor Roy) to help him in his task - this leads to darkly comic moments when Ghislain takes Vlad home to his surbuban house with wife, Linda (Diane Lavallée), and surly teenage son (also Gildor Roy). What we then get for the rest of the film, as it concerns Karmina, is a romantic comedy with a darkly gothic twist.

I have covered most of the lore and, of course, the big new piece of lore is the potion (which adds an almost twisted Cinderella aspect to the story). However one thing I wanted to mention was about the cross. Phillipe is faced with bad vampires and Cushings a cross together that holds them off. In response Vlad crosses a hammer and sickle together, which glows and fires a beam at the cross, causing it to burst into flames.

I really enjoyed this, though I am led to understand that there are nuances in the humour that means much more to Montreal natives. I would have preferred it to be subtitled, of course, but beggars can’t be choosers. I am not normally a fan of the romantic comedy, but this was so oddball and off the wall that it tickled me from beginning to end – plus it had a line dancing soviet vampire, which I am sure is a first.

The film looked great and whilst the dubbing makes a comment about the acting difficult, the physical acting seemed spot on. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Beyond the Rave – review

Director: Matthias Hoene

Release date: 2008

Contains spoilers

Hammer is back! It was a clarion call. It was a moment of nostalgia fuelled hope. It was always going to carry a big risk of disappointment.

The first film was going to be a vampire film… Okay it was going to be contemporary, not the period setting Hammer had been most famous for but that’s okay, we have to move with the times. Then it was released in serial format on MySpace and whilst there was a cameo by Sadie 'Lucy in Dracula' Frost (that was pretty much a waste of her talents) the promised Ingrid Pitt cameo had vanished and…

I was, quite frankly, rather disappointed with the whole thing. I decided not to review it until it became available on DVD and they re-edited the damn thing… and I waited… and I waited… and finally we have a DVD – a limited DVD (mine is numbered 0012). And… it isn’t re-cut. It is still in its poxy little chapters and the chapter number flashes up with logo as it goes along. If you remember my 30 Days of Night: Blood Trails review you’ll already know that keeping it episodic like that bugs me. This isn’t as intrusive as Blood Trails but it is still a pain. Worse because the thing needed a good re-edit, even worse because the expunged scenes are not added in but extras… Now the one with Ingrid Pitt does have a plot important aspect to it (she gives Ed (Jamie Dornan) a Green Man medallion that saves his life and, without the scene, we wonder what the Hell he pulls from his pocket that stopped a crossbow bolt) but… let us get to plot.

We start with Ed on army manoeuvres in a forest. He sees something in the dark and it is the vampire Melech (Sebastian Knapp) taking a bite out of Ed’s girlfriend Jen (Nora-Jane Noone). It is a nightmare and he is in a military hospital He has been injured in Iraq as he planted a flag (the significance of the flag, whilst it features in the film as stands, is lost unless you see the extra scenes in the DVD extras). A detective wants to ask him questions. It cuts back to a month before.

Ed has 16 hours compassionate leave before he ships to Iraq and is picked up by his friend Necro (Matthew Forrest). Now, the character is called Necro and drives a hearse but any significance (or even why he has a hearse) is sacrificed to the Gods of let us not develop characters. Of course the absolute lack of proper character development is probably down to writing 5 minute episodes but it is annoying. Ed and Necro want to go to a rave – though they do not know where it is going to be. Jen is not returning Ed’s calls and it turns out he stood her up the week before for an army night out. Jen and Necro went to a rave, where she met and got off with Melech. Necro met a girl – for girl read vampire, though he doesn’t know it at this point – called Lilith (Lois Winstone, yes, Ray’s daughter).

