Gore Whore – review

Director: Hugh Gallagher

Release date: 1994

Contains spoilers

Shot on, and straight to, video, Gore Whore is a low to no budget flick that I have had ghosting around for a long, long time but never got around to reviewing. It is ostensibly a zombie flick, which owes some of its beats to Reanimator, but the titular Gore Whore is definitely a vampire – though one created by science.

The film begins with a John (John McLaughlin) returning to Dawn’s (Audrey Street) home. He cracks wise that as she has her own place, he should get a discount (as she has less overheads). Ignoring him, she dances, strips and then handcuffs him to the bed. He says that, before she goes on, she should use the condom in his pocket but she doesn’t think that will work as she goes down and bites *it* off. She then tears his throat out with her teeth.

Brady Debussey as Chase

Chase (Brady Debussey) is doing his best barfly impression, all the time thinking of his deceased lover. He was a cop, but now he’s a dead-beat private eye. He is met by Witman (Paul Woodard) who says he wants him to follow a woman – his ex-lab assistant, who has stolen his notes, research paper and formula. He knows where she’ll be, he suggests – which does sound ropey to Chase but the $10k now and another $10k on retrieval of the research puts that at ease.

fridge

He waits for Dawn (for that is who he has been sent after) and sees her go into a house to ply the oldest trade with a female client (Jennifer McLean) and leaves before she attacks the woman. He goes to her place and can’t find the research but he does find blood in the fridge, “a lesbian lab assistant who drinks blood” he muses – though the leap of faith from having blood in the fridge to her drinking it is a bit of a stretch, especially at that speed. He then goes to the police station to get info and discovers that Dawn apparently died six months before, her uncollected body given away to medical research.

Chase Vs Zombie

Chase follows her to a cemetery, where she retrieves a brief case from a grave, strips, attached a dildo to a syringe and vaginally administers some green goop. After she’s left, almost alerted to him by his clumsiness, he retrieves the case but hands grab him from the grave and a zombie attacks from behind. So, what’s going on? Well, Witman created a reanimation formula, used it on Dawn’s body and then used her as a sex slave until she escaped with his research. The formula isn’t perfect though. She has to drink blood and readminister the formula daily.

Audrey Street as Dawn

Strangely, when used on other corpses they become zombies, which she seems to be able to control. This isn’t a freshness of the body issue as the John from the beginning is turned into a zombie – able to function with his head and body detached from each other. When Witman finally gives Chase the explanation of what has happened, the PI does retort that the scientist made a vampire. There isn’t much else in the way of lore.

licking blood

The film is poor, make no mistake. The direction is rubbish, the lighting non-existent, the transfer is atrocious and the effects – well the fact that the transfer is so bad makes them not seem as bad as they might. The acting is amateur and there is gratuitous nudity for the sake of it, it seems (stripping naked in a cemetery to apply a gloop filled vaginal enema underlines the gratuitousness). The nudity is not just female – though the male members are mostly false and (with gore included) detachable. Yet there is a primitive charm despite itself. It is not a great film, but that little bit of something pushes the score to a massive (for this) 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Una Famiglia Mostruosa – review

Director: Volfango De Biasi

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

When I heard about Una Famiglia Mostruosa and went searching for it, I actually found it on YouTube. Unfortunately it was a Russian dub of the film (a legitimate dub, it seems, but dub nonetheless). However, with some subtitles from elsewhere on the net it was perfectly watchable. That said, a dub obfuscates the original acting and so I’d ask you to bear that in mind when reading the review.

What isn’t obfuscated is the obvious programmes this is based on. Whilst the fact that the family are monsters brings the Munsters to mind, the clearer inspiration seems to be the Addams Family.

