Shake Rattle & Roll 2K5 – review

Director: Richard Somes (segment)

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

Shake Rattle & Roll is a Filipino horror anthology film series and this is actually the 7th in the series. The films all consist of three shorts and the film of interest for us is the third in this volume, which was entitled Lihim ng San Joaquin (Secret of San Joaquin).

The first two stories are Poso, the best segment in the film in which a fake psychic is hired to commune with the dead but gets more than she bargained for, and Aquarium, in which a family are terrorised by a haunted aquarium (I kid you not). Our segment is actually an aswang story.

heading to a new beginning

It starts with a cart and, getting a lift on it are Rene (Mark Anthony Fernandez) and his unnamed pregnant wife (Tanya Garcia). They are moving to a remote province and escaping their parents, it appears, and they get to a point where the cart driver will not pass so continue the journey on foot until they eventually reach a village. They are spoken to by Sael (Noni Buencamino), who sems to be the village headman, and he tells them that there had been an epidemic that killed 15 children but they burned the bodies. Sael’s son is alive but has what appears to be a congenital disfigurement.

the unnamed wife

They pass by the graveyard, which is filled with wailing mourners, and eventually find a house that is derelict. Rene gets to work fixing it up. In the evening they go to a communal area to ask if there is a healer and are told that there no longer is one. Rene prevents Sael placing his hand on his wife’s pregnant belly and this angers Sael. They get a visit later in the evening but Sael eventually leaves saying that things will be resolved in the morning.

awakening

In the morning they are warned by a blind man (Ronnie Lazaro, Yanggaw) that the village is populated by aswang – who are all sleeping the day away. Whilst Rene is sceptical he accepts a bottle of oil that will boil when the aswang are near. When they awaken they roll in the mud, smearing themselves with dirt (as opposed to transforming one guesses) and head to the house, where they lay siege.

aswang

The aswang might roll in the mud, rather than transforming, but their teeth do change (into animalistic sharp teeth) and they do have the long tongue one associates with the aswang. The oil works as a warning device and they seem to be nervous of a bust of Christ. However there is little other lore to report. The story itself was pretty lack lustre. We felt no real level of sympathy for the couple – the characterisation so shallow that the wife wasn’t even named. There was a lack of sfx and the sense of peril was minimal.

Scoring the aswang section only, I’ll give this a tepid 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Vampariah – review

Director: Matthew Abaya

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

Vampariah is a Filipino/American production and is based, I understand, on director Matthew Abaya's earlier short, entitled Bampinay. It carries its cultural reference through the central vampire in the film – the aswang. The aswang can sometimes be a confusing concept and is often depicted as a shape shifting creature with a desire for human flesh & blood.

The aswang in this would actually be more accurately named as a manananggal – being the self-segmenting sucker of viscera, which can unfurl bat like wings and fly. However, the term aswang is not incorrect as aswang is more properly an overarching term for the various monsters of Filipino mythology and the manananggal is therefore a form of aswang.

Aswang in flight

The film begins with a brief introduction to the aswang, suggesting that they used to be revered by, and protectors of, humanity. However there was a betrayal and they became hated. They leave their legs behind when taking on their predatory form and it is re-union with their legs that allow them to walk in daylight (fail to return to their legs and the sun will destroy them). We also hear from Mahal (Kelly Lou Dennis), our primary protagonist, who is part of a society of undead hunters – undead in this being a collective term for the whole panoply of vampire species.

Jeffrey Lei as Mr Fang

The hunters have access to an impressive array of weaponry and technology. Most vampires can be destroyed through an assault to the head or heart. The prime field operative is Marcus Kilmore (Scott Mathison) who, we later discover, is a bit of a dick. When we meet Mahal she is out in the field hunting down a kyonsi called Mr Fang (Jeffrey Lei). She is contacted by HD (Roberto Divina) who has a line on an aswang attack for her – Mahal obsessed with tracking down the creature who killed her father. He reminds her that the kyonsi isn’t very bright and can be distracted with chi – she is able to use an implement to channel said energy.

smart wear

Mr Fang shows us an underlying level of humour within the film, done deliberately with an absurdist air and utilising some wonderfully amusing facial expressions by Lei. The kyonsi would seem to be owned by the hunters but often gets loose. Mahal discovers that the star (Jason Bustos) and crew of a TV cryptid hunter show have been killed in the Philippines whilst searching out the legendary aswang. Her boss, Michele Kilman (Arlene Joie Deleon), doesn’t want her out there – the aswang are notoriously difficult to kill and dangerous – but also does not order her back.

dead van driver

When she examines the body of the TV hunter she is confronted by his ghost – this is her gift, or her curse for that matter, as she is able to see the dead but they see her as their killer and react accordingly. She also discovers that the aswang was not a Philippines resident but had travelled there from the States. The aswang is Bampinay (Aureen Almario) and has already returned to America. We see her being cat-called by a van driver and her disembowelling him with her tongue. Of course Mahal will eventually meet Bampinay and things will not go as she expects…

Bampinay dines with a victim

Abaya wrote as well as directed the film and there is an entire sub-text he adds in about cultural identity. For instance, Kilman poses as a news-anchor and uses that platform to spew a (US) right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric, which sits uneasily with her Asian ethnicity. Of course, the use of the vampire as both the Other and the focus for the demonization of immigrants are classic tropes within the genre. The transplanting of the Filipino vampire-type into America and subsequently building an audience sympathy for said vampire provides an interesting and perversive narrative. However, beyond anything else he is building a good, old-fashioned adventure.

Kelly Lou Dennis as mahal

This is, then, very ambitious – the use of various effects for the gear the hunters use (including using smart wear to view holographic communications, drones and various weaponry) and the manananggal effects are ambitious given the budget, but for the most part work quite well. There is scope in the world created to use a variety of undead types and we get a name check for the chupacabra, a horde of experimental chi-controlled zombies and the aforementioned kyonsi, as well as the aswang. Note, with the vampire types we have other minority ethnic related myths (and a Chinese aspect to the zombies given the use of chi in their control), feeding into their narrative surrogacy for the immigrant.

feeding

The story is ambitious also, but perhaps could have done with lingering longer on certain narrative aspects. The female leads all did well and, in the main, the male characters are secondary and only lightly sketched, which again was quite a subversive direction for the film and welcomed. The film gets quite bloody at times and perhaps had a graphic novel feel in places, which again worked to stave off the impact of a low end budget. I really rather enjoyed this one. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The film's homepage is here.

Hacked Horror Film Massacre – review

Director: Angus Simon

Release date: 2013*

Contains spoilers


*release date as suggested by Amazon Prime Video page, the film does not have an IMDb page at the time of writing the review.

It is somewhat difficult to know where to start with this. A portmanteau produced as a lower than low budget piece, I assume it is a self-parody and, with that in mind, it is more palatable than it would have been if they were serious.

The portmanteau piece is some piece of nonsense about a hack of horror films and has us see a woman access the films that have been stolen (and thus we watch them). The films range in quality from very low to low, several are vampire based, and at least one seemed a rather good facsimile of poor films from a bygone age.

Abdul R Dim as the vampire

The first film is Black Kiss and sees a couple of kids, Reggie (Ben Williams and Veronica (Hannah Boean), making out in a car. She’s nervous because of events in the neighbourhood but Reggie soon persuades her to ignore her common sense. Mist swirls and a vampire (Abdul R Dim) appears. He tackles Reggie, grabbing his fist and crushing it, and then bites Veronica and takes off with her. Reggie, once home, laments that he had a run in with a vampire and the vampire took his girl.

a bit of a bite

We see a montage as Veronica and the vampire rise from their (very misty) coffins and hunt the night – Veronica taking to her new life. Meanwhile Reggie trains. Eventually he faces the vampire again and fights him. I must admit I openly guffawed when Reggie exclaimed “My Kung Fu is no match for your Dracula strength”. Will Reggie prevail? Can veronica be saved? Does she want to be saved? Do you care… Suffice it to say that the short opens up to a sequel, suggested to be called Death Kiss, that doesn’t appear in the film.

Dracula goes for the jugular

There is a series of very short episodic films about the Frankenstein Monster (Eric Watkins), which includes an episode entitled Lust of Dracula. In it Dracula gets his freak on with a female victim only for Frankenstein’s Monster to waltz in and violently cock-block him and carry the woman off. Not a lot more to say about this part; this series of shorts seems to be there to introduce Princess Baby (Jill Brummer) who recurs quiet a bit in non-vampiric bits.

he's waiting for a girl like you

The next exclusively vampire piece is entitled To Dance for a Vampire and sees a vampire pick up a dancer from a lap dancing club and take her home. He recognises her as the soul reincarnated of his lost love. They sleep together and when she awakens she finds that he has bitten her – something she is not happy about and she isn’t overly happy about being kept in the house by the vampire.

biting

In fact she does gravitate towards the prtrait of her original incarnation but denies the connection – like she always does, he suggests, and it emerges that she has reincarnated several times but each time she dies rather than turns. This one dragged on a bit but truly felt like a piece of 80s romance leaning, straight-to-video vampire filmmaking. I thought there was a kernel of a good idea here but it outstayed its welcome.

Paola Agusti as Misty

The last vampire segment, entitled Blood Love, sees Misty (Paola Agusti), who has fang scars on her breast, praying for her vampire to come back to her. However when he does he seems a lot more reluctant than she to continue with their blood play… A particularly short piece that wears its Romeo and Juliet colours on its sleeve (or at least in the form of the camera lingering on a book of the play's script), it wouldn’t have been enough to draw you into this on its own.

very red blood

The fact that this seems to both parody and celebrate grade Z movies is interesting, but not enough so to make this a satisfying watch, I’m afraid. However the grade z-ness of it all allows the filmmakers to get away with a huge amount of zero budget sfx. I did like how red the blood was in the first piece as it really did summon up an earlier age of films. However, over all it only deserves 2.5 out of 10.

Short Film: Allure

This was a 2004 short film directed by Pat Pizzuto and is just over 21 minutes in length. It is fairly simplistic story wise and starts with a guy, Marty (Eric Constein), going into a bar and ordering a drink.

The bartender, John (Gadon Johnson), suggests it might be Marty’s lucky night as a blonde across the room is giving him the eye. She’s a nice girl, confides John, and her name is Cora (Kabrina Carlson). Unfortunately, Marty is on the shy side and John has to persuade him to go talk to her but eventually he does so.

Kabrina Carlson as Cora

They talk for a while, he mentions being a computer programmer and she suggests that she is sort of a live-in nurse. Her three sisters travelled to England and contracted a strange illness. It has made them sensitive to sunlight and affected their behaviours. At one point Marty asks whether they might be vampires and Cora laughs, congratulating him on his sense of humour.

kiss

John sends over shots and Cora asks the young man to go back to her apartment. Once there she fixes him a drink, red wine, and then slinks off for a moment. He looks around and finds a book entitled Blood Relatives, the Book of the Undead. She returns in her negligée and is insistent that he drink some more wine (she has no drink). They kiss and then there is a howling noise as she looks upwards – however, Marty is having trouble seeing straight, almost as if he had been drugged…

sisters

And there we’ll leave the story. The dialogue didn’t flow as well as it might but Constein seemed very natural, at least in the bar, and whilst Carlson’s performance seemed more affected it suited the character. I was unsure about the soundtrack, the piano being too much geared towards a Hallmark moment for my taste. However, you can check it out yourself as the film is available for streaming or download at the archive as well as being on Amazon Prime.

I did find an IMDb page but, whilst the accompanying illustration and blurb was right the movie date, cast and crew were incorrect and it seems two films have been merged into one entry.

Realm of the Damned: Tenebris Deos (Graphic Novel) – review

Author: Alec Worley

Illustrator: Pye Parr

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers:

The Blurb: There's no one left to protect us from what lurks in the dark. There's no Hellboy, no Mulder and Scully, no Torchwood or Men in Black coming to save us. The monsters have won.

Our world now belongs to them.

The Vatican's last line of paranormal defence - The Congregation - has finally been overrun by the supernatural forces of darkness. Our heroes are all dead; only the damned remain. Among them is Alberic Van Helsing - addict, murderer, survivor - and the creatures that were once his prey now hunt him across America. But when an apocalyptic evil is resurrected in the forests of Norway, it falls to Van Helsing to become the hunter once again if mankind and monster alike are to see the dawn.

Van Helsing's quest for salvation and survival takes him through the ruins of a neo-gothic Europe, where he must face the vampire queen of the Vatican, a man-made monster with the heart of a storm, the lycanthropic lord of the forest, the mummified ruler of the slums of Cairo, and the crazed vampire demi-god who threatens to devour them all.

The review: I previously looked at the motion comic of this graphic novel and was a tad disappointed, though I did wonder how well the story would do in comic book form rather than faux-animation.

The graphic was, more or less, exactly the same story wise. I didn’t notice much of anything in this that had been cut from the running length of the motion comic. However Van Helsing’s back story was held back until much later in the story. I don’t intend to run through the story, therefore, as the previous review covers that. Pacing wise this did suit the page rather than the screen and suggests there isn’t a guaranteed medium crossover with regards pacing. Indeed it allowed a slower pace to take in the story and art as needed/desired.

However, the greatest improvement in this was having the character voices supplied by my own mind. The voice-acting in the motion comic was generally poor and the character voices didn’t crossover but, rather, my mind supplied new voices to the characters. In this way the graphic became much more accessible and superior. 6 out of 10.

Castlevania – season 1

Directed by: Sam Deats

Release Date: 2017

Contains spoilers

The Castlevania series is a computer game series by Konami. I have played a little of it (mostly Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, which I abandoned eventually as the ported keyboard controls for PC were, quite simply, horrendous) and have also given an Honourable Mention to the live action fan film, Hymn of Blood.

This anime production of the story was a short, four-part series based on the 2008 game Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. I’ll say at the outset that the short length of the series did it no favour in developing the characters as it whistlestopped – though there was good characterisation through voice acting.

Vlad and Lisa

The first episode starts in 1455 (which, historically was the year before Vlad Ţepeş' second, and longest, reign and therefore ignores entirely any attempt at historical veraciousness) and sees Lisa (Emily Swallow) approach Dracula’s Castle. She walks through fields of the impaled, now skeletal, and rendered in cgi on which the 2D animation is imposed against. She gains entry to the castle and suggests that she has come to learn. Dracula (Graham McTavish, Preacher) is impressed by her and allows her to study. We should note that the castle is a home of advance technology (including electric lighting and a mechanism that allows Dracula to transport the giant edifice). Later talk about lore/prophecy coming from the future might suggest an element of time travel (and the games did have time controlling characters).

wrath of Dracula

20 years on, in the town of Târgoviște, Lisa has been taken from her home by the church and sentenced to be burnt alive as a witch. She implores Dracula not to take revenge (they assume she is imploring Satan). Dracula, meanwhile, is walking (at her behest) to her home and hears of the execution – arriving too late. Lisa and he had married and in his wrath he tells the town they have one year before he razes the town and then wipes humanity from the face of Wallachia. He needs a year to summon a demon army. At the end of the episode, with the demon army spreading, we briefly meet Trevor Belmont (Richard Armitage).

demon

The next episode concentrates on Belmont, a drunkard and excommunicant as all the Belmonts were excommunicated despite the fact that they fought monsters. The peasants are blaming the noble families for the attacks and he gets into a bar brawl. He sneaks into the town of Gresit, which is under siege by Dracula’s night army. In there he saves a Speaker, a group of nomad scholars, and discovers that one of them is missing, assumed dead, in the catacombs under the town as she searches out the sleeping soldier. This is a legendary warrior said to be beneath the city who will awaken and defeat Dracula – or so the story (claimed to be) from the future says. He agrees to find the scholar in return for a promise that they will then flee the city.

field of the impaled

Each episode is in the (roughly) 22 minute range and as such don’t build too much story (being that there are only four of them). However the action is fun, the story is kept simple but mention must go to Richard Armitage whose voice acting is superb and who makes the character of Belmont wonderfully dour and jaded, with just a glimmer of the hero he is underneath. The dialogue, and the gore in the animation, sets the series directly towards a more mature audience. All in all, it’s not bad but could stand a lot more depth. However at 4 episodes it won’t outstay its welcome and perhaps should have stayed longer. 6 out of 10

The imdb page is here.

Honourable mention: The Matrix Reloaded

The 1999 Wachowskis’ film The Matrix was a landmark in Sci-Fi cinema and it is of little surprise that the sequels (of which this is the first) were comparatively lacking. It was always going to be a struggle.

Now, I’m sure you are thinking… Matrix… vampires, come on! Some of you are going to be nodding sagely and assuming that I am going to liken the machines who have imprisoned humanity to harvest for energy as energy vampires. But you’d be wrong. There are vampires in this particular film but, despite a visual and dialogue clue, you likely missed them.

The two sequels, this and the Matrix Revolutions, were not released in isolation and were part of a multimedia suite – including a series of animated shorts (the Animatrix) and games (Enter the Matrix, The Matrix: Path of Neo and The Matrix Online) – and all the different mediums played part of the story.

Keanu Reeves as Neo

I assume you have seen the film(s) in the series; if not, essentially after humanity developed AI there came a point where the humans and machines were at war. In a desperate bid to win, humanity used weapons of mass destruction to blacken the skies – cutting the machines off from their solar energy. The machines enslaved humanity, using their bodies as power sources and keeping their minds entranced in a computer simulation called the Matrix. Free humans continue to fight the machines and try to free their people.

Monica bellucci as Persephone

You might recall, if you have seen this part of the series, that human messianic figure Neo (Keanu Reeves, Dracula (1992)) meets a computer program named the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) and attempts to get him to hand over a program called the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim). The Merovingian refuses but his wife, Persephone (Monica Bellucci, also Dracula (1992), Vampire & the Brothers Grimm), and takes Neo, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, Forever Knight) to the Merovingian’s mansion.

Brides of Dracula

Now, before this happens we get some dialogue from the Oracle (Gloria Foster) suggesting “Every time you've heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel. Every story you've ever heard about vampires, werewolves, or aliens, is the system assimilating some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing.” This is our dialogue clue. In the mansion the guards, we see, are watching Brides of Dracula and this is our visual clue but, to get to the truth of things we need to cross over to the game Enter the Matrix, in which you have to raid the mansion and all the guards are vampires and, in game, you must first fight them and then stake them to prevent them getting up again.

the mansion lobby

Indeed Persephone shoots a program named Abel (Malcolm Kennard) and suggests that not many people bother to carry silver bullets in their gun like she does (he was possibly a werewolf program, possibly a vampire program) before letting second guard Cain (David William No), a vampire program, escape and tell her husband what she has done.

So, there you have it, we meet a pair of guards that are vampires – though we never see anything vampiric (bar one being killed by a silver bullet). However, they are there, in fleeting visitation.

The imdb page is here.

The Transfiguration – review

Director: Michael O'Shea

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

There has been a small buzz around the Transfiguration but, to be candidly honest, not so much of a buzz as I might have expected having seen the film. A drama, perhaps, more than a horror it walks a line close to arthouse without stepping fully into that arena and is incredibly self-knowing.

It does not feature a vampire – as in the supernatural creature – but rather a person convincing themselves that they are a vampire and searching with the media vampire genre for answers that it, as a genre, doesn’t contain. It lacks the ambiguity of the magnificent Martin but owes much to the movie – and openly says so.

the victim

It starts with a slurping noise coming from a bathroom stall. A man at a urinal hears it, looks under the stall and sees two sets of feet and comes to a conclusion. However, in the stall a young teen, Milo (Eric Ruffin), is suckling at the man’s open neck. When he is done he takes the money from the man’s wallet and has blood on his mouth. On the train home Milo writes in a book and at home he marks a circled spot on a calendar – his feeding routine. He watches a nature show (he likes to see animal death it appears) and keeps a bag of stolen money hidden behind VHS tapes of vampire films (incongruously he has a recording on VHS of Dracula Untold, a film from way past the VHS era and, of course, he would be able to get the digital file on his computer).

Eric Ruffin as Milo

So Milo is our vampire and I don’t really want to get too much into the story as the film is more a character study. We do see him vomit (after eating cereal but it is clearly the earlier ingested blood he brings up). We see him with a school psychologist, where he is asked about hurting animals, and admits he thinks about it – indicating he was previously caught doing just that. He is clearly the target of bullies at school – interestingly they call him “little bitch”. Later in the film he mentions how good (though not realistic) Let the Right One In is. The phrasing reminds one more of Let Me In as the bullies in the Swedish film use the term “little piggy” but the bullies in the US version use “Little girl” – “little bitch” seems a more pejorative but still gender specific attack. The gangbangers near his apartment call him Freak.

Chloe Levine as Sophie

He shares the apartment with his brother Lewis (Aaron Moten), their father having died of a disease and their mother being a suicide (it sounds like Lewis was in the forces and returned to take care of his brother but had previously run with the gangbangers). It is the suicide that shapes Milo as a vampire – remembering that in folklore suicide can create the vampire, in this case the suicide rests in her grave and it is Milo, who found the body, tasted blood from her slit wrist and can now (as a vampire) not die by suicide himself – it’s a rule. Into his world comes a girl (her race a repeated dialogue point) called Sophie (Chloe Levine, Innocence) and her arrival feels like a mirror image of Let the Right One In/Let Me In – female human moves into the realm of a male vampire. She self harms by cutting, and he does try to taste her blood when he finds her doing that, something she calls gross… but sweet.

Larry Fessenden in cameo

The genre points are thick and fast and for a film that is set in New York it didn’t have that specific New York feel that many other films do (for instance Nadja or Habit). Rather the photography feels more tonally like Martin – which was shot in Pittsburgh, and Milo lists Martin amongst his favourite vampire films. That said the great Larry Fessenden, director and star of Habit, makes a cameo appearance within the film.

video collection

The pace feels similar to that of Martin, as well, though as the film is more self-knowing so is the primary character; in many respects Milo is who Martin would have been if the latter had been more self-composed. Eric Ruffin is stoic as Milo but imbues the character with pathos, intelligence and offers a great sense of timing. Chloe Levine counterpoints with a character that is more obviously damaged, vulnerable and yet sweetly innocent (whilst worryingly worldly in some ways). Director Michael O'Shea actually puts a genuinely shocking moment into the end sequence, which underlines Milo’s own self-awareness. A necessary film for the vampire fan’s collection. 8 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Vampire Cleanup Department – review

Directors: Sin-Hang Chiu & Pak-Wing Yan

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

There have been some really interesting vampire films coming out of China over the last few years, though some are better than others of course. Vampire Cleanup Department is, despite itself to a degree, at the better end of the scale doing much right (as well as a little, if not wrong then a tad, flat).

The film takes place in Hong Kong and contains some familiar faces that fans of Chinese vampire cinema will recognise.

killing a vampire

We start with an elevator opening and a security guard stepping into a parking lot… something is wrong. He follows a trail of gore to a truck. The driver is dead, his neck chewed on. The guard calls for help and is grabbed. The incident is on the breaking news and the police are there. A truck drives into the garage and two men emerge, the younger is Chau (Siu-Ho Chin, Mr vampire, Rigor Mortis, Vampire Vs Vampire, Chinese Vampire Story, The Seventh Curse & Vampire Warriors) and the older is Uncle Chung (Richard Ng, also Rigor Mortis & Mr Vampire 3) who sports a bandaged head. Chung sweet talks a young policeman as Chau checks the bodies and then starts dispatching those rising as vampires. The two men are dressed as street cleaners and Chau's hi-vis vest serves as a prayer scroll and his broom has a wooden sword hidden in the handle. Outside a third member of the cleanup team, Tim (Babyjohn Choi), is stopped by the police and so he tells his story…

facing a kyonsi

Tim lives with his somewhat barmy grandmother, after his parents died when he was newborn. Grandma dresses hip, seems to be unable to remember that her son is dead and thinks Tim is he and, when we meet her, has claimed a cardboard box. There is an altercation with a scavenger and his granddaughter but Tim smooths things over. Grandma has lost something so he tries to find it and, instead, discovers the granddaughter crying. Her grandfather is being attacked in an alley (the assailant going for the neck). Tim looks to intervene, slips on an empty bottle and ends up having his rear end bitten.

Chau and Tim

He awakens in bed but when he gets in the kitchen Chung and Chau are there. Grandma leaves the room and Chau grabs Tim and checks his backside – there are fang marks but Chung points out that the boy is obviously immune to vampirism. They give him a card and leave. He goes to the address, enters a secret base through a cupboard and is introduced to the vampire cleanup department. I won’t go through the other members here as they are periphery characters at best. Suffice it to say that Tim is unconvinced at first, faces another vampire, is given his old home back and joins the team.

Summer rises from the water

His home was held by the VCD after his parents, both members of the Dept., were bitten. His dad self-incinerated as he turned, after asking Chau to watch out for his unborn child (hence Chau being reluctant when it comes to Tim joining). His mother died after giving birth and this has passed the immunity on to Tim. We get his training and then the first mission where a diver accidentally releases two vampires from their coffins, caught underwater by flooding, during a blood moon. Whilst Chung and Chau go after the male vampire, Tim is faced with the female, Summer (Min Chen Lin). She manages to bite him (and lose a fang) and then suck some energy that makes her young – and friendly. The squad are going to destroy her but Tim ends up hiding her at his home.

Summer and Tim

As well as the Summer storyline, there is the police after taking over the squad and the hunt for the primary vampire. The film lingers on the Summer story however and it becomes a source of gentle romantic comedy (the whole film leans towards the comedic). In many respects, she replaces the ghost character that might have come into a Chinese vampire flick in the past, but with the different dynamic of her being unable to talk. Some parts of this are interesting – her on a Segway to prevent the need to hop, learning to walk, and the fact that she turned having been locked alive in a coffin, as grave goods for the evil landowner who became the primary vampire, and this has left her with PTSD around confined spaces. However, it laboured somewhat and orientated the film too much towards the romantic.

the main vampire

The rest of the lore is mostly standard, using the Taoist principles of vampire hunting (indeed there is a Taoist priest (Cheung-Yan Yuen) in the team). They state that the main reasons for turning after death are due to injustice, it being a rainy day for the funeral or the burial place being gloomy. There is a theory amongst the police that vampirism is a virus and they do manage to develop a toxin that will kill them from Summer's lost tooth. However, the VCD do not like to kill on site, as it were, but capture and return to base so that a ritual can be performed to enable reincarnation before incineration. There are several types of kyonsi listed in a book held by the squad.

Richard Ng as Chung

The comedy around the training is gentle but fun, though (as mentioned) some of the comedy around Summer and Tim’s relationship is too laboured and that section became somewhat flat (though plot critical). That aside, the whole thing was good fun. There are incongruities such as the team being secret and yet having their name emblazoned on their vehicles… but hey, never mind. Fun despite the flaws with the vampire action lifting it up to 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.