A Vampire in the Family – review

Director: Ale McHaddo

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

Its difficult to tell where this Brazilian film, which is viewable on Netflix, was pitched. It is certainly a comedy but it felt like it tried to be a family comedy – thus the gore aspects are low – but concentrating on an adult character and side-lining the child, or making the teens supporting but not centre, felt a bit of a move from that. Nevertheless, it was pretty effective at what it was doing, despite a major flaw with the main character.

podcast

Fernandinho (Leandro Hassum) is a retired footballer who presents a podcast with his two cohorts Chicão (Antônio Fragoso) and Claudionor (Eliezer Motta), with teen Ameba (Caio Mendonça) behind the scenes. Fernandinho is a controversial figure as he missed an easy open goal in an important final – he claims a mosquito flew up his nose but many accuse him of deliberately throwing the game. Now here is the problem, as well performed as the character is by Leandro Hassum, and despite the film showing a character growth, the character isn’t particularly likeable. To a degree I was reminded of the character Carl Black from the Meet the Blacks films.

poster

Nevertheless, after the podcast there is a party (who for, isn’t actually said, but I suspect his wife, Vanessa (Monique Alfradique)). His youngest daughter, Monica (Maria Flor Franco), feels let down as he had promised a celebrity would attend, who has not. He goes to try and get his daughter from his first marriage, Carol (Mel Maia), to come down. She used to be Daddy’s little girl but now barely communicates with him – there is an indication of the generation gap when he complains about an Anime poster she has up, lamenting the loss of the Dora the Explorer poster and not understanding that the fiercely demonic looking character is the good guy of the series.

arrival

During the party there is a visitor and Fernandinho goes to the door. At the door is a man, his face hidden by a hood. When he pulls the hood back he is revealed as Greg (Romulo Arantes Neto), Vanessa’s brother who they haven’t heard from in five years. He insists on being invited in – and so we know as the viewer what Greg now is. His rucksack, Fernandinho discovers, is incredibly heavy (later he realised there was a fold-up coffin in it). Greg tells his sister he has been backpacking around the world, but specifically mentions Romania, and he asks whether he can stay for a few days – which becomes a couple of months.

grabbing the bat

Fernandinho generally resents his brother-in-law but eventually realises that he is a vampire. He has a comedic/slapstick tussle with a bat that gets in the house, which is clearly Greg – indeed there are plenty of crap bat moments in this. He checks out Greg’s room and detects a strange odour, discovers he has added blackout cloth to, and boarded, the windows and finds an odd pendent. Meanwhile a strange plague of, mainly, women developing anaemia is on the news. It is when he follows Greg to a club that he categorically discovers the truth but also bumps into Michele (Renata Bras), his ex and Carol’s mother, with whom there is no love lost but who he tries to protect from Greg. He has seen Greg feeding on a woman and managed to catch it on phone but (of course) Greg does not show in the footage.

Edson Celulari as Drax

The film does play with a lot of lore, most works but some does not. Ameba tells Fernandinho that there are two types of vampires; Scouts and Alphas. The former prepare the way for the latter. Greg is a Scout, preparing for Drax (Edson Celulari) AKA Dracula, who has world domination plans (and claims to have conquered the North already). Sunlight destroys and so Fernandinho is confused when Greg appears and uses the pool (normally he sleeps till dusk). What we discover is that he is wearing a full body rubber/latex suit – but that didn’t really work for me, just in that, though he looked perhaps a tad redder, one would think it would be obvious (to touch if not to vision). They do not film or reflect and they can turn into bats, of course.

killing a vampire

A cross will ward but only when wielded with faith. In this any faith will do – and so there is Fernandinho’s faith in his football club Vasco. Stakes (or wooden crossbow bolts) and holy water must be blessed by a priest from the Catholic Apostolic church – exclusively, one feels, for a plot point of going to the wrong church and their weapons not working. Alternatively coating the wood of the stake/bolt with some virgin’s blood also works (as a symbol of purity) but only from a female virgin (this turns a common vampiric obsession on its head). Drax has two Nosferatu bodyguards. If the Alpha vampire is killed then the others become human again, without exception it seems and without memory of what occurred when a vampire.