Now they pass, early on, a US army truck driven by Melech – that has a girl tied in the back as a snack and I did go back to the scene and confirm that it was Melech. Why? Because at the climax of the film… a vampire burns up in the first light of the sun. So why is our vampire driving a truck during the day? Who the Hell knows. Perhaps because it is overcast – though we question why he would risk immolation? We also meet the Crockers. First of all we meet Rich (Tamer Hassan) and Terry (Lee Whitlock) and later Danny (Lee Long) and they are the most stereotyped Mockney type drug dealing gangsters you’d have the misfortune to watch but they do underline one aspect of the film – the blooming awful dialogue that bears no resemblance to how people actually speak.

Anyway Necro and Ed are in the hearse with Big Jim (Jody Halse) and Tina (Katie Borland)… Hold on, where did they appear from. Suddenly they were there, no explanation, as if by magic… but actually it was sloppy filmmaking. The Crockers have had a run in with a couple of vampires – who eventually carve a code on Terry’s stomach. Necro has the same code, in Lilith’s lipstick, on his – it is a mirror image of the radio frequency the rave will be advertised on, broadcast from a pirate radio station. Jen, meanwhile, is already at the rave site, invited by Melech.

The crux of this is that the vampires have decided to go away – why, we don’t know. They are sailing to an island that is “off the grid” near Africa and they need some snackage for the journey – so they are going to harvest all the humans at the rave. Well all of them bar Jen – ‘cause Melech wants her (she reminds him of someone from the past it seems) – and Necro – because Lilith wants him. To do this they are first going to gas the humans…

Now I want to hold off here and question why the Hell the vampires needed to wear gasmasks? After all they have no need to breath and… but wait they can get stoned on weed – indeed the best line in the film is uttered by the vampire Uncle Leopold (Trevor Byfield) when he mentions that he has been “smoking this shit for 768 years” – so I guess the undead do breath in this film. Anyhoo they are going to gas them, knock them all unconscious, mechanically drain their blood into a big container and then neatly put the bodies in body bags. Will Ed and Jen make up and how will they escape?

If I sound disparaging it is because I am. Perhaps naively I had high hopes for a new Hammer film. I hoped they would pull out all the stops and shout at the world, "We're Back!" Bad dialogue, plot gaps and, candidly, weak acting was not what I wanted. Okay, I wasn’t expecting Academy Award level stuff but... I did expect, for example, vampires who got covered in blood (and I mean their clothes, face and hair absolutely plastered in the stuff) to not suddenly be clean in the next scene we see them in. As an aside, I must mention the scene where a guy is approached, whilst in the toilet, by two hot vampire babes and then taken off to be fed on – as soon as he said that he was a ‘cheeky monkey’… well lets just say being fed on by two vamps was a fate better than he deserved.

There are positives. Sebastian Knapp really looks the part as Melech and steals scenes just by being there. The actor has a really strong presence and I hope he does some fine things in the future. The film is rather bloody, which is good, and there are some nice vampire moments. This brings us to lore… The vampires can be photographed. They are resilient and very strong. Beheading or a stake through the heart will kill them as will sunlight (unless driving a truck). An extra scene on the DVD indicates that failure to feed causes feverish sickness and then death.

There is some indication of psychic powers – Leopold tells Ed “I can smell death on you, soldier”. They may be selling drugs laced with vampire blood – one of these pills leads Ed to have a vision of an Iraqi girl riddled with bullets asking him to “play with me”. A foreshadowing of events to come or just a bad trip brought on by his anxiety about his posting. The film doesn’t say or do anything useful with the moment. Perhaps it was simply a political comment regarding civilian casualties in Iraq or the theatre of war generally, if so it was poorly handled and out of place.

This is no longer just a freebie on MySpace, where excesses might be forgiven; this is now a commercial exercise where folks are asked to shell out hard earned money. As such this needs the surgery of a blooming good re-edit with scenes put back in, the flow of the film improved and… even then it might still be on the critical list. 3.5 out of 10 – and it breaks my heart to have to give Hammer’s comeback film a low score. The imdb page is here.

