The Night of the Walking Dead – review

Director: León Klimovsky

Release date: 1975

Contains spoilers

Klimovsky is one of the staples of the euro-horror genre and directed several films that we have already looked at here, these being Werewolf’s Shadow, The Dracula Saga and The Vampire’s Night Orgy.

As El Extraño Amor de los Vampiros, as it was domestically known, began I really didn’t know what to expect. A kind of psychedelic negative of vampire and victim was serenaded by a caustic electric guitar and then… we were in a 18th or 19th century period piece that seemed typical euro-horror fare. Indeed I was prepared to be a little disappointed. The obviously ex-vhs print was too washed out and blurred to allow an exploration of the expected cinematography, the film's dub was that extreme type of dubbing where every character seems to be incredibly patronising in their speech and the setting was too familiar to offer any originality. How wrong I was – not on the first two points – but the lore suddenly twisted into something magnificent.

gratuitous screenshot of a wench

As I say, we are in a period setting village and the locals seem to be plotting something. The village doctor, Patrick, realises what it is and goes to stop the procession of men who are going to the big house, where one of the daughters has recently died. Patrick states that Marian was anaemic and died of natural causes and though his wife suggests caution as they are newcomers to the area, he wants to put a stop to the barbaric practice. Said practice is, of course, to put a stake through the girl’s heart, which the villagers do. She is then buried.

Lore, it seems, is not the villager's strong suit. That evening two women come to the grave and open it. They lift the coffin lid and remove the stake. Marian’s eyes snap open and the two vampire women help the newly raised vampire from her grave. She walks towards the cemetery gates where a cloaked male vampire waits for her. The villagers are of course not too happy about finding the open grave the next day.

Emma Cohen as Catherine

Marian had a sister, Catherine (Emma Cohen, Count Dracula, Horror Rises from the Tomb) and common wisdom supposed she was destined to be a victim too. She is depicted as a sickly woman, with little appetite and prone to fainting. She sneaks around the house getting an eyeful of the maid having some marital rumpy pumpy with the footman.

Count Rudolph bitten

It is through a tinker named Mihai that we get the local legends of the area. The castle on the hill, now a ruin, was home to a Count Rudolph (Carlos Ballesteros). One night he gave hospitality to a traveller and his entourage. Rudolph fell for the traveller's daughter and took her to his bed. Unfortunately they were a travelling band of vampires and as she nibbled on his neck the others slaughtered the household. Over the intervening centuries the villagers have often searched the castle for the vampire Count to no avail.

Marian returns

Catherine is in love with a lad called John and when she hears he has returned to the village she gets a bout of perkiness. We see her and John riding to a bridge in a scene that was a tad confusing until you realised it was a flashback. Following the flashback we realise that she is wandering aimlessly, waiting for him to come to her, when she stumbles upon him and a maid in a hayloft – Catherine scares him, her eyes harbour death, John tells the maid. This puts her into a downward spiral, made worse when her father takes her mother to the city and she is left on her own. She also sees her sister at her window but Marian is driven off by a cross that their mother scratched into the glass.

Rudolph stalking

Everything changes when a Count Rudolph comes asking for hospitality, which she gives. Of course it is the vampire and, once the household retires for the evening, he does some of that creepy vampire stalker bedroom gazing but is held off her by the cross she wears. In the morning he is gone but she goes to the ruins and sees an original portrait of the Count, the date beneath it confirming his date of birth (no date of death is given). When he sends a carriage for her the next night she accepts the invitation – and this is where the lore got really good.

the night of the walking dead

We see graves open up in the graveyard; half the occupants are vampires it seems. That night it is a party for the vampires as most are confined to their graves and emerge once every ten years (this doesn’t fit with the fact that they also get up and about the next night, but that might be because the villagers attack them). The castle interior now looks sumptuous and it seems the Count can restore it by whim. The vampires rampage through the village (though two are killed by Mihai through the medium of a flaming torch). John is brought and strung up as a snack – his fate in Catherine’s hands…

nail in the head

The other lore we get is the fact that a stake through the heart won’t work permanently. Clearly we saw that and, as Catherine's father is the one who communicates the effective method, we can only guess that he didn’t relay that to the villagers as it was his daughter they were staking. Rather an iron nail should be hammered through the skull – this not only makes for a nicely unusual scene but forms (unintentionally) a bridge between East and West as the Indonesian Kuntilanak is sometimes said to lose its powers through just such an intervention.

