Short Film: Shadowglade

This is a 35-minute film from 2015, directed by Ezra Peace, which takes the buddy cop theme along with urban fantasy and merges them into what is, essentially, a pilot with a lot more story to go.

It begins in a car and cop Alex (Danny Klapadoras) is using a squeaky grip strengthener whilst suggesting that partner Ethan (Salvatore Verini) is too quiet – when Ethan is reading. He also suggests that Ethan should drink some of his *special juice* and clearly (as we discover the secrets of these two) that juice would be blood.

in car

Alex is eating a dog biscuit when a car drives by and he smells pot. Blue lights on and they are in pursuit. The car pulls over and as the cops approach, still bickering slightly, Alex smells a body in the trunk. The two gang members open fire on the cops. Checking on their victims they find the bodies gone, and then Alex and Ethan reappear and suddenly have the bad guys by the neck. Alex kills the one he has hold of by breaking his neck. Ethan questions why, he would have compelled them, and then compels the other to shoot his friend's corpse (once it is placed back in the car) and then kill himself. The gunshots attract other cops and the two (obviously, vampire and werewolf) drive away from the scene, intent on getting some food.

Erica and Alex

Ethan sends Alex to get a steak sub (rare) and Alex, for a laugh, has garlic put on it, which causes his partner to choke. Then a call comes in about the murder and they return to the scene. The case has been given to a detective from the sheriff’s office, Erica (Val Simpson), and he realises that she is a witch. The CSI guy has noticed that the bullet wounds are post-mortem in one of the victims of the alleged murder/suicide and, when they discover that the body in the trunk works for the police, Ethan compels him to bring evidence to him first.

uncovering clues with magic

When this doesn’t happen (unbeknown to them the CSI guy gets murdered) they break into Erica’s house to try and see what information she has uncovered – however the man in the trunk was killed by Satanists (for his tattoo, which has occult significance) and the three have to start working together to try and get to the bottom of the case. They also have to work with a priest (Michael Kantor), who is part of a secret militant church order that hunt down supernaturals.

Michael Kantor as the priest

So, the lore we do get is sparse but we know that garlic chokes, that vampires are physically superior, that holy water boils if a vampire gets too close to it (but they can go in churches). Silver incapacitates a vampire but wood will kill if it pierces the heart. The short also uses vervain in its lore, which either pushes the story into the world of the Vampire Diaries or it indicates a spread of one of the long running series' tropes into the wider lore.

rumble

The acting is sporadic with some good moments marred by some more amateurish moments – but to be fair most of the cast are in their first (filmed) vehicle. That given they did quite well. However the lack of conclusion (this is absolutely open-ended) is a tad frustrating.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? Wicked Witches

First released in 2018 under the title The Witches of Dumpling Farm, this is a flick directed by Martin J Pickering and you can see, from the cover art, why this went to a ‘Vamp or Not?’ – sharp teeth, plenty of blood…

The connection between witches and vampires has been a long one. Some folklore has the living (and sometimes vampiric) witch become a vampire on death. The verse The Old Woman of Berkeley (1799) gives the witch a vampiric aspect and the two have been merged to varying degrees in several genre films.

Duncan Casey as Mark

This film is a budget British film and suffers from a massive lack of exposition. The basic story is that Mark (Duncan Casey, Snow White and the Huntsman) has been booted out by his (soon to be) ex-wife. This is referenced mostly by him throwing his ring away and by the odd bit of limited dialogue, which fails to explore the situation satisfactorily. He is looking for somewhere to live and notices that old friend, Ian (Justin Marosa), has a room to rent on Dumpling Farm.

dream or nightmare?

He rings and arranges to get a room and, from the get-go, Ian is acting odd. He does give permission for a party, warns Mark off the “private” basement and gets drunk/stoned with him. Marosa actually does fill his character with sinister strangeness. As Mark stays at the farm we notice that he seems to be being watched by some of the village women, he starts having vivid blood filled dreams of monstrous women and, as things draw on, one of the positives I can say about the direction and performance is that the levels of paranoid fear are nicely drawn.