Adalberto and Luna

It starts, however, with a young man, Adalberto (Cristiano Caccamo), meeting a young woman, Luna (Emanuela Rei), when his cat jumps down to her balcony and it is clear immediately that they are attracted to each other. She doesn’t know that the cat, Cagliostro (Paolo Ruffini), can talk and that Adalberto has secrets. Two years on and she discovers she is pregnant (but not discovered his secret yet) and he panics. He shouldn’t be able to impregnate a human and Cagliostro warns him that the pregnancy will be quicker than a human one… 4 days. He decides to take her to meet his parents, first, then tell her his true nature and also consult a magic mirror (Massimo Lopez) as to whether the child will be human or monster.

family dance

When we meet his family it starts with his little sister, the vampire Salmetta (Sara Ciocca), turned in her teens by his father Count Valdimiro (Massimo Ghini). Adlaberto was not turned and is the natural child of Vladimiro and Countess Brunilde (Lucia Ocone), a witch. Also living in the family castle is Brunilde’s brother Nanni (Paolo Calabresi) – who serves as a cross between Frankenstein’s Monster and Uncle Fester, half his brain eaten by Cagliostro and his dismembered body stitched together – and finally there is the ghost of his grandmother (Barbara Bouchet). Adalberto himself is a werewolf who wanted to live among mortals.

Luna's parents

We get the farce then of trying to act human for appearances, though Brunilde is trying to sabotage the couple (she can’t even say human) and even invites Adalberto’s ex, the invisible Daphne (Alessandra Scarci), to the castle. Then we get Luna finding out what he is and freaking, the couple heading towards a break up when her family (that she told him were dead due to being embarrassed by them) suddenly pitches up, as the nouveau riche (through not so legal means) parents have access to military tracking hardware capable of penetrating the magical mists that otherwise cut off GPS, phone signals and the internet (there is a monster version of the net that is accessed through a crystal ball). The 'will they, won’t they' of the couple is the primary plot.

Massimo Ghini as the Count

This is played for laughs and so don’t expect any blood (though there is at least one vampire bite). The jokes aren’t stellar but they work better than those in the US remake of the Munsters the following year. This was probably down to not trying to replicate humour that is 50 years out of date (there is a saucy element to some of it also). Adalberto and Luna seem a little too teen romance and the sassy Salmetta is underused, but the Count and Countess are actually pretty cool and, for me, carried the film. The look was really sumptuous and the effects worked just fine. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Martin – review

Authors: George A Romero & Susanna Sparrow

Release date: 1978

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Martin was young and good-looking, a shy boy, perhaps even a little backward. But Martin had a secret, one he couldn’t share.

His uncle knew the family had brought the poison with them from the Old Country. He was waiting for the day he could destroy Martin and Martin’s evil.

Others knew – a woman Martin had met on a train, a woman he’d followed from a supermarket. But they were dead…

A chilling story of an ancient evil unleashed on a modern city.

The review: The film Martin is rightly viewed as a classic. It was first screened in 1976, in festivals, but this novelisation came out in 1978 just before the film's general release. The book only carries Romero’s name on the cover but Susanna Sparrow is recognised as the co-author.

This really is one for those who love the film. There are some differences – for instance Martin throws the train victim out of the moving train rather than setting an elaborate suicide tableau. The almost shy intimation of Martin raping his victims is drawn brutally, almost changing the character’s perceived persona by forcing the reader to face his depravity head-on, and the consensual sex later in the story is also more graphically drawn. As well as Martin’s communication with the talk radio we get an inner monologue, building the character that little bit more (though John Amplas’ magnificent performance really communicated by look and body language all we needed to know in the film).

We also get some moments of believed lore that are not explored in the film such as, beyond not casting a reflection, the mirror was supposed to sap the vampire’s strength and the use of painted eggs, the rotten insides sucked out and spat at the vampire as an apotropaic.

The health warning is the slim volume is hard to find and, unless lucky, comes with a hefty price tag - you can, however, digitally loan it from The Archive. For fans of the film 8 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Use of Tropes: The Hand That Feeds the Dead

Directed by Yilmaz Duru and Sergio Garrone, this was a 1974 horror that starred Klaus Kinski and it is a bit of a Gothic potboiler.

Kinski is Prof. Nijinski, the student of a famous doctor, Baron Ivan Rassimov, who was looking to perfect transplanting of human tissue. A fire took the doctor’s life and – according to Nijinski – destroyed his research. The fire also severely burned Tanja, the Baron’s daughter and Nijinski’s wife.

Nijinski is trying to restore her beauty by skin grafts from unwilling victims and it is here we start getting the tropes. Probably the most famous early example of medical vampirism, if I can call it that, was Good Lady Duncayne with a Doctor drawing blood from maids and, it is implied, transfusing them as a life giving treatment. Later examples would see stolen blood in I Vampiri that is treated to give restored youth, likewise harvesting a gland produced hormone in Atom Age Vampire, which repairs a destroyed face. In both these examples the unwilling donor dies and the recipient reverts and needs more.

Tanja disfigured

In this film the donors die during the operation and the process involves a scientific procedure that prevents rejection of the tissue. The finale sees a full face transplant – which is so perfect it fools the husband of the donor (so he cannot tell any difference in her body or voice!). This is a bit more hardcore than a graft, of course, and brought the Bloodthirsty Roses, from the same year, to mind. In that film, the vampires steal faces to move through the years under new identities (though there is no medical aspect). A rejection of the face causes a fast decay – a little like a dying vampire.

Klaus Kinski as Nijinski

Because of the disfigurement, Tanja remains hidden in cloak and veil, which was a very gothic look, and she fears to look in the mirror, which riffs on the mirror trope. She also only emerges from her rooms at night. Likewise, there are some lines in the dialogue that also cause this to feel like a play with vampire genre tropes. At one point she tells Nijinski, “I’ve been in this grave for years.” This likens her to the undead, of course, though it is her life and the mansion she hides in that are the grave. She follows this line with a plea for him to “make me live, like other women.” Again this can be read as her being the living dead who wants actual life and steals it from living women (ultimately stealing identity as well as the donor dying).

The 'science' is hokum, the plot ridiculous but this was fun in a 70s Gothic way and it does play with some of those tropes. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

The Vampire {2019} – review

Director: Trần Nhân Kiên

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

Cậu chủ ma cà rồng is allegedly the first Vietnamese vampire film – and I can’t think of another one that could take that title. This doesn’t feature the traditional vampire form of the region, the ma cà rồng, which is much like the arp of neighbouring Cambodia or the Thai krasue, in that it was a disembodied head with viscera dangling beneath it. However, according to Bane the preferred food of the creature was cow dung (only attacking humans if it could not find the preferred meal). Apparently, the name has been transposed to the traditionally Western vampire and that is exactly what we get in this (and the pretty version of that too).

naga from opening

The film starts with background information on the world we are in – and we are not in Kansas anymore. A place where one of the kingdoms is home to centaurs and elves, and another where merpeople and harpies have been at war. Our story centres on a kingdom where there are humans (and vampires hidden amongst them). It is also a place where folks have the latest smart phones apparently.

Truong Minh Thao as Cuong

Duc Cuong (Truong Minh Thao) cannot remember his life as a human. He is butler to the Master, Huy Long (Vo Dang Duy Luan), and the elder vampire has been injured in one of the supernatural wars. To restore his strength they must perform a ritual using Rh- blood from five women on the night that occurs every 9000 years, when the planets align. To get that blood they have come up with an elaborate plan.

candidates

Five women have been selected to be the new housemaid for his home. They will compete for the honour, but are actually only there because of their blood type. The women also have alternative reasons for being there. One suspects that Long is a vampire and wants immortality, one wishes to become his wife, one, Tu (Mai Ky Han), is a journalist and one, Thien Ngan (Yeye Nhat Ha), has an anti-vampire agenda (and works for a secret society). The film really failed to develop these backgrounds meaningfully.

Vo Dang Duy Luan as Long

They aren’t happy that they have to surrender their phones and follow the rules of the house. The journalist hides a second phone in the woods and uses it to call her editor but Ngan also uses the phone. Tu is caught and sent home, intercepted as she leaves, knocked out with a vampiric click of the fingers and then… Well we don’t work out what happens to those who are ‘sent home’. They aren’t at the ritual and Cuong has taken their blood to use, so why they couldn’t just take the blood of the ladies early on is beyond me. Ngan and Cuong begin to fall in love also.

low key vamp out

So, it’s a bit like a housemaid version of Mean Girls – up to a point – and actual vampire bits come in right at the end (ok there are vampiric reactions early on but fangs, supernatural strength and speed etc are for the finale). The film is well shot, from a photography point of view, its just… well not a whole lot happens. More expansion of their back stories was desperately needed (for one flashback for one woman’s background does not a rich narrative create). It was all a bit incongruous meets dull, to be fair. The cast is pretty, the aim is probably for a young adult audience but, all in all, it isn’t the greatest film. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Transubstantiation – review

Director: Cody Knotts

Release date: 2023*
*Date per Amazon release

Contains spoilers

As I write this, Transubstantiation is available on Amazon as a VOD but IMDb shows it in post-production. It is a brave effort, trying to do something different with a vampire film but the film does struggle because of that. It is very Catholic – perhaps that is why I wasn’t as keen as I might be.

It starts with an intertitle explaining for the unaware just what Transubstantiation is: “The miraculous change by which the Eucharistic elements at their consecration become the body and blood of Christ while keeping only the appearance of bread & wine.”

arrival

It is Christmas Eve 2018 and Father Mark (Scot Cooper) has pulled up in the street. He takes a (religious) book from a gift bag and signs it to Emma (Angelina Morelli), his niece, before slipping it back in the bag and carrying presents round to his sister’s home (Erin Gibiault). He goes to knock at the door but the door is ajar and he enters, coming quickly across the signs of a home invasion.

held at threat

He has dropped his gifts and finds his brother-in-law’s body (Andrew Goldstein) first and then his sister in the kitchen. He eventually finds Emma, still alive but held by a knife wielding killer, Felix (Cody Knotts). He says to the priest that he must make Him listen and Mark drops to his knees to pray and soon Emma is singing Ave Maria. Felix slits her throat and Mark is on him, pounding him to death with his fists.

Scot Cooper as Father Mark

The press clearly want a pound of flesh from him, dubbing him the killer priest, but the State drop the charges. He speaks to the Bishop (J.P. Silk) but he can’t repent and confess as he believes he has delivered righteous justice. There is mention of him moving to a friary – but he is clearly still at a public church and in the same town. Here we have a couple of issues… the plot point of moving him to a friary needed expunging or following through, a minor point but still… The dialogue recording when speaking outside with the Bishop was noticeably lower in volume and of poorer audio quality than the standard dialogue.

stalking

Anyway, a vampire named Janusz (Ryan C. Joseph) has seen the media circus and starts following the priest. He actually enters the church and (having waved his hand over the holy water font) pushes to the head of the communion queue and steals a drink from the chalice, causing him to flee the church and vomit. Mark has bought a gun (because, poor life choices) and ends up pulling it (accidentally, due to nerves) on a female journalist who is out to get him. Next thing he is captured by the vampire and put in a car boot next to the journalist’s body (the vampire got her).

Ryan C. Joseph as Janusz

Janusz takes the priest to a hold out in a cellar and wants the priest to cure him. He has found out through the internet (the film is at pains to say this) that he can be cured by drinking the blood of Christ. But it must be *the* blood, ie the transubstantiation has to change the wine to actual blood. He kidnaps a family, starting with the father (Kane Prestenback) before moving onto wife and daughter, to force God’s hand. The majority of the film sees priest and vampire verballing sparring on a theological theme… and here I had my big problem.

flashback

There is, of course, a religious set of tropes within the vampire genre – hence the use of religious trappings as apotropaic objects. I can certainly dig that. What I couldn’t dig, per se, was a film that seemed to be (or felt) primarily dialogue based that was solely aimed at that. Beyond the religious we get very little lore; we see Janusz’ turning in flashback and he sleeps through the day – that’s it. The issue may have been that if you are going to make a film primarily dialogue based then you need razor sharp dialogue and superb actors. The dialogue was not bad at all and the actors fine but the bar not so high as to keep the conceit running. Or perhaps it was just the hyper-Catholic nature of it that turned me off. Of course; the story is less the redemption of the vampire and more the redemption of Father Mark.

death of a journalist

It is a shame because, I liked the idea of trying to do something very different but I struggled to get on board with this. I think 5 out of 10 is fair as the film did try to play within the religious trope and do something brave and cerebral – perhaps for those who are Catholic facing this might do a bit more.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Honourable Mention: Wolf Manor

Directed by Dominic Brunt (who was behind fun little zombie flick Before Dawn) and released in 2022, this flick also goes by Scream of the Wolf and is a werewolf movie that wears an affection for American Werewolf in London on its sleeve.