undercover cosplay

The film kept me watching, that needs to be said as does the fact that Leandro Hassum turned in a fine performance and utilised good comedic timing – my issue with the Fernandinho character was in the writing of the character rather than the performance. The dislikeable aspects of the character were not enough to make me not want to watch the film. There are various vampire properties being watched through the film and a couple of nods to the 1992 Dracula firstly in a violent shadow play moment between Greg and Fernandinho as they talk and then when Fernandinho dresses like old Dracula when he, Carol and Ameba look to infiltrate the vampire lair. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The Man in Half Moon Street – review

Director: Ralph Murphy

Release date: 1945

Contains spoilers

I mentioned this film, having seen it on a vampire filmography, when I looked at Hammer’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death. The Hammer film is a remake and I looked at it as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ Now, when I did, my opinion on medical youth/beauty extension films was quite strict and I considered it 'Not Vamp'. That said I also considered the same for Atom Age Vampire. I have since revisited AAV and reconsidered my position. I think I owe the same to the Hammer remake of this in the near future.

Half Moon Street

This film starts with a foggy Thames and Big Ben chiming, we are in an atmospheric London and the film relies more on drawing room drama, with a touch of detective film, than the horror it might have been. The camera goes to Half Moon Street and the padlocked door to the house of Dr Julian Karell (Nils Asther) and a voiceover asks about him. The film then goes to various characters we’ll meet in the film, interviewed like talking heads, who call him a fine scientist, a cold-blooded killer and a man “who dared more than mortal man ever dared”. The last was from a woman, Eve (Helen Walker).

Karell and Eve

The film jumps back in time. Karell comes through a gate and across a garden into a room where Eve is playing piano. He has approached the house from the back gate as he heard her playing and wanted to see her before meeting her guests. It becomes clear that he has lost track of time – believing it May when it is in mid-June and his loss of time is put down to being lost in the act of creating her portrait, which she has sat for through May. That day there is a party for its unveiling.

Helen Walker as Eve

They go through. Karell has never met her father, Sir Humphrey (Edmund Breon, The Thing from Another World) who correctly suspects his daughter has fallen for the “dauber” and who is talking to his physician Dr Henry Latimer (Paul Cavanagh). Henry has tried, in vain, to woo Eve. Lady Minerva Aldergate (Aminta Dyne) wants to meet Karell and swears he has a look of Julian Le Strange – his grandfather he says. But, as he speaks to her, he tells her of her illicit meeting with Le Strange as though he had been there. Then he tells her that his grandfather had, towards his end, spoken in detail of his misadventures. Returning to Eve he spins a different story, saying his grandfather had died before he was born.

chemical

The portrait is revealed and then he and Eve sneak off to be alone and he tells her that he won’t see her for a while. He explains that he is being visited by Dr. Kurt van Bruecken (Reinhold Schünzel), a world-renowned surgeon, and they will be working on an experiment that will benefit humanity. She does pick up on a missed undertone in the conversation, and asks him direct if he was going to ask her to marry him, which he affirms. There is a phone call and he rushes home; van Bruecken is delayed. He makes himself a chemical drink from a glowing flask.

greeting van Bruecken

As the film progresses, he saves a young medical student (Morton Lowry) from suicide in the Thames due to gambling debts and it is clear he had been watching the student, talks him into agreeing to helping with an experiment (using van Bruecken’s name and the lure of £2000) but then keeps him locked up and drugged. Van Bruecken is visibly an old man but they are the same age – they mastered a gland transplant that can maintain youth but it has a ten-year lifespan. They have done this six times and each time the young man (it is a young gland exchanged to the old man) has died. This is our vampiric bit, taking a gland from a victim that gives youth but kills the donor. He is convinced he has developed new chemicals that will mean the donor does not die.

Karell's notes

The problem is van Bruecken has had a stroke and can no longer operate but, more so, he is no longer convinced that what they are doing benefits humanity either, rather it benefits Karell only. Henry and Sir Humphrey are looking for dirt on Karell and manage to get his fingerprint. It matches that of a murderer in an unsolved crime, committed decades before and the first of six murders suspected by the same man (fingerprints were found only once) who kills every ten years – there is scepticism, of course, at the theory that the murderer could be the much too young Karell. However, Scotland Yard do get on the case.

rapidly aging

We don’t see a “harvest” but we do get a death (that is probably accidental and has a cracking corpse disposal scene) and we also get a rapid aging scene as the old transplant finally fails. Given the apparent low budget and the date of the film, the aging scene is surprisingly effective. As a film, this won’t set the world on fire (or it would have been more readily available over recent years) but it is a competent piece. The opening commentary on Karell, of course, makes us realise that he is unlikely to get away with it but it is a pleasant enough ride to the outcome. Much less horror than Hammer’s remake (which, again, I do need to revisit) but a solid 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Ditch Boys – review

Directors: Louis Bellavia & Thomas Hatz

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

A mad scientist, a vampiric creation and a wood full of teen party goers. This should have been a fairly easy flick to get to at least a beer-goggle watchable state. Unfortunately, it made some mistakes that absolutely damaged that journey, I’m sorry to say. To be fair it is a directorial and writing debut for both of the directors and I’m sure with future projects they’ll build on this but for now, what went wrong?

rising

The film opens with Victor (Jonathan Hansen) getting a call he gets to the morgue where the mortician (Joshua Dowd) is creeping around the body of a large man. Victor has headed to another cadaver, that of his wife Karen (Alexandra Faye Sadeghian). Creepy mortician makes creepy comment. In Victor’s lab he injects Karen’s body with something. We see him, his back to the corpse, as she sits. We then flick to a man in a car, needing a poop. He spots a porta potty and uses it, something starts rocking it and he leaves – that something is on the roof and leaps at him…

Victor with Karen's body

We then get a montage of various people and here I’ll stop and cover the issues so far. The film is aimed at comedy and so the creepy mortician and the guy pooping are meant to be comedic… they weren’t really, at least for me. The kids we see in the credit montage are going to the party but this montage is pretty much all the character building we get and it really isn’t much. There isn’t even really that much to match them to slasher stereotypes and thus there is no connection later when they get to the party (and we see precious little of that). One of them, however, phones Lou (Adam Bramson).

stoned

Lou is a stoner and drug dealer, along with his pal Tom (Nicholas Scott), and they are our primary characters. In this scene we get Tom checking their stash and see a body in there that freaks him – it is Olivia (Teagan Sawyer), wearing makeup to get him. Then a cop comes in, Uncle Phil, and gets some drugs from them. None of this adds to the film particularly, though Phil does tell them to be careful in the woods. Generally the two bicker, and (along with a series of poop jokes and them getting stoned), this is all they do. They are both primary protagonists and comedy characters but they are not built beyond very basic stereotype and the comedy is… well, lame to be honest. They are not likable but, even then, we might care about their peril if the characters were more rounded.

turning

Keeping our attention on Lou and Tom, they head into the woods and then decide to smoke crack. This leads to a psychedelic montage with strange filter and song (and the details of the song appearing as though it is a music video). It was a brave choice and whilst it might not have worked in the flow, I appreciated what the filmmakers were trying to do. They then spot Karen in the woods and bee-line to her. Now we have already seen her appearing with blood on her face and know that Victor is freaked when he discovers she has gone to the store. Lou and Tom freak her out and she turns – veiny, eyes changed and a maw of sharp teeth. She chases them through the woods and they fall in a pit.

Karen bloodied

So, they spend the majority of the film down there, kept there by Victor (who gives them food and water but not assistance to escape the pit) in order to protect Karen’s secret until he realises it has all gone to far and gets them out and they team up with him to end the nightmare. Meanwhile we get Karen attacking folks – but we have no real connection to any of them – and also an extended flashback to Karen and Victor working together, falling in love and her death (in a robbery gone wrong). Whilst the flashback did build their characters much more than any others it also destroyed any pace in the film.

mirror moment

Did anything work well? Yes, the makeup effects around Karen were good and there was some good gore effects (though some body part prosthetics were better than others). However, the film didn’t concentrate on this enough to bolster the film and the issues with pacing, poor characterisation and the comedy missing (at least for me) undermined that positive element. As for Karen, we get some pseudo-scientific babble about her DNA mutating too quick to cure her but essentially she is a raised corpse, who is self-aware (when in human form hating the other side and revelling in slaughter in monster form), with sharp teeth and we do see her lick blood (whether she eats flesh, drinks blood or just kills isn’t explicitly clear). There is a mirror moment when she loses her reflection but it is a psychodrama moment rather than lack of reflection.

licking blood

I do hope that the filmmakers continue their journey. However, they would be as well avoiding comedy and thinking both about pacing and establishing characters at least to the point of the audience caring – even the cannon fodder. 3 out of 10 because I can see some nuggets that could be developed. The end of the film suggests that they have a sequel in mind.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Prisoner of the Dawn – review

Director: Michael Lazar

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

Despite appearing on Amazon VoD (and on Tubi also), this was definitely a film that snuck out – IMDb showing it as still in post-production when I wrote this review. It codes itself as a Los Vegas film from the opening city shot but despite an earnestness it struggled as a coherent film. I think it also made a mistake by stripping the vampirism right back in this (as I’ll explain).

It starts with a view of Nick (Michael Lazar) in a room and then cuts to him running to a car, he’s chased and shot at and runs off. The two pursuers chase after him. He shoots one and, as the other approaches, he seems to move at superhuman speed to get behind him and then shoots him also.

Michael Lazar as Nick

This all gives us a bit of a measure of the man, who seems to be an assassin at first but later reveals himself to be into a bit of everything, apparently. It also marks him as more than human. Of course, he is a vampire and, as well as moving really quickly, he avoids the sun as it makes him weak and ill and uses blood. I say uses because he seems to be injected with it for the most part, rather than drink it and its only a small syringe worth. This is what I mean about stripping the vampirism back, there are no fangs, no bloodbaths and no other lore (though there is a backstory that I’ll get to).

Nick and Jet

We see him pick up several jobs, but not necessarily him completing them. We see his blossoming romance with waitress Jet (Daniela Prado Cota) and his friendship (and perhaps relationship) with Cara (Persia Sound). Jet doesn’t know what he is – he tells her later in the film – Cara does and he goes to her when he needs blood. The CIA also seem to be involved, wanting his blood so they can make super soldiers over at Area 51. He is employing a doctor to look for a way to end the curse (specifically around the sunlight aspect).

SS Officer

The backstory was interesting even if the execution of the scenes left a little to be desired. Nick was a criminal in New York in 1943. He ended up in a concentration camp. If the film said I missed it, so one assumes he was drafted and ended up captured as a POW and then separated from the other POWs. He has a camp tattoo and later says he was in Buchenwald. In real life 350 American POWs were placed in the Berga slave labour camp, close to Buchenwald, on suspicion of being Jewish and so the plot point had a voracity to it.

the witch

An intertitle tells us that “After the loss of key battles by the German military in world war two, Hitler dispatched his dark arts division of the SS. Their mission was to seek out mystic powers. Hitler sent an envoy to the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. The SS obtained intel of a witch with the blood of Vlad the Impaler, also known as the Vampire Dracula". They essentially use this experimentally on Nick and turn him.

Nick and Cara

I said the scenes left a little to be desired. The briefly seen sets were quite generic. The SS captain had a hat and black shirt rather than a uniform. The witch has a plague doctor mask. It does lead to a side scene of Nick selling a luger and medal taken from the SS chap to a neo-Nazi and then returning and killing him. As well as the 1943 scenes, the film seems a little fractured and the dialogue struggles to support things leaving the plot with an incoherence. Michael Lazar clearly had a vision but, he just didn’t bring it across well enough. His performance, I’m afraid, brought Neil Breen to mind (who hails from Vegas himself) – not that Lazar’s performance was anywhere near as bad as Breen (if you’ve not seen any of his films, lucky you) but that almost naïve delivery was reminiscent.

I tried, I really did, but struggled with this one and yet I can appreciate the earnestness. 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Interesting Short: The Mystery of the Haunted House

Back into the world of Juni Ito and not one, but actually two interesting shorts. This first was published in 2003, with the variant in 2004. I read them both in the UK collection Smashed. To start with, however, the original story is set in a small Japanese village where a travelling haunted house attraction establishes itself.

Villagers are sceptical, given the very high price of entrance. However the showman behind the haunt allows one villager to enter for free and he soon runs out terrified. Koichi and Satoshi are young boys who decide to sneak in after hours. They are caught by the showman admires their moxy and allows them to enter.

At first the haunt seems tame but then exhibits are revealed to be live – a severed head speaks and they meet a crucified man. They are, it is claimed, the showman’s siblings and he uses magical powers to hold them enslaved and tortured. By far the worst torture is being forced to look after the showman’s son (the mother, an abomination, is not with them). At this point the spitting of nails tells us that the showman is none other than an adult Soichi.

adult Soichi and Miss Fuchi

When we last saw Soichi, in the story Rumors, he was still a boy and facing an irate Miss Fuchi – the shark-mawed recurring vampiric character. When we see his son, cannibalistic with rows of sharp teeth, it is clear that the child is Soichi and Miss Fuchi’s offspring (as a youth, Soichi had been rather taken with her when he saw her photo in a fashion magazine).

I won’t spoil the fate of the two boys but it is worth noting the ending as Miss Fuchi, Soichi’s partner (I assume not wife as the child is refered to as a bastard), turns up and drags him away, vowing to kill him if he runs away again. This, in itself, would be an interesting coda to the stories Junji Ito has given us about both Soichi and Miss Fuchi. However, the next year he did a variant version of this story entitled The Mystery of the Haunted House: Soichi's Version (also published as The Souichi Front).

offspring

Strangely, the story does not start with Soichi but his cousin Michina, who has been searching for the family since they all went missing. She is actually about to give up when she meets the son of a landlady who spits nails. He has acted strangely since a travelling Haunt came to town. As she investigates, she discovers examples of changed behaviour in children wherever this show went (essentially Soichi is cursing children to act like him).

She eventually tracks down the haunt but meets a dishevelled old man first of all, who is fleeing the haunt where he was indentured, she does not realise at first that this is the wreck of the man who was her cousin (and Soichi’s brother) Koichi. The Haunt is much like the first variant and she finds the son in a cage. However, in this Miss Fuchi is not as forgiving when she arrives and we see her jaws around Soichi’s head (with the son biting into his shoulder). The real twist, however, is that at this point Soichi (still a child) awakens… was the Haunt only a dream… one of the kids from the first variant shares his brother’s name… or perhaps this variant featured a vision of the future, with the first variant being part of his actual story?

In Hardback @ Amazon US

In Hardback @ Amazon UK

Short Film: Monsters Crash the Pajama Party

Not a great film, this is a short from 1965 and was directed by David L. Hewitt but it was actually meant to be part of a show, apparently. At one-point monsters are sent out of the film and actors in the theatre would have come out and terrorised the audience.

The film starts with the Mad Doctor (Vic McGee, Gallery of Horrors) warning the audience in a dialogue that was Criswellian to say the very least and then the credits are all read out, whilst a person in a gorilla suit (later named as Big G) plays with film equipment. This opening takes the best part of 6-minutes out of the roughly 30 of the film.

the sorority pledges

A college Professor (James Reason) and detective inspect an old house, looking for college students, on Halloween. The house is known to have housed a Mad Scientist in the past, who turned youths into monsters (and who is still in the basement). After they have left a group of five girls and five guys come in. The girls are going to do a sorority pledge by spending the night in a haunted house. After installing them, the guys leave (intent on returning later with monster masks to scare them).

the doctor and Draculina

Obviously they will end up being kidnapped – one will be turned into a gorilla (and then turned back by Big G, it seems). The rest will be chained up for experimentation, following a Scooby-Doo type run through the house (and the same hallway) scene. One of the vials of liquid (for use in the transformation process, I assume) says vampire. The actual reason for the mention is that hanging with the Mad Doctor is Draculina (Pauline Hillkurt) – presumably a vampire that was created by the Mad Doctor in the past, she does nothing vampiric particularly but I assume she was one of the creatures who would then invade the theatre. This is, to say the least, a curio. If curious the film can be found on both Plex and Tubi.

The imdb page is here.

Crocodile Fury – review

Director: Godfrey Ho

Release date: 1988

Contains spoilers

It’s a Godfrey Ho and so you know what to expect – he has three films in my worst 100 (two in the worst 10) under pseudonym, them being Devil’s Dynamite, Robo Vampire & Counter Destroyer. Ho had a little trick of buying films and stitching them together and then having them dubbed.

In this case he took the Thai film Kraithong 2, in which a man can turn himself into a man-eating crocodile, and (I suspect) shot some footage to stitch into it. It’s in this footage that we get the vampires. However, for the majority of the film we get crocodiles, who seem to be reincarnations of people, attacking a village on a river bank.

bitten by a croc

This involves footage after footage of people being got by the crocs and it is amusing (but not for the running length of the film). It might be sick gallows humour, but the scene of playing kids in a tree and one diving head first into the open mouth of a patiently waiting croc did make me giggle. Some are ripped apart in ok (given the fuzzy transfer) sfx, others are dragged along in the croc’s moth, screaming help… We get some story going on concerning Jack. He was in love with Marie, who is now a crocodile, and spends some time talking her out of killing (the crocs can appear as humans).

Monica and her kyonsi

She and the others are controlled by Mr Cooper, the Master of the Sea, and he aims to take over the world. Marie, however, teams up with a male crocodile who is very rapey and gets him to kidnap a woman who is now Jack’s wife, using the promise of sexual favour to persuade him to help and then teaming up with him to take over the Master’s kingdom. The Master, in the meantime is in league with a sorceress named Monica (Trudy Calder), who controls vampires.

prayer scrolls

She has a couple of kyonsi (which she saved her co-criminal Rudolf (Ernst Mausser, Robo Vampire) from) and she and Rudolf are students of a dead master who was in the vampire business. They are hunted by agent Bruce Thompson (Kent Wills, also Robo Vampire) and he gets attacked by Rudolf occasionally and has vampires sent after him – though the ones he fights, in the main, look more zombie than vampire. There isn’t really a story beyond this with these guys.

Jack and Marie (as a croc)

Oh, it is bad… the croc footage might have saved a short but gets tedious for a feature. The bad dubbing is really bad, the dialogue atrocious and the rapeyness very rapey – though one such character does get eaten by a crocodile and the rapey crocodile gets defeated by another crocodile man. It isn’t good, and it never was going to be. There are a couple of versions floating around. The one with English dub is a worse transfer than the French dub (which is still poor). 1 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Curse of the Werehuahua – review

Director: Lucas Millhouse

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

A lycanthrope who changes into a Chihuahua, well it could only be a comedy and this is. It is perhaps a tad over-stretched to the concept but the central characters were fun enough and that keeps the viewer with it. The almost urban fantasy aspect seemed a little not on point but, again, if you can go with it then it’s fun enough.

It starts, as you would imagine, with a chihuahua – in many respects the world’s luckiest chihuahua. It is running through a parkland area when it appears to be struck by lightning, but gets up and carries on. Then what appears to be a meteorite strikes it but it manages to breeze through the explosion. A pickup with toxic waste barrels manages to lose a barrel as it turns, causing a spill and the dog runs through the spill… its eyes turn green.

robbery

We have a montage about Dustin (J.R. Timothy, Vampires are Real & Vampires are Real 2) and Gary (Lucas Millhouse) a couple of guys in a house share (there are two other housemates whose presence is almost background) who work together in a coffee shop and do fun things together, We also, in the montage, see Gary meet a woman, Lizzie (Brittany Shamy). The friends walk a dog and are robbed but a growl spooks the robber and, retrieving their belongings, Dustin is bitten by the growling Chihuahua.

the Van Helsing Chapter

This, then, turns him in to a werehuahua and that night he goes on a rampage (although his first attempt at an attack goes badly awry there are several bodies in the house in the morning). Like a good friend, Gary helps him clean up. They go to the library and find a book on monsters, ‘Myths, Monsters and Musical Numbers’. The book is oddly specific and accurate, with its chapter on the werehuahua suggesting that, after a specific number of kills, the Van Helsing (Todd Michael Thompson) will be summoned to despatch the werehuahua.

Bakir Mehinovic as Morganroth

At one point the story peels off to meet Morganroth VanCleek (Bakir Mehinovic) and see his disastrous date. He is walking with his date (Jordyn Aspyn) when Dustin attacks (as a werehuahua he will turn to any moon). Dustin and Morganrith fight and, when the action pauses, Dustin realises that his foe is a (low self-esteem, poorly performing) vampire. They become friends (though the Van Helsing is after Morganroth as well) and Gary and Dustin meet his vampire mother (Robin Towle), who he still lives with. Morganroth comes in and out of the story thereafter – hence this is a review. Eventually the Van Helsing hires a group of fantasy people (a Viking, elf, sorceress etc) to help finish off the werehuahua – though it is during the day when the showdown takes place and so Dustin is in human form and Morganroth is swaddled in clothes to avoid the sun.

the werehuahua 

This was amusing, though I didn’t find it laugh out loud funny and it traded mostly on the fact that Gary and Dustin were likeable characters. At over 2-hours it could have stood to have a wedge shaved off the running time. The werehuahua looked pretty cool, especially as it didn’t have to look ultra-realistic given the comedy aspect, and the other effects were minimally used. This won’t set the world on fire but it was amusing enough. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Use of Tropes: bloodsucking darkness

Although this Junji Ito short, first published in 2002 and printed in the UK in the volume Smashed, is not a vampire story it does feature an incredibly clever (if strange) story and there is a blood element and vampire bats. There is enough, I think, to touch into genre tropes.

The story actually takes in eating disorders also, so please take note before reading. It follows Nami whose boyfriend breaks up with her, causing her to become obsessed with dieting and this leads her to become bulimic. The bulimia leads to her vomiting blood and she begins to dream of blood raining from the sky and a hand reaching for her. She wakes to find blood on the sheets, assuming she has vomited in her sleep.

After some time, a young man called Kazuya Tani tries to talk to her, expressing concern over her weight loss and offering to be a confidant, if that would help. She shrugs him off. When she meets him again, he looks gaunt and he suggests he has decided to diet for as long as she does. He then takes her to a shed as he has something to show her and it is full of vampire bats. One feeds from his hand and then goes towards her, spitting blood at her, as he admits he lied about the dieting.

detail

Vampire bats will regurgitate blood for hungry members of the colony and he has been feeding his blood to the bats and they have been visiting her when she sleeps, giving her his blood to try and sustain her. She vomits and runs and he chases after her, unfortunately he is hit by a train as he runs across a line, his body dismembered by the machine. The bats suck at his blood trying to reanimate his severed body.

Nami wakes in hospital and discovers she was bitten by the bats, though her parents are dismissive as vampire bats are not native to Japan. After they invade her room she goes searching, convinced that the authorities have not found all of Kazuya and she can hear his disembodied voice saying that there is not enough blood and asking for help. She finds his head and goes to pick it up when it turns into a bat and flies with the colony into the night, then a rain of blood, like she experienced in her dreams, pours down onto Nami.

As you can see there are definitely elements here that fit into the genre, the use of blood for health (whether it is sustaining Nami or not is unknown but the blood loss is certainly causing Kazuya’s health to diminish). The transformation into a bat is, of course, out of the vampire playbook – interesting that it is only his head, of course. This is wonderfully Junji Ito and a great little short.

In Hardback @ Amazon US

In Hardback @ Amazon UK

Honourable Mention: Ouvert 24/7

Despite its Troma release and the presence of Lloyd Kaufman in the film, this Thierry Paya directed film from 2010 has more in common with New Extremity from its native France than the normal fare from the Troma table.

It’s a portmanteau film with a wraparound based on a truck stop with the two customers and the waitress telling stories to pass the time. It starts with a truck pulling up and the trucker ordering a beer. When he starts to tell his story, he is accused of being a drunk, and admits to it – worrying given the large vehicle he pulled up in.

the trucker

The stories include one about a pair of cannibal lesbians (not the reason for the mention, though cannibalism and vampirism skate closely together), one about a child eating ogress (or so the credits suggest, listing Marie-Pierre Vincent in that role, though there is also a hint of the character being a witch), which draws in on numerous fairytales to inform its narrative, and one about sisters who violently escape their incestuous father to head to the city to see a musical star.

standoff

It is from the ogress’ story that we get the mention – I had seen the term vampirism used regarding the film but this is not accurate. The child-eater does primarily eat children (she can’t resist chowing on an adult at one point but can’t keep the flesh down). However, it is at her home when a cop (Bertrand Patrzek) shows up and demands an interview with her that we get the mention of vampires. In a standoff, on comfy sofas, she pulls a knife and he a crucifix and then splashes her with holy water, to no avail, accusing her of being a vampire. She isn’t and so he leaves (he only does vampires) – gunning down a grey faced visitor as he leaves (the neighbour) and suggesting the ogress stake her (though she doesn't as she has a crocodile to feed the cadaver to).

A mention in passing and a vampire hunter (and credited as such). The film is interesting, though I felt the stories lacked denouement. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK