Michael – (K)ein Harter Vampirfilm – review

Director: José Hidalgo

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers


I have previously looked at short film Fang, which serves as a prequel to this film and was an extra on the DVD. The DVD was a gift from Matt who runs Vampire Film Reviews, who receives my gratitude for enabling me to see these films. If you wish to read Matt’s take on Michael it can be found here.

The title translates to Michael – (not) a Hard Vampire Film and the reason will become all too clear, but before we get to that we have a prologue piece.

Klaus Thiel-Klenner as Engelbert

We see a priest, Engelbert (Klaus Thiel-Klenner), running through a graveyard and heading to a church. He gets there and we notice that he has an ornate dagger in hand. He nips through to a stairwell and is met with Sina (Jerina Beqiri), a vampire Queen. He declares that it will end that day and brandishes a net bag of garlic bulbs. She plucks them from his hand disinterestedly and climbs the stairs to the attic.

Jerina Beqiri as Sina

Up there he faces her again and wields his dagger, which she causes him to lose with a wave of the hand, he then brandishes a cross and she causes it to crumble in his grip. He considers holy water, but he has none, and asks her if silver will work on her but dismisses the notion himself as he rationalises that it is for werewolves. She is ready to finish him off and he asks her age; she doesn’t say but suggests she is in 4 figures. Her great age must be why she has lost all sense of time, he submits, before kicking open a hatch and catching her in sunlight. We see flames at the corner of the screen indicating that she is killed by the sun but the death remains off-screen (clearly for budget reasons).

at the doctors'

Michael (Jörn Guido) wakes in a woman’s flat and leaves, we will discover, somewhat embarrassed. He travels across town to visit his half-brother, Mumu (José Hidalgo), but calls him before knocking on the door. He tells Mumu he needs his help and no, it isn’t help with his Prince Albert. When Mumu lets him in, he admits that he is suffering from erectile dysfunction (and now the title should make sense). Mumu’s girlfriend, Lola (Simone Kaufmann), thinks this hilarious and Michael is able to say exactly how long for, to the minute (with an hour error due to daylight savings). It has been weeks and they take him to see a doctor.

vampire hunters

Long story short, they discover that he is lacking blood and his vital signs indicate that he is, well quite frankly, dead. He has been bitten by a vampire (down below, it turns out) and, as a result, doesn't have the correct quantity of blood to enable erections. They work out he was bitten on the full moon and, so, they have to find the vampire who bit him and kill her before the next full moon or he will turn. They also discover that he has already lost his reflection. When they work out the film’s internal lore they discover they need a priest to give the vampire absolution and hence Englebert being involved (who is a drunk, horny priest and Michael’s dad, it turns out).

dream of the vampire girl

What follows is an endless parade of smutty one-liners and innuendo – it is like we went back in time and Benny Hill made a vampire movie. However time has moved on and the endless cock gags just aren’t funny. There is some degree of reversal on the guys (at one point, for instance, Michael’s crew of man-sluts interview women in a club to discover if they have pubic hair and therefore might be the one Michael is looking for, which leads to *some* sassy comebacks) but all in all the film just revels in Michael’s misogyny and even feels it has to explain some of the jokes (the professor (Georg Gröling-Müller) and his breakfast springs to mind).

inept staking sequence

Moments make no sense – like a run through a (vampire) club to come out inside Englebert’s church but there are also some fourth wall breaks that were an interesting choice. Jörn Guido does his damnedest to make his character personable, and might have succeeded had the character not been written so sleazily. Simone Kaufmann offers the most personable character though it is a shame that her solo action moment was against another woman – I’d have liked to see her kick a man’s butt. The film does offer us the ineptest staking I think I have witnessed but even that becomes a problem. When the vampire does not die one assumes it is because the stake is too low, but apparently the heart was that low and it just needed pushing further in.

Simone Kaufmann as Lola

When it comes to budget films, especially, there is always a part of me that feels for the filmmaker when they have made the effort to make a film, as José Hidalgo has here, and it doesn’t come off. There is always the thought that, at the very least, they tried. Unfortunately the trying here was absolutely in the wrong direction and one long cock gag wore very thin, very quickly. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.