Across the Forest – review

Directors: Justin Blair & Matthew Vincent

Release date: 2009

Contains spoilers

It is easy to forget, as we indulge in film after film and novel after novel centred on the vampire, that in the past these creatures were a very real nightmare to many people and even easier to forget that to some they still are.

Of course the vampire of tradition is a very different creature to the vampire built from the imagination of filmmakers and novelists – but the vampire we watch owes its existence to its folklore cousin.

Bram Stoker, using the voice of Jonathon Harker, commented on Transylvania in Dracula, suggesting that “every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting.” Over a century after Stoker published those words Justin Blair and Matthew Vincent created this documentary and I make no apology for quoting from a literary source that, frankly, has no place in the resultant film.

The documentary looks at the actual beliefs and superstitions of the people of Transylvania. Unlike many documentaries it forgoes dramatic reconstructions, bar a few beautifully realised illustrative plates, and eschews prescriptive interpretations. Instead the camera captures the heart of these traditions by having Transylvanian men and women tell the stories in their own words. We hear of strigoï – akin to the vampire we know – of vârcolac and pricolici – akin to werewolves – and of mama or fata Pădurii – a forest spirit.

Some of the tales seem like fairytales handed down from generation to generation. Others come from friends of friends. Others still are claimed as their own stories. We hear from a woman whose neighbour was, as she describes it, strange – the sort of person who would walk in the snow with no shoes. The neighbour died and the woman’s husband was digging the grave (as was custom) as she prepared the funeral food. A younger cousin came to her and claimed he had seen the neighbour walking in the barn. Her animals were becoming distressed and she realised the neighbour was strigoï. She then knew she had to hammer a nail through the corpse’s heart to stop it wandering. She improvised with a needle and log and, as the deed was done, the corpse’s mouth twisted and sneered but she was then bound to the grave.

Many of the tales have very familiar elements. We are told of a woman who knew how to deal with strigoï. She would discover the strigoï's graves by riding on a horse over the graves past midnight. She would take grave dirt and cast a spell on it before throwing it in the Mureş river. The spell would say that the strigoï could only return when they had gathered every granule of dirt.

The camcorder recording is perhaps, by nature of the equipment, not as sharp as it could have been with more expensive cameras. However it offers a closeness to the subject, helping us be drawn in to the stories we are told. The music includes songs by locals and pieces by Justin Blair and is truly haunting. The style of filmmaking allows us to hear what these people have to say and was filmed with a palpable level of respect. Ultimately it allows us to make our own mind up with regards their tales. This is essential viewing for the student of vampire lore and folklorists alike. You can discover more about the project and order the DVD from the film’s website (EDIT: the link ia apparently dead, please try the Facebook page). 8.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Tiempos duros para Drácula – review

Directed by: Jorge Darnell

First release: 1976

Contains spoilers

Hard Times for Dracula… or so it would seem in this Spanish/Argentina joint produced movie. Tiempos duros para Drácula is a comedy and maybe it was just me but I wasn’t overly amused as I watched it.

After credits with a bizarre almost electro version of the funeral dirge, it begins with Drácula (José Lifante), high necked cape and all, in the rain – absolutely soaked and knocking on a door. A woman in a nurse’s uniform opens the door and he asks for a transfusion before falling unconscious. Through bleary eyes he sees the fuzzy shape of hospital staff all around him as he is wheeled on a trolley.

He finally awakens in a room, a man sits by him who explains that the is an asylum, rather than a standard hospital. Drácula starts to tell him the story of his fall from grace – as it were – and this makes up the bulk of the film. It is, I guess, best described as a series of vignettes or comic sketches about the ill fated vampire.

He begins with the castle. Mortgaged up to the eyeballs and behind on his electricity bill payments Drácula has had to turn the castle into a tourist trap. He has fake cobwebs, wolf howls on tape and crap bats on strings that swoop at the sightseers. He makes an appearance in full formal attire. Then the electricity got cut off (mid performance) and his assistant, Archibaldo, left his service.

This is the start of a downward spiral for Drácula, he uses his ancestral ‘book of prophecies’ and summons forth a girl – only to loose the spell to a domestic. He gets his formal cloak from a pawn shop (it seemed) but ends up attacked by a socialist sweep. He gets a job advertising toothpaste but is fired due to looking like a famous politician and he gets into movies but a fight stunt causes one of his fangs to be knocked out.

He does go to the dentist but he can’t afford a prosthetic and the dentist refuses to glue his original fang back on. There is a suspicion that he needed a good woman and he tells how he found one, Sonia, but after their wedding it became apparent that as well as having only one fang he was impotent. Then it turns out that she used him, wrote a book called Taming the Vampire and then divorced him.

On it goes, so what about our Drácula. Other than fangs (or one fang) he does not meet either the novel born or movie born expectations. Whilst he wears formal wear, he also wears a Mickey Mouse vest and bats boxer shorts. When a pop star, for a short while, he took to wearing a large blonde wig. He has a reflection and can go around in daylight. There is no indication of shapeshifting abilities.

We see him successfully drink blood once – his victim is diabetic and he has a sweet tooth. We see him shot at, to no avail, but we cannot tell if he is bullet proof or if the cuckolded husband is a bad shot. Certainly, later, he breaks into the Chief of Police’s house as a way of committing suicide – an act that fails when the Chief of Police offers him his wife as a snack – and the 'suicide' would have been via a handgun.

We see him go to the cinema and watch a film, which he rather enjoys. Recognisably it was Jess Franco’s Count Dracula – which in clips worked rather well! He also comes across a drunken cemetery caretaker who always wanted to be a vampire hunter – Drácula beats a hasty retreat.

All in all he might have just been a delusional man who believed he was a vampire – even when he was at school, as we see in flashback.

Now I rather liked José Lifante’s performance in this – he makes a rather passable comic Drácula but, generally, I did not find myself enamoured with the jokes in the film – always a problem when it comes to comedy. The final punchline could be seen a mile off and, other than that, the film seemed to be a movie searching for plot and/or purpose. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? Lich

I was perusing through the goods at a market when I spotted the DVD of the 2004 film Lich and my eyes were drawn to the tagline “She found the secret to immortality… death.” Turning the case over my eyes alighted upon the phrase “bathing in the blood of her victims” and “killing and feeding!” So even though a lich and a vampire are two different creatures I had hopes.

The DVD was also very cheap and, as indicated, for sale in a market so I had no doubt it would be of a low, low budget.

We get a view of bathing in blood at the very start of the film, along with a man (Corey Greenan) tied down in crucifixion pose, bleeding. The blood drips down plastic sheets and is collected in any form of receptacle. The music playing is an interesting choice, voice and piano float hauntingly belying the obvious camcorder shoot and very amateurish pictures that adorn the walls (note that, clearly, not every killer will be able to draw like Picasso but somehow we expect it in our film killers!)

Cut to a girl, Maggie (Samantha Klein), reading a letter, interspersed with a nurse (Numa Perrier) walking through the halls of her hospital. Patients drool and fuss in the corridors and she is taking a tray of breakfast to Maggie. From the letter Maggie discovers her old house has been sold. She belts the nurse with a tray, steals her scrubs and escapes. Now, this much didn’t ring true. The asylum did not seem very much like a hospital, it seemed too easy for Maggie to escape. But we’ll let that pass.

Maggie meets with a man, Bill (Steve Siegel). He was the one who sent her the letter and now he gives Maggie a gun – but he won’t go with her. All through these opening scenes we see flashes to Maggie's sister Tabetha (Tammy Filor) and the rituals she performed. Maggie heads to her house that has been bought by Chaz (Billy Parish, who also wrote and directed the film) and his wife Alison (Georgia Cobb). They are due to have friends around and Alison decides to take a bath before they arrive.

