Honourable Mention: Monster Brawl

Going back to the Universal Movies there has been a tendency for film makers to monster mash; throwing favourite monsters together and having them duke it out or team up against one particular monster. This is probably the ultimate expression of that, as it is a film that pits the monsters in the ring together and has them deathmatch. There is little other story to this, just fights and some background to each monster. There was an attempt to suggest some form of supernatural calamity approaching, but that fizzled out.

The film itself dates to 2011 and was directed by Jesse T. Cook. The voice of Lance Henriksen (Near Dark & Vampires out for Blood) is used from time to time and the German DVD comes with art cards of each monster. The monsters are split into two conferences and two weight categories. The first two matches were middle weight and saw, in the creature conference, the Cyclops (Jason David Brown) against witch bitch (Holly Letkeman) and, in the undead conference, the mummy (Rj Skinner) against Lady Vampire (Kelly Couture).

Jimmy Hart as himself

In the heavy weight category the creature conference had Swamp Gut (also Jason David Brown) against the werewolf (also Rj Skinner) and the undead conference had Zombie Man (Rico Montana) against Frankenstein (Robert Maillet). The winner of each heavy weight conference would fight each other for the overall Monster Brawl title. The matches were commentated on by Sasquatch Sid Tucker (Art Hindle) and Buzz Chambers (Dave Foley, Suck & Netherbeast Incorporated) and the MC was Jimmy Hart (himself).

a goblet of blood

When it came to the background film for Lady Vampire we meet Agent Dunn (Mark Gibson), who has found an estate in Transylvania that the locals say is built on unhallowed ground. Due to the fact that there have been a spate of murders he goes in and sees a woman coming down the stairs. The estate, he says, once belonged to Vlad Ţepeş and she says she has been there forever. She is drinking blood from a goblet.

in the ring

He pulls his gun and then shoots her and she falls, apparently dead but then, of course, many a vampire is good at playing possum. Next we see him running from the estate clutching his bleeding neck and that is about all. No more backstory than that. As for the match itself… well I am not going to spoil the outcome though I will mention that the Mummy might have a secret weapon in the form of his amulet of Ra, though whether it is enough to give him an edge…

Lady Vampire

The film itself, candidly, lacked something and I don’t necessarily think it was the lack of cogent story (beyond the fights). The ring is set up in the Hillside Necropolis – a graveyard miles from civilisation. It is explained that, perhaps, the monsters wouldn't have liked the lights, noise and exposure found in the the big city (not to mention the risk the audience would have been in) but it is that very lack of an audience (as fake as it might have seemed) that I think is missing. The fights seem a little sterile as there is no crowd cheering on.

The imdb page is here.