So, some great lore – I loved the vampire party and the nail through the head. The ending is deliciously dour. However the print I saw left a lot to be desired and the dubbing is awful. This is screaming for a digitally restored release, in its original language with subtitles. As it stands the lore carries this to 6 out of 10 – a better print that reveals the cinematography and good original acting might well push the score higher.

The imdb page is here.

4D Man – review

Director: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

Release date: 1959

Contains spoilers

Friend of the blog Halek suggested this film as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ The fact that I’m reviewing it indicates that there was so much of a vampiric factor that I decided I didn’t have to investigate whether it should be classed as a vampire film; simply that it is a vampire film.

That said, I need to put a moment of explanation in. We are not dealing with the undead, but we are dealing with a man who becomes an energy vampire. Energy vampires have been a staple of the genre easily as far back as the nineteenth century vampire literature. But, as Halek pointed out, as well as the energy vampire there are other tropes within the film that are recognisable as coming from the genre.

in the lab

The film begins (after a groovy jazz accompaniment to the titles) with a man, Dr. Tony Nelson (James Congdon) in a lab. Outside a bell strikes and he turns the lights out as a security patrol pass by. He turns the light back on and plays with his equipment. He is trying to pass a solid object (a wooden dowel) through metal. He fails and the experiment goes awry, causing a fire. This is an extra-curricular experiment and he gets fired. Then we see him turn up at another lab where his brother, Dr Scott Nelson (Robert Lansing, Monsters: The Vampire Hunter), works. He is the lead scientist working on creating a new impenetrable alloy, assisted by his girlfriend Linda (Lee Meriweather) and the overly ambitious Roy (Robert Strauss, the Munsters).

shelter from the rain

Scott tells Tony that he intends to ask Linda to marry him. They all go out for dinner and, another day, out into the country. Linda seems somewhat flirtatious with Tony. This is not lost on Scott who makes an excuse to go. Tony and Linda then get caught in a rain-shower and end up kissing – though Tony breaks away and stops things there. Back at the lab, the next day, and the experiments are still failing and then a breakthrough and they create cargonite. However Scott has been going to the furnace room during the experiments – dangerous due to radiation released.

proof of theory

At the press conference to announce the breakthrough, Scott’s boss, Dr. Carson (Edgar Stehli), takes the credit for the discovery. When Scott gets home and tells Tony, the maveric brother states that he doesn't believe it is impenetrable and mentions his experiments using the 4th dimension to allow solid objects to pass through each other. When Scott seems less than supportive he goes upstairs and retrieves a successful example. The problem was he did it by accident; he is also convinced that he willed it through.

somewhat embarassing

Tony was ready to leave because of Linda but storms from the house at his brother’s disbelief. Linda follows and tells him she is his girl. He explains that he stole a girl from his brother before, but there is no denying their attraction to each other. Tony gets a job at the lab and Scott not only realises what is going on but is also seeing the doctor, Brian (Dean Newman), due to headaches. This is put down to his brain being too perfect – a possible effect of the radiation. He asks Linda to marry him and is rejected. Walking, he finds himself at the labs and, angry at his brother, breaks open Tony’s locker. He starts experimenting with the equipment and pushes his fingers through metal. Panicked, it takes time to get them out but it is then confirmed, by Tony, that the machine was not functioning, Scott willed it to happen.

first contact with Brian

From this point on he can pass through walls, he becomes criminal in his actions (for instance robbing a bank) and more and more insane – as a result of the dumping and various betrayals or because of the ability we don’t know. Probably a bit of both. As for the vampire aspect. The fact that he is solid but can also pass through the narrowest of cracks (in this case between atoms) is straight out of Stoker. However that would be flimsy. What we discover, when he goes to Brian for help and accidentally puts his hands into the doctor’s body, is that he can drain the lifeforce from another.