I’m looking at it here because of the opening of the film. The movie follows a film crew who are shooting a vampire movie on location in a manor house. They have gone over schedule and the producer has ignored the strict instruction by the house trustees to have left by the day before… of course there is a full moon that night.

staking

So, it is for the vampire movie they are making in film that this flick gets a mention. Beginning with an old-fashioned X-certificate censor certificate, the film does show us the staking of a vampire in her coffin before the call of “cut”. She blinked, someone complains, but they decide they’ll take that out in post-production. The only other vampire aspect we get is meeting Oliver (James Fleet).

James Fleet as Oliver

Oliver plays the main vampire and it is a role he is reprising. In reality he is a luvvie and a drunk who can’t stand the vampire teeth he has to wear. The film proper starts with a couple of journalists arriving at a nearby pub – the Blue Moon, and they do liken it to the Slaughtered Lamb in dialogue. They’re attacked as they walk to the manor but pretty soon the crew are dying and the survivors need to find a way to stay alive.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon UK

First Impression: Renfield

So last night it was a family cinema trip to see Renfield (Director Chris McKay) and I have to admit a bit of trepidation. I do like a Nicolas Cage (Vampire’s Kiss) movie but there was every chance that things might go wrong with this…

Well, my worry was for nothing as I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, the whole family did. Starting with Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) introducing himself and immediately into a high octane action piece as hunters attack Dracula (Nicolas Cage), the action then slows and we are in black and white as Renfield takes us to the beginning with scenes from Dracula (1931) and the two characters meeting. The film is a sequel of sorts to that (the ending of the '31 film notwithstanding and squarely ignored). The use of the footage was excellent, the actors replacing the originals fit nicely (though Cage looked perhaps a little more like Carlos Villarías from the Spanish 1931 Dracula than Lugosi) and it then returns back to the action and we see Renfield saving his master, who then decimates the hunters – but not without significant (sunlight) damage. To mention here, Dracula turning to smoke, going down a hunter’s throat and exploding him from the inside – not the first time such a kill has been done, but with high budget and panache.

Indeed there is a fair old amount of gore to this film, including heads punched away and limbs torn off as the movie progresses. The recuperating Dracula is ensconced in an abandoned New Orleans hospital and Renfield attends a self-help group for persons with co-dependent personalities – removing the problem people from the attendees' lives by capturing them and feeding them to Dracula as he heals. The film expands Renfield’s bug eating by making it a source of superhuman power for him (and, presumably, responsible for his longevity). If he is severely injured then Dracula’s blood can heal extreme wounds. Into the mix comes foul-mouthed traffic cop Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina) who wants to take the Lobo crime family down – they murdered her cop father and the force does not seem to be prepared to take the family on, even when she manages to bring hellion of the family, Teddy (Ben Schwartz), in.

Primarily an action-comedy, there are good laughs in this, with the genre jokes coming from a place of celebration of the genre. The acting is great – Hoult makes a very personable Renfield, his manners making him a man out of time (and we get the occasional Dwight Frye chuckle) and the character contrasts to Awkwafina’s Rebecca really well. She adds an earthiness to the proceedings as, perhaps, the only straight cop in New Orleans. Cage is magnificent as Dracula – it is one of three roles he always wanted to play and the mix of comedy and malevolence works so very, very well and plays to his strengths as an actor.

So there are my first impressions. I’ll review proper when it hits the home market but I do urge you to see this one, it was great fun – the humour hit just the right spot for me, buckets of gore at times and Cage doing what he does best. I recognise that it might not be for everyone – comedy is so very subjective – but hopefully it will hit well for most.

The imdb page is here.

Cemetery of Lost Souls – review

Director: Rodrigo Aragão

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

The version of this Brazilian horror film, entitled O Cemitério das Almas Perdidas in the Portuguese, was somewhat different on Tubi as suggested on the IMDb page, which lists it as being 2hr 14mins as opposed to the streaming service's 1hr 34mins. Whether the timing is wrong on IMDb or whether 40-minutes have vanished is unknown. However, given the God-awful dubbing I really do want to see the Brazilian original release. Don’t get me wrong, however, as bad as the dubbing was (and it was) I still enjoyed this flick.

writing the grimoire

It starts with a blind monk, Cipriano, writing in a grimoire as a satanic choir sings and a demon whispers to the monk. A group of monks/knights approach the monastery. We then see them looking down on a man who seems to be being boiled in blood (presumably the satanic monk). The leader of the knights looks at the grimoire when a monk (Renato Chocair) comes to him with a jug and then slits his throat, blood spattering the book. We never get this monk’s true name as when asked he takes the original’s name and calls himself Cipriano.

incongruous

We then see him on the hold of a boat heading to the new colonies. The boat is in a storm and in trouble but Cipriano says that they need not die that day but they will need blood. One of the passengers comes behind another and slits his throat. Cipriano draws sigils on the inner hull in blood and speaks an incantation. He calls upon the demon to withdraw to Hell and take the storm with it, and the storm calms. They reach shore and, as they look up, they see a Gothic castle on a mountain top.

placing the coffin

As incongruous as the castle might seem, a slice of European Gothic in Brazil, it does transmit the nature of the film and is no more incongruous than a castle at the end of a pastel suburban scene in Edward Scissorhands. The film, however, flips to a sunny scene with a young boy running through a clearing, flying a kite. The kite becomes caught in a tree behind a cemetery gate. He climbs to pull it down and falls into the cemetery. He comes round and sees a parade of people carrying a coffin into the cemetery. They leave it just inside the gates – people emerge from the crypt and open it, dragging the bound, living occupant off. The boy passes out.

more like a haunt

He wakes in the clearing and a girl is there but the scene turns dark and he is surrounded by bodies. He wakes again and is in a water run-out in the cliffs above the sea. A long nailed hand comes from the dark and pushes him. He wakes again, an adult in a truck with other performers in their travelling show and we are in the present. The show might be described as a freak show but given the performers all wear costumes, it is actually more like a mobile haunt. They have their first show, after setting up, scaring the locals. However a woman and her cronies come along and accuse them as being in league with the devil. They fail to convince them otherwise and, before they can leave, they are captured – bar the ring master who is murdered – and taken in coffins to the cemetery.

Renato Chocair as Cipriano

Cutting back in time again we meet Aiyra (Allana Lopes), a young woman about to go through a rite with her tribe. She is rendered unconscious by the shaman when the Portuguese attack and slaughter her people. When she comes round in the bodies, Cipriano assumes she has returned from the dead and has her brought to the crypt below the castle. It is clear that he sexually abuses her and this does not sit well with the coloniser Joaquim (Caio Macedo) who teaches her Portuguese and then goes to a nearby (cannibal) tribe to arrange her rescue.

vampires

Trapped by the natives, a desperate Cipriano draws inverted crosses in blood on his companions heads and feeds them blood also. This turns them into (essentially) vampires – though, as we see them later, they look a bit more zombie, but they are essentially immortal and the blood regenerates them to their living form and even can make them younger. Joaquim steals the grimoire and uses the incantations to seal the gate and prevent them from passing through it. Cipriano grabs the book through the gate but Joaquim manages to rip essential pages out and the vampires are trapped behind the gate.

Aiyra turned

And that’s the story – a monk (it has been suggested Jesuit) who turns evil, uses black magic and becomes a vampire. Cipriano turns Aiyra also and the vampires have a deal with a nearby village that they will provide them with victims and in return they won’t lure and eat their children. The lore that ties them into vampirism, beyond the feeding on flesh and blood to remain young and their apparent immortality, is within their destruction. They avoid sunlight and one is left by the rest to burn in the sun.

feeding blood

I liked this. The story was a bit convoluted in places and the transitions between past and present weren’t overly smooth but it kept me entertained and interested despite the really bad dubbing. I can’t overly comment on acting because of said dubbing. There had clearly been a bit of budget blown on the film and it looks good in some parts. There’s quite a bit of splattered gore, especially later on, and the colonisers are really drawn as irredeemable (bar the honest Joaquim). I enjoyed this one and really want to see the original language version. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Mur-Pire

This is a 2017 short that was directed by Alex Rivers and comes in at just under 18-minutes. The name? Mur-Pire is a portmanteau word made up of murderer and vampire, and is absolutely not used in the film. Rather, in film they use Vampurderer. It is also another film where a corporate leader is perceived as a vampire and, to be fair, it is easy to see why storytellers would be drawn to this trope.

The film starts with Henry (Stuart Hammill) asleep at his desk. It is mid-afternoon. His slumber is interrupted as a hand comes down heavy on the desk. The hand belongs to James (George Tattum), who shares the office with him.

a sleeping Henry

Henry did not get much in the way of sleep the night before and that’s his excuse for the snooze but James cautions that Vanessa (Lize Johnston) had better not catch him sleeping on the job. Their conversation moves along and I liked the dialogue, built to sound realistic and just that little bit corporate-bro. The conversation has veered towards Henry’s love life and his ex (who works in a bar the office workers frequent and he is avoiding).

George Tattum as James

Suddenly Rob (Evan Henderson) comes in, almost begging for assurance that they haven’t finished their reports. Henry should be done in the next day or so (after all he did sleep part of the afternoon away) and James is done. Rob has lost his – he forgot to save – but Vanessa will forgive him… surely… Vanessa comes up behind him and it is clear that she is as bad as the others made out (she fired someone for having a paper jam). They scurry back to work – though James quickly leaves for the day (his report done).

revealed as a vampire

Henry stays and works into the night until the report is finished, at which point he leaves. Rob is still in his office when he gets a visit from Vanessa. Uncharacteristically nice, she suggests that he is under pressure and she’d like to relieve it. Henry goes back to the office, he forgot his keys. On the way out again he pushes Rob’s office door open to see what looks like Vanessa canoodling with him, till she turns her head and there is blood on her mouth and she has fangs… Henry bolts and runs into a wall, knocking himself out and waking at his desk the next day.

towering over Henry

He can remember what he saw, though the official line is Rob has been fired, with new worker Leslie (Rachel Braff) in Rob’s office. How is Henry supposed to convince James and Leslie that Vanessa is a vampire (or, as James coins it, a vampurderer)? I liked this. I mentioned the natural sounding dialogue and the actors all bring heart to their roles. There is a run through some lore in the film, which I won’t spoil but it is fairly standard. I also want to mention the casting, particularly Lize Johnston. Casting is about acting ability but sometimes the look of the actor is important. Johnston is tall and thin and her build, given her character’s association with a vampire, is reminiscent of Orlock – especially when she towers over Henry. This one is worth your time, for sure.

The imdb page is here.

Mur-Pire from Alex Rivers on Vimeo.

The Dark Dawn – review

Author: Jerry Knaak

First Published: 2022

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: San Francisco 1943

After an injury saved him from the hell of World War II, Jonas Dietrich is on the verge of becoming the youngest detective in the history of the San Francisco Police Department. He is a husband and a father, who adores his family.

But there is more than fog on the wind in The City. An ancient evil has taken root. A violent predator the likes of which the residents, and police, of San Francisco have never seen embarks on a reign of terror that holds The City in a grip of deadly fear.

Our intrepid police sergeant and his compatriots band together to fight this dreadful new enemy, all the while forgetting to tend to the home fires.

The fourth instalment in The Dark Passage Series will introduce you to evil and depravity like no other in this prequel to The Dark Truth.

The review: As the blurb suggests, this is the fourth volume in the Dark Passage Series (you can read my review of book three, which links to reviews of the first two volumes) but this is a prequel rather than a continuation of the series.

I found the change refreshing. The primary character of the previous books, Elizabeth Rubis, became ever more powerful in each volume; logical, in the series, but the threat also had to grow to create a tension. In this we follow Jonas Dietrich who, in the previous books, is a vampire who hunts evil vampires and instead find a human facing terrifying odds with initially little or no knowledge to help that fight. This switch up changes the feel of the book as does the fact that we are in the realm of police procedural as the newly minted detective Dietrich works his first case, which at first seems to be a sadistic and ritualistic killer but quickly takes a turn towards the occult (as the killer is, of course, a vampire).

Knaak does a good job at immersing us in a bygone San Francisco though there are some quibbles. For a character drawn as a sharp, intuitive copper, the fact that Dietrich misses a peril closer to home felt just that bit off and I think the author could have closed that gap with a little more detail explaining why he was blind-spotting there (I read that in myself, as I read, but it would have been good for the book to guide us there a little more). That said there is a pace to this and I enjoyed the journey. If you are a fan of the series then the book will offer you a nice solid piece of background to the Dietrich character. 7 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Blood Covered Chocolate – review

Director: Monte Light

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

Touching on themes of addiction and mental health, Blood Covered Chocolate is a low budget piece with lofty ideas that moves purposefully into the arthouse area. In black and white with occasional colour (mostly filters) this revels in the idea of an unreliable narrative, where the viewer must keep their wits about them.

It starts with a man, Massimo (Michael Klug), in a storage facility, entering a unit and looking at a bag stuffed with money. Then at home, Massimo looks on proudly at his 1-year sobriety chip. His girlfriend, Tien (Christine Nguyen, Haunted Hotties & Twilight Vamps), who wears her (longer) sobriety chip on a chain. They have sex and afterwards are talking about penanggalan (and the alternative Arp name).

Massimo and Tien

Massimo thinks the idea gross (she turns this back on Western folklore of the prince sexually forcing himself on a sleeping woman) and we do get a visual of the penanggalan (a sketch and later in photographic form). Tien explains that her grandmother was obsessed with her virginity and use to tell her tales of the creature to scare her (as it will suck a foetus right out of her). When the conversation turns to his parents it becomes more strained. His father ran out to Mexico and was involved in shady stuff, and his mother, Barbara (Debra Lamb, Beverley Hills Vamp & A Blood Story), is described as a succubus – Tien will see when she meets her.

shadow of the vampire

The film cuts to a dinner with her and her husband, Crate (Joe Altieri). Crate offers Tien wine – even though he is aware of her alcoholism, and makes direct mention of it. He is scornful of her job – bartender – and is generally rude and the dinner is very awkward. She takes it in her stride until she has to leave. There is then heated words within the family until Crate tells Barbara to wait in the car. We see her outside the apartment with a shadow reaching for her, à la Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (I’ll circle back to this later). Crate interrogates Massimo and orders him to break things off with Tien. It is clear that Crate is into some sketchy stuff and controls Massimo’s life.

penanggalan

After Barbara and Crate are gone, there is a knock at the door and a woman (Jamie Tran) is there and demands Massimo invite her in. She refuses the offer of wine, which Massimo pours on the floor, and then attacks him. She seems to be penanggalan. Tien is calling him and wonders where he has been, he has not spoken to her for seven days. He starts to say he needs to break up with her but, when she argues back, a woman he identifies as Sofia (Meghan Deanna Kingsley) sits on his knee and tells her to take a hint. Sofia is the vampire and can change form – later she takes the form of his mother when sexually tormenting him.

fading reflection

The narrative becomes splintered and we wonder as to the reality of the vampire – we get the impression that he is both drinking and using heroin and as the film focuses on his gaze, and he is a very unreliable narrator (as I alluded to earlier), we are never sure. He loses his reflection (and we see it fade) but is told that most of the folklore/tropes are wrong (stakes do not work, nor crosses or garlic and the sun is fine 9 out of 10 times). He learns to smell the truth of people, able to almost read their minds through scent.

Michael Klug as Massimo

I mentioned Nosferatu and I have seen the film described as a tribute to the classic silent movie. We do get the odd moment of shadow but, to me, this is a tribute only in that it is vampire themed. Whilst director Monte Light may have had it in mind, this is much more modern and eschews the European gothic (though there is arguably an American gothic running through it), leaning much more into the black and white New York vampire films (The Addiction and Nadja specifically). That black and white, with occasional colour, worked well and the photography is very nice. It was nice to see Christine Nguyen in a serious role within a quality project – given the films we’ve seen her in before – but it is Michael Klug who is given the task of carrying this and his effort is admirable.

Meghan Deanna Kingsley as Sofia

Whether you like this or not will very much depend on your taste for arthouse films and splintered narratives. It twists into psychedelia from time to time – replete with kaleidoscopic imagery – and whilst it does offer a trustworthy explanation at the denouement, the viewer may find themselves put off with the unreliability of our lead’s narration through the body of the film. If you are cool with that then I think there is much to get out of this and I certainly enjoyed it. 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The film is on free services such as Tubi but can be found:

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK