Vampire Cop – review

Director: Donald Farmer

Release date: 1990

Contains spoilers

We have looked at Donald Farmer’s films before; the risible Demon Queen, the painful Red Lips and the nonsensical Red Lips 2 . This falls, chronologically, between Demon Queen and Red Lips but its lineage doesn’t make one hopeful about this film.

The montage of images at the beginning didn’t help my confidence. This was shot straight to cam and words such as cinematography, lighting and editing all seemed to have been foreign concepts. So was musical taste as my ears were assaulted with the worst excesses of AOR. Images of a shadowy man, a woman in bed, a squad car they were all over the place with no sense of a cohesive thread.

bikini bar

Two men go down an alley and up some stairs. One of them will be revealed as Max Jagger – or maybe Geiger – as played by Terence Jenkins. Anyway later we discover that he is a German immigrant criminal but his accent was floating towards English with a touch of affected Boston. The other guy was his bodyguard Kurt. They go to a bar where a bunch of ladies are parading in bikinis. Two of the girls, Nikki and Danielle, go off with a patron.

shadowy man

Out in the city some guy pulls over and forces a girl called Tracy into his car. Meanwhile the two girls have gone off with the bar patron and have offered themselves for three hundred each. The man doesn’t get to have his jollies as Jagger comes in, chases him off, rebukes Danielle for running away, shoots her and gives Nikki to Kurt. He’s not a nice man. Tracy, meanwhile, is about to be raped but the shadowy man comes over and she sees, as she runs, him rip the hand off the rapist and then bite his neck.

bang bang

Jagger and Kurt are meeting a guy for a drugs deal. Outside a cop (Don Tilley) waits to pounce but his partner isn’t there. When he arrives we see it is the vampire, Lucas (Ed Cannon). They are too late, Jagger has made their man inside and shot him. They chase after him and it gets to a point where Lucas is facing down the villain's car. His partner is killed, he is shot and not only do bullets not kill him they don’t make holes in his T-Shirt! He kills Kurt but Jagger gets away.

hanging on the telephone

Anyhoo, a reporter Melanie (Melissa Moore) starts tracking down the vampire killer. She starts by breaking into Lucas' apartment and asking for an exclusive… really, and he wouldn’t: a) kill her seeing as he is a vampire or b) threaten to run her in as he is a cop? No, he says he won’t talk to her or go to lunch with her (what with it being daylight and all) but he will go to dinner with her! Jagger starts working out what Lucas is and it is all meaningless, ill plotted crap. Sorry but there is little else to call this.

cross fingers

The daylight rule applies in this film as does no reflection (not that we get that tested in a meaningful way). We don’t know about crosses, though one character crosses his fingers at one point! He drinks blood and a bite turns… sometimes. Kurt didn’t turn, neither did Nikki when he paid for her services (yes he is a bad cop who kills villains and drinks their blood and then picks up prostitutes), but two girls who are sent by Jagger to get him do turn. Go figure. He likes to sleep hung upside down but we only see his upper torso with those shots, so no clawed feet on display.

vampire cop

The acting is, across the board, rather poor but not all of it will be the actors' fault as the dialogue is rather poor as well. The effects aren’t that great – we can see him trying to keep his fangs in at times. Is there anything good to say about this? Yes. Next to Demon Queen it is appears cohesive – though that seems, in reality, to be an optical illusion!

1 out of 10. The imdb page is here.