Ian and his friends

They are nicely drawn but exposition is not and thus the story is incredibly basic. Mark is paranoid, Ian is acting off, and the former throws his party filled with friends getting drunk and stoned (including his friend Stevie (Kitt Proudfoot), who mugs the camera in every scene he is in), and the latter shows up with three women (never named). As the sun rises the women take the blokes into the woods, Mark feels sick and is off to the side as Stevie opens a cooking pot, finds a head boiling and the women become veiny, sprout teeth and talons, and attack.

teeth and veins

So this is our potential vampire moment and they do seem more vampiric (or perhaps demonic) than witchy – though they are as at home munching entrails as drinking blood. Later, whilst hiding under bodies, the dead Stevie talks to Mark and says they are demons or witches or something… But Stevie also points out that he is dead and Mark is stoned – so the information is coming from Mark’s imagination. He also, later, finds occult scribblings with satanic overtones but that doesn’t help except to let us know that Mark was a target all along. Ian seems to be some sort of mad servant (ala Renfield), who they feed with blood at one point, and chopping the witches with an axe kills them.

snacking on a limb

If only we knew what they wanted Mark for or, even, if they eat human’s for fun or out of necessity – that would have helped the deliberation but the filmmakers took the decision not to include any meaningful exposition beyond the bare minimum (or less, perhaps). The film is more Evil Dead (though not nearly as much fun) than the VVitch, but is it vamp? It’s a tough call… there are certainly the tropes (fangs, talons and flesh eating) but that could go to demon as much as vamp. The tropes make it genre interest, I am unsure if I’d call it vamp though.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

Demon Squad – review

Director: Thomas Smith

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers


This is an urban fantasy film sporting alternative titles Night Hunters and Full Moon, Inc. The easiest way to describe it is probably that it is a low budget film in the mould of Cast a Deadly Spell. Like the earlier film this sports a visitation of a vampire (Martin Ross Henne) – though the presence on screen is longer in this and I cogitated over whether to class this as a fleeting visitation and, eventually, decided the on-screen presence was just enough to warrant a full review.

Daisy and Nick

In the film noir style this follows PI and mage Nick Moon (Khristian Fulmer) and his empathic secretary/partner Daisy (Erin Lilley) as they search out a missing artefact. The father of client Lilah Fontaine (Leah Christine Johnson) has been kidnapped, and the police are looking into that, but she realises they aren’t equipped to deal with the theft of an ancient, priceless artefact – a dagger that can carry an antediluvian power core (which may or may not have something to do with the Elder Gods).

Martin Ross Henne as Skeeter

In good old film noir style they follow a twisting, turning path of clues, whilst menaced by supernatural creatures. It’s a world where demon prostitutes hang out on street corners and we see at least one vampire, Skeeter, haunting a bar. Skeeter interferes in the case, is later hunted down by Nick and Daisy, interrogated (as he is a henchman for the baddy) and has his fangs removed and then later appears at the end of the film as a good henchman should.

being interrogated

The film itself is low budget but the primary leads (Fulmer, Lilley and Johnson) imbue it with a level of charm that makes it watchable. For the most part it uses practical effects to create the various monsters. It certainly isn’t as slick as Cast a Deadly Spell but it is so personable it is very watchable with enough world-building to create the urban fantasy but not so much as it gets mired (indeed it could have done for some more) and enough hinted backstory to warrant further exploration in a sequel. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Use of Tropes: the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

If it had not been for the more obvious tropes used in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and that isn’t too obvious) I doubt I would have written this for the blog. Released in 1986 and directed by Tobe Hooper, this was a direct sequel set thirteen years after the first film. Once again it centres on the cannibal Sawyer family – now decamped to an abandoned civil war theme park/carnival and their pursuit by Lefty (Dennis Hopper, Queen of Blood) – a ranger who was the uncle of Sally and Franklin from the first film. Radio DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams) also gets drawn into the story having captured the sound of an attack on tape during a radio call-in.

licking up blood

The details of the film are, mostly, unnecessary from the point of view of looking at the vampiric connection within the film, which centre around the character Grandpa (Ken Evert), who was the focus of the vampiric element of the first film. In the first film I observed that he looked like a corpse but then he seemed almost revived by being fed a drop of blood, to the point of being feebly animate at least. In this he is brought to dinner, again, in a scene that is probably the most derivative of the first film – with him brought to dinner, Stretch tied at the table (replacing Sally), and then trying to encourage him to brain the woman with a hammer to relive his glory days in the slaughterhouse (before he lost his employment to automation).

hammer time

If he looked dead in the first film then he looks no better 13 years on. We hear that he is 137 years old and we get the secret of his longevity when Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow) declares “Grandpa's strict liquid diet keeps him as fresh as a rose.” The nature of the liquid is confirmed when he takes a blood coated wire and licks the blood. Whilst he is in a wheelchair, he does wield the hammer. The tool is wielded feebly at first, dropping the hammer as much as failing to hit Stretch, but actually hitting her twice after he tastes the blood, the second time seemingly enough to temporarily incapacitate her. He also manages to stand at one point after that and throw the hammer. The text can be read, of course, that the taste of the blood revived him back to animate action again.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Bonus Bit: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

I decided to add an addendum re the third film in the series. To me this was thoroughly out with continuity despite having an uncredited appearance of Caroline Williams as Stretch. Not least of all because Leatherface (R. A. Mihailoff) was gutted with a chainsaw in 2 and in the vicinity (along with Grandpa) when a grenade went off. This features a whole new version of the Sawyer family and whilst one might generously imagine it is a new Leatherface, the presence – ish – of Grandpa is the reason why I’m looking at this here.

feeding the corpse blood

And, unlike the other two films, he is dead – rather than looking dead. Sat in the kitchen area of the Sawyer house with blood around the mouth, the family still feed the corpse blood but there is no subsequent movement after being fed. Eventually the corpse is shot, the bullets hitting the torso causing blood to gush due, I assume, to the mummified corpse having blood poured into it regularly causing a reservoir. The face, when hit, collapsing.

Grandpa's bloody corpse

This chapter of the series grossed the lowest at the box office (until the subsequent Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) and perhaps lost the subversive anti-capitalist undertone of the first two films (In the original Drayton Sawyer has a barbeque shack – selling the human flesh, more explicitly in the second film he wins a chilli cook-off and is obsessed with making money selling his meat products – connecting the family with capitalist pursuits). However, the corpse of grandpa (and its fetishization) made me want to mention the film.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Short Film: Vampire Couch Trip

This 2017 short film was directed by Devin Dugan and comes in at just over 17 minutes. The basic premise is that four vampires hire the services of a psychologist, Dr Hazel (Nick Breslin), to discuss their issues (mostly around a road trip gone bad).

The film starts with Dr Hazel driving to the appointment, the radio playing “Vampires in my Neighbourhood” whilst we get intermittent flashes of dead office workers – this slaughter is not referred to in session, as it were.

The first vampire we see Hazel speak to is Remanence Radu (Maral Milani) – though she prefers to be called Remi. She starts off talking about ‘dirt bag goth kids’ thinking blood drinking is cool. Her idea of cool is travelling, she wants to see the world and be part of history rather than an observer of it. Yet when Hazel suggests she can travel she is dismissive of the idea. She also complains about her brother, Coax Radu (Jeffrey Hammerstein), who she predicts will talk about not meeting a significant other.

attack the cop

Coax does, indeed, mention this – though the doctor is somewhat surprised that he can’t find a decent night life in LA. Next he speaks to Draw Aldea (Wesley Lambert) who is with his girlfriend Allure Vulpe (Kelsey Redmond). The story, as they tell it, develops to a truck stop massacre and then, a couple of days later, the eating of a cop (Adrian Gomez) who recognises the vehicle they’re in as the one described from the truck stop. That happens in the car park outside a dairy queen. Mostly we don’t actually see any of the action, it is just mentioned and establishing shots used – clearly due to budgetary constraints.

kids' choir

The vampires suggest that it isn’t their fault, that they don’t want to hurt anyone, it just kind of turns out that way. They recount that they were now wanted over 6 states and ran out of gas. They walked, looking to hitch, but soon realised it was only an hour till dawn. Now I could forgive the day for night shots used but the idea that they were then picked up (an hour before dawn remember) by a woman (Gina Dugan) and the people carrier had a kids' church choir group in it was a story credibility stretch. It did lead to an amusing moment however as the vampires recall the kids singing kumbaya – the looks on the vampire’s faces, especially Allure’s, was priceless.

And its there I’ll leave the blow by blow. I think you can guess what happened to the choir but why, you might ask, are these vampires unburdening themselves to a shrink?

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Down in the Dark

This is a 2018 short that comes in around the 6-minute mark and was directed by Daljit Kalsi Jr. As it manages to throw a monster mash together you can probably guess that it doesn’t have much more than cameos in but one of those cameos is vampire in nature.

It is set in the abandoned “Old Wesley Hospital Site” on Halloween night and four generic kids prowl the spooky halls. How generic? There is the Goth Girl (Camila Escobar), the hipster (Myles Moore), the athlete (Jonah Bishop-Pirrone) and the good girl (Audrey Dickson) – though their names portray stereotypes more than their looks/behaviours which are just ‘kids’. The girls are there first and the guys try to scare them and then they get to the stairs to the basement.

vampires

They try to work out what might be down in the dark and the first guess is that it is a vampire lair… We get images of a vampire (Lavin Cuddihee) and his bride (Robyn Wells). Despite having a victim strapped into a chair he is getting frustrated by blood baggies (and getting in to them) – portion control we discover… If this had been a full-length film their appearance would have been a fleeting visitation but, nevertheless, they are there. We also get guesses around witches and a serial killer creating a Frankensteinean bride… but what is really down there?

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Lady Belladonna's Tales from The Inferno – review

Directors: Robert Posey & Justin Holtzen (segment)

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

This is an anthology stitching shorts together, which is the second Lady Belladonna (Tawnya Bass) film. The first, Lady Belladonna's Night Shades, looked cheaper in the wraparound (about the demonic Lady Belladonna and her time as a soul broker) than this edition and the photography and effects were sharper in this one.

There is a difference in the content also – the first film was pretty much serial killer/slasher themed and there was a real variance in the quality of the shorts. In this one a more supernatural theme enters the concept and the shorts were of a higher quality generally. The segment is called Family Tradition and was probably the strongest part of the film. A note on directors – the film lists Robert Posey & Justin Holtzen as the segment directors, if you find the short’s IMDb page it lists Posey only.

vision of blood

The story takes place in a scrapyard and Bekah (Donna Bella Litton), a teen girl, lives there with Mom (Hailey Josselyn), dad (Shawn McCall) and little sister Grace (Julianne Medina). Bekah gets home in time for the evening meal and there is some family banter but dad, as he looks at the family, sees them splattered with blood and has no humour. He leaves the table and mom says it is the anniversary of grandpa’s (Royd McCargish) death. Bekah makes a snarky comment about dad being drunk in the shed rather than the house.

Donna Bella Litton as Bekah

We cut to the shed and see dad sat, talking to person unknown and saying that he can’t do it anymore, this will be the last time and *he* won’t survive this time. As he speaks, we see him holding a metal mask. Later in the evening Bekah awakens and picks up a pack of cigarettes, going out for a smoke. She sees light in the shed, goes to investigate and, as she gets closer, hears grunts of pain. Looking in the door she sees dad clearly torturing someone (Robert Posey).

from Grandpa's tale

She runs back to the house and dad follows. She calls him crazy but mom intervenes. She wasn’t meant to find out yet but… They tell her the story of Grandpa and his first family, of him coming home to find them all dead, bar one child, and a man violently biting their neck. Grandpa attacked the man and then realised what *it* was. He captured it and starved it, torturing it each anniversary of his family’s slaughter – a tradition passed on to dad when just a child. Will Bekah buy such a story?