a victim

Later we discover that he uses up a large amount of energy – years’ worth – as he goes 4d. This needs to be replaced and when he touches a victim (albeit two of his kills are accidental) he steals their lifeforce, and essentially their time, causing them to age massively – to the point that they die of old age. A cop states that he “saps the life out of a man like juice out of an orange”.

aged and quite insane

As for Scott as he fails to feed he becomes older and older looking. This is, of course, a familiar trope. It was a cornerstone of Dracula. Another vampire trope used is a massive spoiler, unfortunately, as it was in the way he was stopped. Suffice it to say that Linda has to be prepared to sacrifice herself in much the way that Ellen did in Nosferatu, the big difference in this is that she is not instructed in this but choses the path herself.

a victim

This was, all in all, a fun watch. Some 50s science fiction and a non-supernatural basis for the vampirism – albeit an energy vampire. The cast work well, Lansing played his character at just the right level of dour and Meriwether offered a natural performance and delivered a female character who, unusually for the time, knew her own mind and proved strong and determined. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Thirteen Years Later – review

Author: Jasper Kent

First Published: 2011

Contains spoilers

The blurb: Aleksandr made a silent promise to the Lord. God would deliver him – would deliver Russia – and he would make Russia into the country that the Almighty wanted it to be. He would be delivered from the destruction that wasteth at noonday, and from the pestilence that walketh in darkness – the terror by night…

1825, Europe—and Russia—have been at peace for ten years. Bonaparte is long dead and the threat of invasion is no more. For Colonel Alexsei Ivanovich Danilov, life is peaceful. Not only have the French been defeated but so have the twelve monstrous creatures he once fought alongside, and then against, ten or more years ago. His duty is still to serve and to protect his tsar, Aleksandr I, but now the enemy is human.

However the tsar knows that he can never be at peace. Of course, he is aware of the uprising fermenting within the Russian army—among his supposedly loyal officers. No, what troubles him is something that threatens to bring damnation down upon him, his family, and his country. The tsar has been reminded of a promise, a promise born of blood… a promise that was broken a hundred years before.

Now the one who was betrayed by the Romanovs has returned to exact revenge for what has been denied him. And for Alexsei, knowing this chills his very soul. For it seems the vile pestilence that once threatened all he believed in and all he held dear has returned, thirteen years later…

The review: If I felt that the first book of the Danilov Quintet, Twelve, was perhaps a little off in one aspect then all such doubts melted away with Thirteen Years Later. Perhaps it was because the tale moved away from a historical war and became much more a tale of intrigue. Perhaps it was because I felt the balance of the now twelve years older Danilov was more realistic when pitied against the voordalak.

The prose summons a feeling of Russia, or at least a Russia I imagine from films and prose that have emerged from that country – giving the whole book a feeling of authenticity. The characters are well rounded, all flawed in their own ways with a villain of the piece who is truly fascinating.

The actual main villain, the puppet master if you will, Zmyeevich, is again a shadowy entity manipulating events through his agents and again we have hints that he is Dracula, though nothing definitive.

We get some interesting additions to the lore. It transpires that if part of a vampire is removed – a finger for instance – the vampire will regrow the body part but the original bits will remain intact. If you should do something to the body part – let it meet sunlight for instance – the vampire will feel pain as though it were still attached. Should the vampire die then the body parts will decay at the same rate as the vampire (Instantaneously dusting if the vampire is old enough).

We also get some interesting theory about the lack of reflection. For some reason the human brain blanks out the vampire itself, thus things that are incongruous – such as clothes – are also blanked out. Why we do this is not known though it is theorised that the vampire's scent triggers the reaction and it is known that the reaction occurs equally with other vampires.

This is a great read and a fantastic addition to the genre. 8 out of 10.

Honourable Mention: Lost in New York

Of the recent deaths of genre personalities I think the one that affected me the most was the death of Jean Rollin. Of course I never knew him personally but one felt that you knew the man through his body of work. Indeed, more so than many directors, Rollin placed a large part of himself in his films.

There was also the fact that there could never be another like him and no-one will make films like those he gave us. It was a bittersweet moment, then, to discover that there was a film by Rollin (short, at 50 minutes or so) that I hadn’t seen and that also had a vampiric aspect.

the vampire

Lost in New York was produced in 1989 and was filled with many of the themes that Rollin carried through his movies. The important place of the beach in his symbology, the weaving of dreams, the streets of New York… He recognises this in the story of Marie and Michelle, two young girls who are transported into works of fiction and then to the streets of New York through the medium of a Moon Goddess fetish. As a voiceover mentions the fictional works they enter it lists several of Rollin’s earlier works and where the girls were hidden within that work – such as within the musical box of the Living Dead Girl or the clock of Shiver of the vampire. The vampire is an important symbol in Rollin’s work and in this we meet the ‘white woman vampire who haunts New York’.

Marie offers her neck

The encounter is described as a dream within a dream. She approaches one of the two girls, who subsequently offers her neck to the vampire. Both girls have the same dream at the same time. The only difference, after the vampire has fed and the victim is led upon the ground to be found by her counterpart, was the colour of a rose that appeared, carried by the other girl, to be left with the body – a red rose for Marie’s dream and a white for Michelle. Michelle brings the rose to the corpse of her friend.

the dream dies with the dawn

As day breaks we see the vampire dead her face sore and blistered. Has she been killed by the sun? Only in a roundabout way, the dawn marks the waking hour, the time when the dream that created her drifts away and so the vampire’s death with the daybreak is the death of the dream. She drops a rose from her hand – red in colour.

That then is it – for the vampiric aspect. The film itself is not the easiest of Rollin’s work to watch as there is little narrative structure or plot. It is the auteur’s dreams given filmic form. The imdb page is here.

Death Hunter: Werewolves vs. Vampires – review

Director: Dustin Rikert

Release date: 2008 (by copyright notice on film)

Contains spoilers

This is one that appeared on the radar only very recently. At time of review it is a couple of months from its US DVD release – my DVD is the earlier Thai release – but I failed to find a homepage, what may be the iMDB page is bereft of any detail and the director’s iMDB page doesn’t list the film. The copyright notice on the actual film states 2008 and that is the release date I have used.

The title is almost a misnomer, whilst the film does have werewolves and does have vampires, they are never in direct conflict. There is a technicality that allows the title to be kind of okay – I’ll get to that in a little while.

werewolf

The film starts with a couple, Sandra (Candis Brown) and Billy (Adrian Burks) by a campfire. They are heavy petting but she breaks off asking if he brought protection. Whilst he is in the tent, looking for a condom, a wind seems to catch the campfire as something moves around the place with speed. Sandra is taken. Billy returns and finds blood on the floor. He gets a firearm from his trunk and then finds Sandra’s dead body. A semi-transformed werewolf appears, he shoots him, the werewolf gets up and so he shoots him again before getting to the car. The werewolf appears in the road and so Billy runs him down, gets out of the car and shoots – blowing the gas tank and obliterating the werewolf – a fully transformed, not realistic, cgi Wolfman appears – cue credits.

John and Maria

The credits have newspaper clippings that mention missing people and talk of vampires. Then we cut to John Croix (Sam McConkey) and his wife Maria (Shari Wiedmann) as they drive cross-country. It is night, they are on a short cut that has left them lost, en route to an anniversary camping trip, and the fuel gauge is running perilously low. They see a building ahead and decide to go in – John taking his gun as it looks creepy.

vampire woman

Inside it is a bar – a kind of low rent version of the Titty Twister in From Dusk till Dawn – they ask the barkeeper, Shamus (Rich Williams), about gas but there is no station for fifty miles. He suggests they wait until day and he’ll contact a tow. They have chance enough to talk, John gives Maria a cross it appears, but it had no story impact, and she tells him she is pregnant, when the bar patrons and staff (bar the human Shamus) transform. The vampire makeup didn’t work too well for me.

a choice I never had

John gets a couple of shots off as Maria is grabbed and then another vampire, Sotreum (Paulino Hemmer) I’m guessing, comes in. After a ‘what are you’ moment, Sotreum suggests that he will give a choice he never had – which, of course, is very Interview with the Vampire. John becomes indignant, suggesting that he will never take the undead option, and Sotreum wonders at his presumption. He only meant the offer for Maria - John is walking food. John manages to escape the building, leaving his wife behind.

head in the sun

There is a vampire on the car roof moment as he tears away. This sequence was green-screened and looked rather false. He crashes the car, pinning the vampire and then he separates the head from its body – after the vampire begs for mercy. The vampire does not die, the head laughing at yet another presumption – however the sun is rising and the sunlight causes the head to be consumed in flames.

the cloaked man

John wanders out into the desert. He sees a cloaked figure but cannot catch him. Eventually he falls down a scree-covered slope and passes out below. When he comes around he hears the rattle of a snake. He reaches with his fingertips and grabs his shovel and kills the snake. Night finds him with a campfire, cooking snake… that is until he is attacked by a werewolf. He is rescued by the hooded man (a crossbow bolt to the head does for the werewolf, presumably it is silver) but he has been bitten.

4 weeks, or 28 days, later 

He awakens chained and the man, Van Ness (Mike Lawler), gives him an antidote – he might survive he might not. Four weeks later he awakens – bearded, healed and human with a trace of lycan that gives him all of the werewolf powers but none of their disadvantages – he is the ‘death hunter’ that prophecy spoke of, the one who can end the curses. The touch of lycanthropy that John carries is the reason why the title isn’t entirely inaccurate as he has some werewolf in him and goes after the vampire who took his wife. So here comes the lore.

a victim speaks

Kill the lead vampire or the lead werewolf and all the other ones revert to human and the age they would have been – thus ancient ones will die but a wife, who was turned six months ago, would only age 6 months. Werewolves and vampires are damned souls as are their victims – thus holy water blessed with faith will harm them, a knife or bullet dipped in holy water becomes a deadly weapon. As for the victims, we see a young boy suddenly sit up, white eyed and tell John that he is damned (presumably asking for his help).

vampire brides sleeping

To kill werewolves, silver is the key. Each werewolf is turned to differing degrees and thus you have the partially transformed and the giant man-wolves. To kill a vampire Van Ness mentions stakes through the heart and decapitation – but the sun has to finish the job. So, not decapitation then, rather losing the head makes them easier to handle and sunlight is the killer. The weirdest lore we get is the idea that none of the anti-vampire aspects works in the vampire’s own lair.

green-screen back drop

This was rather disjointed. After John’s training period he meets a group of kids and has them tag along rather than heading for the hills. The dialogue for the kids was incredibly false and one wondered at their presence in the film – padding and eye candy one assumes. There is quite a bit of location green-screening that looked simply awful.

crushed vampire

The acting wasn’t anything special, though Sam McConkey was personable enough – up to the point that he became shaven headed action hero and I didn’t buy his character as much. This had some good ideas lurking around, as well as some very referential moments that belayed the credit disclaimer that “any similarity to… …other firms (sic) is purely coincidental.”

This was a case of good intentions failing to make a great movie and it is a shame as there was clearly some effort put in. 4 out of 10 is for that effort, however flawed.

A couple of days off

Last night I went to Misery of Sound where we saw the always entertaining Devilish Presley (the photo is with Jacqui Vixen from the band), who I always feel I can mention due to their song Hammer Horror Glamour as well as Frankenstein – a horror punk band new to me but great fun to watch. Unfortunately we missed local band the Garbagemenn, but I’m sure I’ll catch them again sometime.

All of which does not explain why I won’t be posting anything substantial today and tomorrow. The reason for that means me getting a tad political and off the vampire topic for a moment. Tomorrow morning I’m off to London to join the March for the Alternative. The current UK shysters, I mean Government, are determined to slash and burn the public sector. They are doing this for purely ideological reasons and to keep their fat cat pals in filthy lucre. There is an alternative; bailing out the banks is what actually led to the current level of deficit so they could pay us that money back or we could run them publicly with no massive banker bonuses and profits channeled into the state until the debt is paid off; we could collect the £120 billion of uncollected taxes per annum; we could place a Tobin Tax on speculative financial transactions; we could cut the private sector out of the public sector as they are the biggest cause of waste of public money. Remember, the deficit was larger when we built the Welfare State… Rant over…

But perhaps I was on topic. Let us recall the words of Voltaire (pictured right) from 1764, “These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer. We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces.” (my highlight)

Vampire Carmilla – review

Directors: Tom LePine & Denise Templeton

Release date: 1999

Contains spoilers

After Dracula, Carmilla is arguably the most influential piece of vampire literature. Certainly when it comes to 19th century literature that is an inescapable truism. It is also one of the most abused pieces of vampire literature.

Like Dracula there have been a fair few movies that have little or nothing to do with the original story, despite claims to the contrary. Some, despite having no meaningful connection with the original prose, are works of absolute genius, Dreyer’s Vampyr being a prime example.

You’d think a film that styles itself as J Sheridan Le Fanu’s Vampire Carmilla would have at least a passing interest in the original story. Unfortunately this borrows a couple of names, does the anagram thing – rather clumsily – and has a lesbianism aspect. Beyond that the film bears as little resemblance to Carmilla as possible. It is also rather borrowing.

in the woods

We start with a couple of teens in a car, they are out in the woods – we know this because the scene is interspersed with a stock trees scene and there are stock ‘woodland night time’ sound effects playing. They are getting hot and heavy – an excuse to have her remove her top for a little viewer titillation – but she hears something and wants to go elsewhere as she thinks there is a prowler spying on them. He goes for a pee and then falls across the hood of the car bleeding – in a shot that reveals a couple of parked cars behind, what they were doing in the woods is anyone’s guess! Five shadowy figures (drawn over the stock wood footage) appear.

at the grave

In a graveyard Laura (Stacia Crawford) and her boyfriend David (Kevin Summerfield) stand in the rain as she looks at her sister’s grave. Monique (Marina Morgan), said sister, was not part of her life – Monique was five years older, born out of wedlock and given up for adoption. They go to her house and look around. We hear that the bank is going to foreclose as Monique’s husband died a week before her. Now, in a minute David is going to look around the town and discover that it is deserted… Where did they get the keys to the house from?

corpse

So, he pops a lock on a box that – by some psychic prescience or bad script writing (you decide) – they know contains a diary. She sits outside a church and reads it whilst he looks around to try and find someone and get some gas. After looking around for some time he sees a figure (we don’t see who it is, but I suspect it was the priest we later see). He runs to the figure, who vanishes off but there is a charred looking (and false looking) corpse there. David beats a retreat via the medium of speeded up film. Laura wants to stay overnight, despite the fact that Monique’s house has no electricity and David – despite having found a corpse and no townsfolk – agrees.

meeting Carmilla

Now during this we get flashbacks to Monique’s life. She is in an abusive relationship with a husband who both physically assaults her and commits marital rape. Out in a bar one night she meets a mysterious woman. Later she is named as Carmilla (Bootsie Cairns), though in the flashbacks we never see her face in full shot – probably to try and fool us when David later meets Mircalla… told you the anagram was used clumsily. Anyhoo, get together, a bit of soft focus, no thrills or passion lesbian sex, caught by husband, Carmilla overpowers him… yadda, yadda, yadda…

beware women in cloaks

That night, as the police from elsewhere send a couple of cops to check out why they cannot raise the town, David and Laura sleep. Earlier he had heard a noise like lots of people talking but thought little of it. Next thing you know she is sleepwalking and meets a mysterious woman in a cloak. In the morning she awakes, he has gone looking for anyone – again – and she has bite marks on her neck.

vampire townsfolk

In the town he meets Mircalla, sees the cop who stops an attack by a vampire on the priest and is subsequently killed. David is then marched upon by a horde of grey faced townfolks who mean him no good. He and Mircalla head back to the house, where Laura is out cold and Mircalla distracts him by smoking weed with him and then Laura waking up and having sex with him (presumably due to Carmilla's influence, given they were waiting until marriage). In the morning Laura has vanished and he is threatened by a horde of vampires… what will he do?

vampire Monique

Who cares? Okay, to be complete we have to note that a stake through the heart seems to work fine but then so do bullets. The vampires are not affected by sunlight, as suggested earlier when I mentioned the day time attacks. Most act more like zombie hordes than vampires, but there you go. Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and there is a scene with the priest waking up in his house, pulling out a cross. We hear Monique singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” before knocking the cross out of his hand and that was actually quite a good scene – though story pointless. One good scene does not a film make.

fangs

There are some poetic voiceovers from time to time, but the acting isn’t anything to write home about and the general dialogue is flawed. The film has ‘erotic’ moments that are as sensual as wet lettuce – overly soap music, close ups that show nothing and no displayed passion. All in all this is a disappointing and ultimately a boring film. 2 out of 10 (for the “Onward Christian Soldiers” scene).

The imdb page is here.

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne – Rockets of the Dead – review (TV Episode)

Director: Pierre de Lespinois

First aired: 2000

Contains spoilers

This was a short lived series that followed the adventures of novelist Jules Verne (Chris Demetral) as he travelled with Phileas Fogg (Michael Praed, who was in poor vampire movie Son of Darkness: To Die For 2), Fogg’s second cousin Rebecca (Francesca Hunt) and Fogg’s valet Passepartout (Michel Courtemanche).

Of course it had a steampunk thing going on – Verne being the spiritual Godfather of steampunk – and had to have, of course, a vampire episode – this being it.

It started with a man, Lord Pontetract (David Schaap), being attacked by a cloaked and fanged assailant. He kills Pontetract and steals a briefcase – ignoring the bullets fired by a guard. He clicks his heels together – touching two electrodes – and a rocket backpack fires up and flies him into the night.

Francesca Hunt as Rebecca

The British secret service has ensured that Verne’s play of the Maid of Orleans will be put on in the Rimini Theatre and star Rebecca in the titular role. The reason? The Rimini Theatre is one of many (one in each major capitol city in Europe) by patron of the arts Duke Angelo Rimini (Patrick Duffy, yes, the Man From Atlantis himself). As well as being a patron of the arts, they know that he is from Carpathia – though the name they gave him sounded Italian to me – and he is an arms dealer. He often gets besotted by leading ladies and they hope to use Rebecca to get an idea of what he is up to.

Patrick Duffy as Rimini

He does indeed become besotted with Rebecca and, as he brings her lilies after the performance, she and we notice he casts no reflection. He takes her to supper but gives Phileas (who is none to happy with the secret service) the slip and buggers off to Estonia (as the nearest port to Carpathia) with her. It is clear that he knows she is an agent but also that he wants her to trade allegiances and rule the world at his side.

the Aurora

Phileas and Jules have to travel to Carpathia, but that is no problem when you have the Aurora – essentially Fogg’s balloon steampunked up. Now, I know that Verne wrote 80 days but I don’t remember it being a powered craft in that… never mind… On the journey Passepartout tells them about vampires – a concept dismissed by Fogg – and all the lore his family passed down to him. They avoid sunlight, drink blood, cannot be seen in mirrors, must be staked through the heart and hate garlic – not all of this is true.

a vampire

They get to an inn and discover the first truth. All the patrons and he landlord (R D Reid) are vamtpires and none cast a reflection – as seen in the cleaver given to cut a block of cheese. The heroes manage to beat a hasty retreat with Passepartout going to the Aurora and Fogg and Verne heading to the castle. Vampires, however, have invaded the Aurora and perhaps Rebecca is a little bit too friendly with the Duke. Has she been turned?

in a coffin

I don’t want to go much further but I will reveal the actual plot devised by Rimini. He wants to take over the world and convert it to vampirism. To this end he has an army of vampires and homing devices planted in all his theatres. He had Pontetract killed for an explosive formula (which is unstable). The rockets will allow them to get across Europe in a night, guided by the homing devices and armed with rockets containing the formula.

Michael Praed as Fogg

As for the vampire lore. Presumably a stake will kill one – we do not see – but they are not actually afraid of garlic, it transpires, nor do they fear the cross. They have fangs and glowing green eyes and can become invisible – something they do when resting through the day. Whether this protects them from sunlight or they are just not killed by it is not explained. One bite turns.

This was passable entertainment but nothing special. I don’t think the steampunk ethos was captured particularly well. As a vampire episode it was again okay – to be honest they needn’t have been vampires, give a man a cloaking device and he would have been much the same (though alive). The plot to take over the world seemed a little too convoluted – I always think that a spreading of vampirism through key persons is more likely. That said Duffy was rather fun in a melodramatic, gothic vampire sort of way. 4 out of 10.

The episode's imdb page is here.

;)Q

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne (2000 TVseries) on Amazon