The bath tub is where Tabetha bathed in blood. We see her lying in the water as Alison gets in. It becomes clear that Alison has been possessed. Ginny (Monica Huntington, who would go on to be in Bled) and her new guy Gerry (Brian Thomas Barnhart) show up. They are going to explore the house when Alison comes downstairs and the doorbell rings. She touches Ginny who doubles in pain. Shrugging off the visually noticable stomach cramp as nothing, Ginny and Gerry head upstairs, where Ginny comes on strong with Gerry.

Meanwhile downstairs Alison seems confused and the doorbell rings again. It is the other expected friends, Susan (Corrine Dekker) and John (Hilliard Guess). Upstairs we see that Ginny is now possessed – when folks are possessed we sometimes see through their eyes in a yellowy-grey tint. She stabs Gerry with a pair of scissors (rather effectively as he does not scream out) and starts drinking the blood from his wound. Downstairs Maggie arrives and asks to come in, she is refused but pushes past as a scream resonates through the house.

The screamer is Ginny as the spirit left her and she regained consciousness above Gerry’s body. Her mouth is covered in blood. Everyone is upstairs and Maggie says to tie her up, when they refuse she pulls the gun and says that she will explain when Ginny is tied up. This is a ruse to ensure that Ginny is not possessed as her sister (she thinks) wouldn’t allow herself to be tied.

They all go downstairs and she explains that her sister was a Satanist and often did rituals that involved drinking blood. Her final ritual was supposed to give her eternal life. She slaughtered twenty people and made a bath of blood (how she prevented the blood from clotting is not explained… well, sorry but these things strike me when I watch such a film). She conducted ritual suicide in the bath. Maggie was meant to get in the bath to finish the ritual (and be possessed). She admits that she is looking for Tabetha’s journal as it should suggest how they can stop her.

Tabetha is currently in the cat (anyone who has watched Fallen wouldn’t have missed that one) and manages to get into Susan, gag Ginny, kill John and vanish off whilst the others are upstairs looking for the journal. Help is at hand, however, as Bill turns up. He was the one who turned Tabetha onto Satanism (though it was all very low key for him) and luckily he knows a lot about Tabetha as he has her journal. Why he didn’t hand it to Maggie in the first place, the God of continuity and plot holes only knows.

Anyway he explains that her spirit is able to pass from person to person by touch. She must drink blood to sustain her energy but whilst someone is possessed they have supernatural regenerative powers, heightened senses and super strength. The host manages to regain control after some time has passed. The only one she can’t jump into is Maggie as she has a pendant, given to her at the time of the ritual, that she was meant to put on after she got in the bath. The pendant prevents possession but will seal possession when worn by one already possessed (until removed again). It also gives her the ability to raise and control the dead when she has it on her person. Why no one decided just to break the damn pendant is beyond me – it was my first thought. She can be killed by killing the host she is in (so long as she doesn’t manage to jump hosts).

I won’t go further into the plot as we have all the lore and whilst this is, at its base, spirit possession is sounds pretty darn vampiric to me. The use of bathing in blood and suicide to create the undead is pretty much vampiric. The fact that she has to drink blood to maintain her energy was also vampiric. Hell even the pendant, whilst unusual, has resonances in some vampire films where a piece of jewellery carries vampiric powers – in this case it would be raising the dead, more than anything, which is also a sometimes used vampiric power.

The film itself is right royally attacked on imdb. Virtually all the reviews are scathing. Okay it was shot on a shoestring, some of the performances are terrible, the lighting is pedestrian at best, the dialogue isn’t always the best and there were really strange plot moments (like Bill not passing the journal on, or telling Maggie all he knew, in the first instance). But it was an unusual vampire type and I have seen much, much worse – I actually quite enjoyed it in a low budget sort of way. Tightening up of script, more directorial practice and a bigger budget might see Billy Parish making some interesting films. For now, however, this one is Vamp. The imdb page is here.