Robert Posey as the vampire

The film is well shot, well-paced and the acting is credible throughout. I particularly liked the photography and the directors manage to walk a line where the victim (the vampire) isn’t so much a victim in the audience eyes and the aggressor (dad) is complex and broken with a few simple dialogue strokes. This one is worth the entry fee to the whole anthology. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Whistling Past the Graveyard – review

Author: Jonathan Maberry

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: A lonely, nerdy paperboy encounters ancient evil on the shadowy back roads of his home town. A little girl spends her nights dreaming of monsters and teaching herself the art of murder. Sherlock Holmes journeys to America for an encounter with the ghost of a murdered woman. A samurai sails to a forgotten island to battle the living dead. Special ops soldiers fly the void to fight space pirates. A heartbroken junkie seeks vengeance for his murdered friend. Whistling Past the Graveyard is the first print collection of short fiction by New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. These creepy tales of horror, suspense, adventure and mystery take readers to the troubled little town of Pine Deep, to the Feudal Japan of the Samurai, to the angry red planet of John Carter of Mars, and elsewhere. These are strange journeys through nightmare land, with a five-time Bram Stoker Award winner as your guide.

The Review: This is a collection of short stories by Jonathan Maberry, who we know primarily for his V-Wars series – though none of the stories in this collection are from that world.

The stories come from either from other Maberry worlds or are standalone and those connected to other series can be read without knowing the series. The collection contains four stories from his Pine Deep stories – one set before the three novel series and three afterwards. Now, I haven’t read those books (they are now on my wishlist) and the stories worked without that but as some of the characters come from that series, whether incidental in these or central, I can’t help but think I’d have got even more out of these having read the novels.

What we discover is that the country town of Pine Deep was a scene of a massacre known as the Trouble – officially the scene of domestic terrorism, where drugs were put in the water and the town tore itself apart in hallucinatory paranoia, thousands dying. In actuality there was a mass outbreak of vampirism, and I kind of got the impression of Salem’s Lot with a lot more death and destruction and fight back. The Trouble is covered in the trilogy of novels.

In this we get three post Trouble stories each with vampires featured one way or another – plus something that eats vampires in one story and vampires who avoid human blood (for survival’s sake) in another. In the pre-trilogy story, we actually get a haunted house that offers a glimpse of a broken future and feeds off the despair – so almost a vampiric building. This story really did strike me as one that fans of the Pine Deep books would really enjoy.

All the stories contained within were strong, to tell the truth. I particularly liked a period Japanese based story and an outbreak of Spanish disease (or zombies). I’m scoring, of course, for the vampire shorts and I was impressed with the fact that the author managed to hook into a wider series but also keep them accessible for someone who hadn’t read it. The writing was crisp, as I would expect from Maberry, the action explosive and the book eminently readable. 8 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Short Film: Bats in the Belfry

Hailing from Portugal, this 7-minute long animated short was written and directed by João Alves and takes place in the Wild West.


It is night time and Deadeye Jack has tracked money bags he meant to steal that afternoon, before being interrupted by the sheriff, to a small mission in the desert. As he approaches the mission, we hear a woman (Rita Soares) within whimper and grunting as well as seeing splattering blood.

Jack

Jack roles a barrel of gunpowder towards the mission and lights the gunpowder trail it leaves, blowing the door. He gets to the open entrance to see a scene of carnage with a group of vampires, dressed as monks, feasting on the blood and flesh of a slaughtered group and only two survivors. Jack only wants the money but the vampires turn their attention to him…

vampires

The vampires go down with a shot to the head and have sharp teeth. There are bats within the sequence but no indication that they are anything more than bats. As for the animation, I saw an immediate stylistic similarity to such cartoons as Samurai Jack and it is crisp and fun. I actually enjoyed the whole thing and can see that it might actually be a launching pad for a whole series should Alves wish to pursue it.


The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Detective K: Secret of the Living Dead – review

Director: Suk-Yoon Kim

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers


I have to thank Leila for putting me onto this – the third Detective K film. This is a Korean series about an eighteenth-century Korean detective and so, like Rampant, this is a period set film. Also, like the zompire film this has a comedy element but, in terms of tone, this weaves it more delicately into the general film. You’ll also see that this has another textual element in common.

awkened

The film is set in 1789 and talks of blood-suckers appearing in the kingdom. As we are given a little background, we see a man digging up a grave and are told that vampires are strong, heal rapidly, can fly and the way to kill them is fire. The coffin contains a charred corpse and he drops blood on it but runs into the woods as soldiers start coming through the trees. He is mortally wounded as a thrown knife sinks into his throat. A woman (Kim Ji-won), the corpse revived, comes to him and he gives her a pouch before dying. She is caught at a cliff edge, shot, goes off the edge but then flies into the distance.

undercover

Detective Kim Min (Kim Myung-min) – K – and his “Watson”, Seo-pil (Oh Dal-su), are undercover at a travelling show, where they are posing as magician and assistant. K actually manages to wound Seo-pil during the swords through the box trick but their primary reason for being there is due to vampires – as suspicious deaths have followed the show. A child is kidnapped from the crowd and K intercepts but discovers that it is the show’s owner and son killing people but not because they are vampires. One of them suffers from porphyria and they are taking blood to treat that (it is, again, a mistaken view of porphyria and how it would have caused people to act).

combustion

Elsewhere a man staggers through the streets with a bite on his neck, he falls and turns, at which point a flaming arrow strikes him (from out of the night). The fire consumes him from inside out. K is approached by a woman to come and investigate the mysteriously burnt man (the second such death) – they are to host a royal lunar festival, the first in 30 years, and the King is to attend. K agrees but finds his lodgings are not as promised. He soon meets the revived woman – who has amnesia and whom he names Wol-Young. At first he doesn’t realise what she is (despite showing prodigious strength) as she can walk in the sun and the two work together to try and both solve the case and discover her story.

vampire

So, the reason she can walk in the sun is down to the fact that she hasn’t drunk any blood – if she does she will gain standard sunlight issues (though dying in sunlight leads to a tad of sparkling) but also regain her memories. The intertextual connection with Rampant that I mentioned is down to the source of the vampirism, which is a European ship that wrecked on shore with a vampire aboard. Likewise, Rampant’s zompires came from a European ship and this speaks of the monster coming from Europe – be that as a general commentary on Western colonialism, the pervasiveness of European culture generally, or a media commentary regarding the traditional folklore creatures being replaced by the Western hordes. This is not a new Asian trope – the Japanese film the Bloodthirsty Roses had the source of vampirism be a shipwrecked European, pushing the trope further by having him literally steal a succession of Japanese faces.

Wol-Young and K

That aside, this is a sumptuous film with some great comedy moments, including much in the way of slapstick – but that slapstick works really well. The three primary characters all work brilliantly. There are moments early on with a UFO abduction and zombies, told as events supposedly happening, that make a nice break from the less supernatural earlier instalments. The zombies make a more substantial appearance at the end – indicating the direction the series is likely to go in. The central narrative itself is, of course, a mystery, and I won’t spoil that. However, I will say it centres around murder, revenge and dynastic politics. 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Dracula Vampyre in Beijing – review

Director: Tim Lies

Release date: 2019*

Contains spoilers

*release date according to Amazon Prime video – no IMDb page at the time of review to confirm.

Oh dear Lord, this is bad. A film that is in both English and Cantonese (I assume, rather than Mandarin), it appeared on Amazon Prime video and its an hour and a half I am never getting back – this really is a case of 'I watch them so you don’t have to'.

horror dream eyes

Set in Beijing and the Changping mountain area, we start with a voice over from Li Mei (Liu Xiao Yan) who talks about the mountains being her home and the centre of all she loves. She is an artist and has specialised in art featuring horror dream eyes – a vision that haunts her sleep and she translates into art by taking a horror film poster, cutting the eyes out of a face and having eyes behind that looks like someone behind the poster. She mentions vampires in the mountains living in abandoned war shelters.

birthday

The film is set in three acts over three nights of the blood moon, apparently, but there is no sense of chronology really. In the credits we see playing cards where the faces have various vampire icons – Lugosi or Lee for example. Then we are at Li Mei’s birthday and she has been given a pack of these “vampire death cards” by her friends Liu Ling (Wang Yao) and Zhang Zhu (Cui En Hao) – they seem to all believe in vampires. The other friend, intimated later that he is her boyfriend Zhao Guo (Hao Yi Bo), does not believe in vampires. He gives her his gift, wrapped in newspaper, and she seems to zone out and leave the place in a trance.

Dracula and his Coven

Outside and she’s ok but they decide to have a car race (lei Mei against Zhao Guo) to a venue, Vampyre Theatre, where the band Dracula (Tim Lies) and his Coven are due to play. No one has seen the singer's face as he keeps it under a bandana tied over the mouth. The race is pointless cinematically, she wins it and the three friends ‘cosplay’ – Zhao Guo doesn’t. A friend (Wang Ping) of LI Mei (from the mountain) catches her at the door and admonishes her as mountain people die in the mountains (no, it makes no sense). The venue has perhaps nine people in the crowd and Igor (Will Matthews) taking money. The band are made up of vampire brides with Dracula singing. One of the friends takes a photograph of Dracula and notices something funny (but we never see the shot). Li Mei seems entranced.

Li Mei turned

After the gig Li Mei seems entranced again and gets in a strange car – abandoning her friends. Yet we then see her wake up in her own bed, screaming from a nightmare, and her mother (Yang le Qun) comforting her. After the mother leaves, a shadow stretches over the room, Dracula is there and he bites the young woman. In the morning her mother has a box and starts running through the village screaming – apparently Li Mei is dead. We do see her in the morgue and see her wake, have fangs and wander off naked but we also get the message that people don’t know if she is dead or missing.

legless

We also get the brides escaping from Dracula’s lair, where they are chained during the day. First let me mention the chains – they are blooming paper chains that are sticky taped to the wall. No, really. Outside they attack a guy (note it is day time, so no sun related lore is used particularly) and – with the worst effects I have seen for some time – rip his legs and arms off – clearly stuffed clothes and a splodge of meat by the “torso” to represent gore, one eats an arm and dribbles what looks like apple flesh out of their mouth. It really is bad. Igor recaptures them, though we don’t see that, just him bringing them back into the lair.

Tim Lies as Dracula

As for Li Mei – she wanders around aimlessly, either naked or in a wedding dress and the once sceptical Zhao Guo gives a cop (Ivy Shan), who conveniently shows up at the end, a silver bullet to tackle Dracula with. We get a flash of a picture of Vlad Ţepeş at one point and a diatribe about the vampire being there to avenge nature. But really it all meant very little – it is a fever dream and not a particularly good one, with poor effects, poor acting and no narrative worth mentioning. I can’t understand why it was dual language – the actors struggled with the English dialogue, it not being the first language of the Chinese cast, and one would have thought sticking to Chinese dialogue would have been better.

brides

I really wish I could offer you a redeeming feature, but I can’t. 1 out of 10 is probably generous but awarded as the mess feels like it was a labour of love (for Tim Lies, at least) and I can’t condemn that – I can suggest that you steer clear however, as you don’t get the time back. At the time of writing I couldn’t find an IMDb page.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK