Apostle – review

Director: Gareth Evans

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

This was a Netflix film that I had added to my viewing list, understanding it to be a folk horror film. I had in the back of my mind that it might be a little bit like the Wicker Man (1973). Little did I know that it is, at heart, a vampire film and the trope is so strong that no examination is needed to decide on that – Apostle is, in my opinion, a vampire film.

In being so it plays with the idea of native soil in a way that is really interesting and we shall be looking to that. It also plays around with the idea of a vampiric landscape – to some degree – and I will touch upon that too.

Dan Stevens as Thomas

The film is set in 1905 and a letter has been sent by Jennifer (Elen Rhys) to her father begging that he send a ransom to enable her freedom from a religious cult (it reads as though she was a cultist, but later we discover that she has actually been kidnapped from the mainline by the cult with the sole view to ransom). Her father is a broken man and so her estranged (from her father) vagrant looking brother Thomas (Dan Stevens, Vamps) is sent to rescue her. He is not to make himself known to the cult, or pass them the ransom, until he has seen her. As he travels by train to the port, from where he will embark to the cult’s island, we see that he is addicted to some form of drug that he administers by dropper.

ticket

As the viewer sees the quayside my first thought was of Lovecraft and Innsmouth – that is the sort of atmosphere that the set offered and probably a good analogy as the film does play with mounting dread that Lovecraft excelled in. The passengers are all told that no books may be taken to the island. As one passenger (John Weldon), empties books from his case, Thomas offers to help and uses the opportunity to swap his ticket (provided by the cult) for the man’s. Frank (Paul Higgins), the boat’s captain, takes the tickets as they board and seeing something on Thomas’ ticket marks the case of the passenger now in possession of it. Something noted by Thomas.

finding her

The cult itself was founded after convicts Malcolm (Michael Sheen, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2, Underworld & Underworld: Rise of the Lycan), Frank and Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones) had shipwrecked on the island. They had discovered a woman (Sharon Morgan) there who is referred to as a Goddess – I’ll come back to her. Malcolm has styled himself as a prophet, Frank runs the connection with the mainland (as we have seen) and Quinn seems to be more an enforcer. There is a full community now living with them.

branded

Thomas immediately notices many strange things, such as the expectation of ritual bloodletting and a secret tunnel running from Malcolm’s home to somewhere on the island. We see that Thomas has burns on his back and later discover that he was a priest who was tortured and branded with a cross as he tried to bring Christianity to China during the Boxer rebellion – the incident killing his faith and the reason for the character name (he is Doubting Thomas). The island is becoming infertile – the crops dying, animals birthing stillborn or malformed offspring that soon die. This is why they have turned to kidnap, to get the funds to buy food, but they are also being infiltrated by establishment spies from the mainline with a view to ending the cult.

under the floor

I want to concentrate on the Goddess. On his second night Thomas breaks curfew and, when he returns to the lodgings that he and the other newcomers are in, he sees all the other doors have jars of blood outside ready for collection. He fills his jar by stealing blood from another jar (meanwhile we see a female figure behind him, who vanishes). He cuts his finger on a barb on his key and we see, after he retires, the spilt blood moving of its own volition across the floorboard and running down a crack where a face laps hungrily at the blood. The cultist bleed themselves nightly, it seems, and the blood is gathered is an offering to the Goddess.

in the channel of blood

The next night Thomas breaks into the secret passage but becomes trapped down there between Malcolm and Frank. His only way to avoid capture is to climb into a channel that seems to be filled with blood and offal. He is moving through the channel when a rodent is pulled below the surface and then she appears, moving rapidly towards him. He manages to escape, reaching a cave where cave paintings seem to explain the woman (the word Exodus is also chalked on the walls). Meanwhile Malcolm goes to the woman and we see that she is captured within vines and foliage, that have become part of her. A question around the channel of blood came to my mind. As we have seen her hungrily lap at a small amount of freshly spilt blood, why is it that there is a channel of blood apparently untouched? Does the blood need to be fresh, perhaps?

Malcolm feeds her

Malcolm admonishes her for appearing to Thomas, indicating perhaps that he has some sort of telepathic connection with her – as her ‘prophet’ – but also letting us know that, despite being trapped, she can appear on the island. This bilocation might have been illusionary if it weren’t for the feeding under the floorboards. Malcolm feeds her some of his blood and for a moment blossoms appear on the foliage though they quickly die. A humanoid creature, with a vine wrapping around his head, works in the barn, dealing with the meat and acting as her caretaker it seems – he is billed as the Grinder (Sebastian McCheyne).

capturing her

The health of the island is intimately tied into that of the Goddess. Quinn later reveals how they found her and he (having found the cave paintings) uses rabbit’s blood as he captures and ensnares her. Animal blood eventually failed to sustain her (and thus the island) and he plans to produce babies to sacrifice annually to her, convinced such blood will work. Yet she is also able to manipulate the land (we see guards impaled on high branches at one point) and this link between her and the land reminded me of the lore we often get of a vampire and the need for native earth – note I’m specifically thinking of that and not the variant of grave earth. In this the conflation is bought full circle – if the vampire is dependent on its native earth then the film imagines that as an interdependency where the earth is just as reliant on the vampire. It’s a symbiosis between the two.

blood and fire

What we don’t see, but do hear, is that the Goddess can manipulate the surrounding seas as well, protecting her ‘chosen’ but by chosen, are they meant to be a larder for consumption? There is always the possibility that the Goddess is a physical manifestation of the land itself. When she is freed (destroyed?) by immolation the fire spreads rapidly through the land and the community – it blows a chunk of cliff out in an explosion of fire and blood, which is suggestive of the channel of blood but also makes it look as though the entire cliff bleeds. As an aside I was reminded here of the turning process in Byzantium - the Celtic God (who took the form of the prospective vampire, so we never saw their true form) and the bleeding waterfall, to be honest there feels like there is a definite (if not intentional) crossover that could be exploited in a fanfic. Also remember that immolation does not necessarily destroy in nature, rather it clears deadwood and allows renewal.

the Goddess in the land

If the Goddess is a manifestation of the land itself then we have a vampiric landscape, a land that needs blood to blossom. We have seen examples of this before and my mind goes to All Girls Weekend but more so Jug Face, which had the vampiric landscape, the sacrifice and the religious cult element. If she is a manifestation of the land then maybe the channel of blood is more the land’s artery than a feeding sluice? The film certainly poses more questions than it answers but I really enjoyed the sense of dread and the atmosphere – even if things with the Grinder moved off folk horror and more into something around Silent Hill (thanks to Simon Bacon for that analogy).

meat for the grinder

Because of this move it seems to have put some viewers off, I’ve also seen some complaints because of its deliberately unanswered points. Yet I felt it a well-acted psychodrama and its long 130-minute running time flew by. This is one that will gain more fans as the years pass by, I suspect, but I am one already. For me this gets a strong 8 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Sleepless Nights – review

Director: Wayne Whisenant (segment)

Release date:2016

Contains spoilers


This is another portmanteau effort this time masterminded by veteran b-movie/straight to video impresario Todd Sheets (from a TMtV point of view he was the writer of the truly risible Vampire Holocaust). And whilst time has moved on the filming quality of this film seems stuck in a straight to vhs era. Now, this is played with; the film starts with a “feature presentation” screen straight out of grindhouse. But it still looks poor.

The surround follows a girl and her babysitter as they carve a pumpkin, hear the radio talk about an escaped lunatic and the girl tells the nervous babysitter horror stories. There is quite a neat twist to the surround but that’s not why we’re here. The vampire tale is the last segment and the girl introduces it by talking about her grandma living near a creepy man. The segment is called Unnatural Attraction and was a short from two years before this was put together.

John O'Hara as Edwin

The creepy guy is Edwin Parker (John O'Hara) and he is watching life go by whilst sat on a park bench. He is clearly nefariously interested in a jogger (Michaela Paxton Tarbell) who goes by. He also takes too much notice of a young girl (Ariah McLaws) on her bike. The girl has a fall and he goes over to her – she’s cut her knee. He offers to get a first aid kit from his car. He gets it out from the trunk and we see he has another girl (Ashley Whisenant) tied up in there. He patches her up and then we see him leave, the bike still crashed, abandoned on the floor.

Michaela Paxton Tarbell as Regine

When he gets home he gets the girl out of his car – she has clearly been knocked out with chloroform – and takes her into his basement, tying her up. In there are another couple of older girls also tied up. Back upstairs he has a picture of his desired victim – the jogger. There is a knock at the door and, when he gets there, the visitor actually is the jogger. His house is on her route to the park, she has noticed his car and has brought a jumper wondering if he had lost it. It isn’t his but she asks for a glass of water and so he invites her in.

not the actual twist

Of course you know what has to happen, given the film is listed here. The jogger is a vampire and she is preying on him. She gives her name as Regine Dandridge – a clear reference to Fright Night Part 2 - and she chats to him for a little while before baiting him with news of the girl who went missing and vanishing as he goes to stab her. She reappears and attacks… The only real lore we get is that she drinks blood and is fine in daylight. There is a twist in the tale beyond her vampiric existence.

fangs

The short was probably the best segment in the film and what saved it was the story of the vampire preying on the despicable. The acting was ok but nothing to write home about and the photography was washed out. All that said – the segment wasn’t bad and probably deserves 4 out of 10. I’m afraid the whole film would get less in total, it isn’t greater than the sum of this part.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Short Film: Midnight Thirst

This was a 2016 film directed by Deanna Meske, which came in around the twelve-minute mark. I came across it because its sequel was on demand at Amazon and found this on YouTube.

Starting in a house, a six-years-old girl called Rachel (Kaitlyn Covey) awakens to a noise. She calls out for her daddy but the figure that enters the room is a vampire (Dan Paz) and she screams.

Her mother, Jocelin (Deanna Meske), is driving home having picked up an anniversary present for her husband. On the radio a newscaster (Wade O'Harra) talks about police hunting down the vampire menace, about the penalties for harbouring a vampire and about keeping doors locked at night. She turns into the driveway and, when she gets into the house, finds a Dear John letter from her husband mentioning that she can keep custody of Rachel.

fangs

Running to the girl she finds her with marks on her neck and fangs in her mouth. It becomes quickly clear that Rachel is going to need blood and – as a good mother – Jocelin will provide for her. She does cut her own arm but she needs a more sustainable source and, of course, a babysitter… It just so happens that Kiona (Avery Gonzales) rings about the advert Jocelin has posted.

What will happen – you’ll have to watch the short to find out. The imdb page is here.

Honourable mention: Doomsday County

This was a themed anthology film from 2010 and whilst there are two parts that draw our attention – Vampire Academy directed by Art Brainard and Betty Beretta directed by Steven Shea – it receives an honourable mention as it really doesn’t add up to more than a fleeting visitation.

The cover promises “Vampires, Zombies, Aliens…” and it is the latter two that are mostly on show in the segments – all set around the titular Doomsday County, which sits on a gateway to Hell.

attack

Vampire Academy actually opens the film with a knock on a dorm room door heralding the food that has been ordered against college rules, but – as one of the college guys says – sometimes you just have to eat Italian. The ordered food is pizza but, obviously, that is just a ruse and the guy who did the ordering rips the throat out of the pizza delivery guy (Mark Hlavin, the Absence of Light). Some fangs flashing and that’s about it.

Tara Lightfoot as Betty Beretta 

The last segment is Betty Beretta – a hard rocking action agent played by Tara Lightfoot, who probably deserves her own B movie vehicle. In this she is taking on Aliens and part way through she gets back up in the form of the vampires from the Academy – who apparently don’t get on with the aliens’ green blood. She is also aided by the monster hunting college professor from a previous zombie segment (who actually went around staking the zombies).

And that’s it. A Fleeting visitation adding up to not a lot of screen time but vampires nonetheless. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Kiss my Ashes – review

Director: Sam Salerno

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

There is weird and that can be good. Some directors specialise in weird and you can recognise the genius within that surrealism. Then you have this. In many respects weird for weird’s sake this struggles to maintain coherency through its length.

That’s not to say that there weren’t any clever ideas within, just that it didn’t realise them very well and the affected dialogue was not the greatest. There were also some lazy moments.

dead priest

One of those comes in the opening scene as we see a priest dead, holding a cross. A glass is scraped through the blood and then we see our vampire, Gregory (Brett Burrier), drink from the glass… except, there wouldn’t have been any quantity of liquid gathered in the glass of which to drink. The scene becomes incoherent because we know that what we see cannot be. Similar happens in the next scene.

at the table

We have Gregory speaking with Cynthia (Dani Ardilla), they sit at opposite ends of a long table. She is in the twilight of her years and they speak of love (and how Gregory is bored with life). Cynthia is his wife and she has aged as he has not. There might have been a whole exploration of loss and immortality seeing mortality slip away. There really wasn’t of any value or interest (there is more lore around his wife, which I’ll come to). They kiss over the table but, given the length of the table the kiss would have been physically unfeasible. Eventually they go to the bathroom and she bathes him (stock water sound effects don’t match the sponging on screen) and he remembers his original love – mother nature – and a daffodil that was cut and then bled (symbolic probably). He does call his marriage loveless.

Mykayla Booth as Scarlet

We then meet another character, Scarlet (Mykayla Booth), who is being bullied by Taylor (Danto Dwiananto) and Tiffany (Samantha Gordon). Their dialogue seems unreal, ill-fitting with the characters. Scarlet walks home from school and finds, under a bridge, a severed penis. She picks it up and takes it home, putting it in water (removing from the water a daffodil that had been there) and then calling Tiffany to come and see. At each turn I ask why. Tiffany threatens to tell the whole school, well she would, wouldn’t she? The IMDb blurb suggests it is a magic penis, which probably explains why it doesn’t rot.

Wee Matt as Clive

We also meet a couple of cops, soon to retire Sam (Gary Tang) and young nihilist Tim (Jaime Thordsen). They are meant to be investigating a spate of murders with blood drinking involved (I think he drank the blood, says Sam later, as the camera rests on a blood-stained wine glass) but Tim is obsessed with Gregory – assuming incest between him and Cynthia. Finally we meet Clive (Wee Matt) aka the Moonchild – a little person who is a drug dealing/using pimp and a being with special powers, who vacillates between being murderous and benevolent, and part of a prophecy involving Gregory and a demon. Clive is the actual murderer – often killing in astral form – who then allows Gregory to feed from his victims.

the demon

I’ll go no further in the story but in the lore… well Gregory was heir apparent to a throne when he met the demon and sold his soul for immortality. The deal did not go as well as he expected as he developed a thirst for blood and his commoner love of his life killed herself. He moved out into the wilds, living with nature, when he met a new woman, who died and a healer put his first love’s heart in her chest to revive her. Since then each wife he has had also had his first love’s heart but eventually they grow old and die.

heart in hand

Well, it is strange but the strangeness wasn’t handled well and the dialogue just seemed stilted and unnatural – perhaps that was the aim but it didn’t work. The general story was odd for the sake of it but had no hook to drag the viewer with it and overall I was really disappointed with this. Gregory (or, indeed, any other character) elicited no viewer sympathy. The acting wasn’t great – vacillating between ironically bored to shouty. Overall not great. 2 out of 10 reflects the fact that I think there was a thought to try and do something unusual and thought-provoking but ultimately it was just weird and more than a tad languid with no real point.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Playing with Tropes: The Omega Man

One of the great things about introducing the “Playing with Tropes” section to the blog is that I finally feel I can cover off this 1971 film directed by Boris Sagal. Based on Richard Matheson’s I am legend, it is arguably the most famous direct make of that book, if not the most accurate (that honour remains with the Last man on Earth).

In making it, Sagal eschewed the vampire aspect that was central to the original novel and made a film steeped in Cold War paranoia, which nevertheless still contained genre tropes by the very nature of its adaptation (unlike Night of the Living Dead, which was part-inspired by the novel but arguably birthed its own genre). Like the Last Man on Earth the film threw in a Christian-centric religious aspect, more overt in this, indicating that film makers just can’t let alone with such a secular source as Matheson’s novel.

Charlton Heston as Neville

It starts with a lone car in the city, driven by Neville (Charlton Heston), he plays music on an 8-track and at one point stops to shoot at movement behind a window. As the opening credits roll, we see that there are still bodies out in the city. Neville crashes the car as he takes a corner and nearly hits an armoured truck – the robbers’ decomposed bodies still where they fell. He takes a jerrycan of gas and his gun and picks another car from a used car salesroom. In the showroom he reacts to a pinup calendar but it is the dates he reacts to – this shows us that it was 1975 when the world ended.

never stuck in traffic

After stopping off to watch Woodstock (1970) – an unusual film for Neville as one imagines the military doctor had little in common with the hippy generation but, as he intimates, the film has been showing for three years and so was likely the only film in the small theatre. The other thing to note is that the film shows crowds of people, something he misses. As he leaves the theatre he starts to realise that the sun is setting, when suddenly the payphones all start ringing – he realises that they are an auditory hallucination and wills them to silence. He races the sun home.

shooting an infected

As he opens the garage door a cowled figure pours petrol from an adjacent window at the front of the car and starts a fire, one jumps into the car and Neville races into the garage, using momentum to throw the attacker off and shooting him. Two more assailants have got in the garage as he sets off the closing mechanism. They too die. These are our replacement for the vampires of I am Legend – an infected group who call themselves the Family. In the film Neville remembers the start of the end and so, before we look at the Family, let’s cover that.

Neville's former life

It is the time of the Sino/Russian border war – a burgeoning war of two Superpowers (and, whilst there were border skirmishes between those two powers in 1969, it is interesting that the American filmmakers imply that the USA is an innocent victim of their aggressions). Later we discover that germ warfare was used and a plague hit America (and, we assume, the rest of the world). The symptoms are rapid – choking, unconsciousness and then death within minutes. Neville had developed an experimental vaccine but his pilot succumbed to the plague as they transported the sample by helicopter and they crashed. Neville used the vaccine on himself and is immune.

the Family

So, what about the Family? The disease seems to be slower acting in some. We meet a group of kids and young adults who are infected but without symptoms. The Family are infected with symptoms listed as “blindness in light, albinism, psychotic delusions, occasional stages of torpor”. This makes them pale of skin – and I’ll touch on race in a second – with the mark of affliction, whitened iris and small pupils, as well as open sores. They might be called psychotic and delusional but they just appear to have a mutual hatred of technology and the old world – which their leader, Mathias (Anthony Zerbe, the Matrix reloaded), identifies as the source of their curse. The transition from non-symptomatic infection to Family seems to be brought on by age and can be a drawn-out process or occur in minutes.

auto-da-fé

Neville not only represents the old world to them (a creature to be eradicated in order that the world can move on) but he is feared by both the Family and the kids alike as he tends to shoot indiscriminately at anything that moves. He is captured by the family and they threaten to cleanse him with fire in something that looks a lot like the inquisitions’ auto-da-fé. Indeed, the Family all wear monkish robes and he is announced as the dead (reversing the status of living corpse from vampire to hunter – after all he is the Other). Interestingly he later calls the family Half-dead. The kids rescue him and, as he is not infected, he can make a vaccine from his blood for a young man who is slowly turning, Richie (Eric Laneuville, Moonlight).

Neville and Lisa

There is much that could be written about the racial aspects of the Omega Man. The disease creates a new race it seems – on turning one seems to align automatically with the Family and young doctor Dutch (Paul Koslo) describes someone turning rapidly and attacking him. Yet, Ritchie and his sister Lisa (Rosalind Cash) had spent time with the Family early on, as the Family removed the bodies of the dead and cremated them, until the Family started to notice the differences between them. The Family do become albino, the condition whitening their skins no matter their ethnicity but Neville seems to represent the privileged white – one Family member, Zachary (Lincoln Kilpatrick), rather than relying on the anti-technology narrative Mathias espouses (and indeed we see him carry a gun, something forbidden) calls Neville’s base “Honky paradise” – though Mathias berates him for using the language of old hatreds. Neville makes a racial assumption later, suggesting that Lisa is from Harlem (and thus will never have seen a river teeming with fish). The whole film could be examined for its racial commentary.

Jesus Christ pose

A strong narrative is the religious aspect and I have already mentioned the monkish robes (although Lisa’s robe, when she turns, seems to make her look more vampish than monkish) and the idea that heretic science has brought about the end of the world, the infection is a curse and Neville was to be cleansed in a way reminiscent of the inquisition. Yet Neville also represents Christ. He is asked whether he is God, by one of the kids (Lisa is dismissive as to whether he is even a doctor, never mind a deity). It is through his blood that a cure can be found and when the Family wreck his base he manages to save a bottle of his blood, which the dying Neville passes to Dutch. He is killed by a spear (though it does not remain in him as it did with Vincent Price in the Last Man on Earth) and dies in a blood red fountain (rather than the church Price’s character dies in). Yet his pose in death, both arms and legs, is based on the common portrayal of Christ from a crucifix.

Lisa turned

So… genre tropes. The main, of course, is that the film recognisably is lifted from one of the classic vampire books. Like the book there is a twisting of the trope of the Other, with the hunter being made that and the infected/vampires being the new normal. Like the book the “answer” is in blood – though the cure is science based and not naturally occurring as in the original (in the book the Last Man is immune due to a bat bite before the plague, although he does use science as he investigates the plague). The pallor of the Family corresponds to the paleness of the vampire and the fact that they are now nocturnal and can see at night is a trope in itself. Given its heritage perhaps this is not as trope heavy as some other vehicles but it still plays with tropes.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Vanished – review

Director: Matt Spade

Release Date: 2018

Contains spoilers


A budget movie from 2018, I was impressed by the crisp clarity of the photography in this. Unfortunately, despite ambition, the film itself did not work as well as it might.

To me, as I watched it, I was struck that it felt like a low budgeted attempt to capture something akin to Salem’s Lot but it failed to capture either the atmosphere or the scope of the famous mini-series and so felt limited where it could have played up the wider vista of the small town with much more aplomb.

Body in the open

Having been told that the film was inspired by a dream, we discover we are in a small Pennsylvania town. A radio show suggests that there are four missing kids and the credits show us various newspapers through the years that suggest that spates of missing kids occur every decade or so. The search is on for Laurie Greyson – we see her prone body and given the interspersing with the cemetery we assume she is there – plus an establishing shot of a chained crypt. As she has been missing for four days, and her body appears to be out among the elements, we wonder that she wasn’t found.

vamping out

A group of three guys meet in the cemetery, as does Sarah, a babysitter with her ward Tommy. The guys chew the fat as Tommy plays, when a very ill looking Laurie comes to them and warns them to get out as the night is falling. They start trying to talk to her when she suddenly attacks. All three guys are killed and Sarah runs away with Tommy. Given what we have seen, the fact that she tucks him into bed and seems utterly unconcerned seems a tad off. Laurie appears at a window. We hear breaking glass and – as Sarah is listed later as missing – I assume she was pulled out off-screen as we discover the invitation rule applies in this.

clued-up kids

More and more kids go missing and some adults start to vanish too. The town is concerned, businesses are closing and the police are clueless. Later we discover that the mayor was in on it with the main vampire, Mr Gallows, and his human (but long lived) henchman. One strange aspect is that Tommy and a girl called Charity seem more clued-up than the adults – she gives him a bottle of holy water. The film eventually comes to an abrupt chapter end, following a mob going to the cemetery and many glowing eyed vampires.

adult Tom

The film then jumps forward 20 years (the first half was set in 1993, though this isn’t communicated). Tommy, orphaned by the vampires, was moved out of town and now lives in the city and goes by Tom. He is respected by his boss as, though he can zone out in meetings (thinking, we realise, about the events of his past), he is the company’s highest earner. Charity finds him – she had been told what was going on by her grandmother, back in the day, and told there was someone she'd know she could trust (Tommy). We see the kids in flashback, Tommy inviting a vampire in, Charity distracting her with holy water and Tommy staking her (remember they were eight).

Mr Gallows

It has started again and Charity gets Tom to go home so that they can rescue the town and deal with Mr Gallows… Gallows looks a tad like the Master from Salem’s Lot (1979) but with quite poor makeup. The story holds together so long as you don’t start scrutinising it and, if you do, you see incongruities and holes. The buildings associated with the evil (the crypt and the big house the human helper lives in) will vanish if Gallows is destroyed.

let me in

As I mentioned, the photography was much better than many a budget film. Some of the acting was quite good – especially one of the lads in the cemetery at the beginning – but other performances were distinctly average. I think this deserves to be liked a lot but never reached its level of ambition and that makes liking it that much so very difficult. As it is the film needs much more atmosphere, indeed it needs a build up of dread caused by the home-town rotting from the inside that both versions of Salem’s Lot do really well. 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vurdalaki – review

Director: Sergey Ginzburg

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

This review comes with a health warning, as it were. I managed to stumble over a stream of this Russian film online. I then managed to find English fan-subs (with much searching). Those didn’t work but a bit of dibbling with the coding on the srt got them working (though I had to put a seven second delay on them). At first they seemed reasonable but as the film progressed it became obvious that some were literal translations and some simply gibberish. There was enough to get a fair grasp of what was going on but I will re-review this when I eventually find a DVD with properly constructed English subtitles.

vampire

The other reason that this was recognisable – in part at least – was that the film was loosely based on the Alexis Tolstoy short story the Family of the Vourdalak and whilst the lore and events were dibbled with it was still there. Of course that is where the original title of Vurdalaki comes from – it has also been released under the monikers of Prince of Darkness (Fürst der Finsternis) and Ghoul.

Lavr slays the vampire

It starts with a graveyard and a woman stands next to a grave marker that seems to bear her likeness. A monk, Lavr (Mikhail Porechenkov), walks to her and asks whether she cannot sleep. She suggests she has a troubled soul and asks him to pray for a family member. He recites the Lord’s Prayer and, as he concludes, drops a stake from his sleeve and lunges just as she vamps out. He stakes her but as she dies she announces that the Master is coming. Her corpse disintegrates.

Igor Khripunov as the servant

A carriage is driven through the village and people seem to avoid it. At the rear we can see it carries a coffin. As night falls the carriage is in woodlands and a bat flies by the worker that the driver (Igor Khripunov) has paid to help him. The worker calls the carriage to a halt and suggests the road will take the driver to his destination but he will go no further. He scurries off but the driver seems to move with unnatural swiftness (he isn’t a vampire, rather the vampire’s servant). He mentions the payment the worker is owed and also the carriage’s load. The worker didn’t know it contained a coffin.

tree hugging vampire

The driver opens the coffin and a colony of bats explode out, killing the worker (who’ll be soon up and about as one of the undead). The vampire Master – the Baron – appears old and withered but touches a tree (the tree changing from silvered bark to a brown bark) and becomes younger, declaring himself home. They go up to a castle and he uses a rod to open up an arcane, coffin-shaped contraption that reveals a goblet of blood. His plan is to bring about the resurgence of the vampires through a ritual involving a village girl Milena (Aglaya Shilovskaya) in a few days as there is a rare celestial alignment and an eclipse.

Aglaya Shilovskaya as Milena

Milena, the next day, is speaking to her little nephew as they watch the goats, and he asks for a story that night. She realises that a goat is missing and rides into the forest, finding it on a gravemound, where it seems to have partly sunk into the earth. She tries to pull it out but a bat buzzes her. The goat is sucked fully into the grave. She rides to Lavr to tell him – it is the grave of a young girl Marica, who died recently and the grave’s cross has gone.

Gorcha

A Tsarist official, Lyubchinsky Andrej Vasilevich (Konstantin Kryukov), arrives at the monastery with his servant Paramon. Lavr was exiled to this place but he is being summoned back to the city. He refuses to leave, intent instead on making stakes. As the officials leave they pass a lake that Milena is bathing in and she injures Paramon as he tries to spook her. They take him to her home that she shares with her father, Gorcha, brother Georges and Georges’ wife and son. Almost the same family unit as in Tolstoy’s tale (only another brother is missing) it won’t come as a surprise that Milena and Andrej quickly fall in love.

Marica throws Georges

The lore is very different, however… as well as summoning bats (and transforming into them, it appeared), the vampires burn in sunlight and avoid religious items. When Marica returns from the grave we see that they are super-strong (and later we get some vampire warriors who seem supernaturally ripped with extensive veins showing). The need to feed on immediate family is either gone or not mentioned and the fate of the family is dealt with very swiftly. The big change is that Milena is a moroi – Bane suggests that “The rarer moroi {is a} (“living male vampire”)” and is the child of a vampire. In this the Baron attacked her mother whilst she was in the womb and she has been born half-vampire (ala Blade). She has no vampiric traits (bar absorbing bat’s blood if touched with it) but the ritual will convert her to a full, daywalking vampire.

the Baron in repose

The parting with the lore and story offered by Tolstoy allows the film to move to a more action/adventure stance and it doesn’t necessarily suffer for this. There was a chemistry between the leads and Lavr reminded me of Brother Sandor from Hammer’s almost namesake film Dracula, Prince of Darkness. However, the action adventure side does mean the horror aspect is underwhelming – a shame as some of the night photography is rather atmospheric. The parts around the vampire warriors were confusing – but that I think was due to poor subtitling and this overall is a nice slice of action vampire flick. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.