Thamma – review

Director: Aditya Sarpotdar

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

It is not the first time we have looked at a vehicle using the Indian betaal but this one certainly grounds itself in the Western vampire, whilst distinguishing itself. It is part of a cinematic universe – the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe, which includes films such as Stree and Bhediya. Bhediya is a take on the werewolf genre and we do get a visitation from the film’s lead werewolf in this.

Alexx O'Nell as Alexander

This does work as a standalone, however, and if I have a gripe it is that it is overly long. Nevertheless, it did hold me for its 2-hour 30-minutes run time. It actually starts in 323BC with an army. My thoughts went to a Roman legion until I realised it was Alexander the Great (Alexx O'Nell) and his forces – Alexander did reach India. Later in the film he is described as an Englishman rather than Macedonian (his blood is still bottled, he does not survive) but nonetheless it is his force that hear noises in the forest and his horse refuses to move forward, when a host of betaal, led by Yakshasan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), attack.

finding Alok

Cut forward to modern day and Alok Goyal (Ayushmann Khurrana) is a reporter – we see a TV stunt gone wrong that’ll turn him into a meme. He and two co-workers are camping in the wilderness and he’s told his issue is not using Instagram enough and so he marches off into the forest to take a dramatic photo – and is attacked by a bear (the cgi bear was pretty well done). The two coworkers run the other way and he is chased and, eventually, painfully but not fatally mauled. He manages to get into a hiding place.

Alok and Tadaka

The bear seems to be yanked away and a woman, Tadaka (Rashmika Mandanna), looks into his hiding spot. He passes out and she pulls him away. He awakens in a carcass of a crashed airplane, which serves as her home. She promises him that she’ll take him home, once healed, but he shouldn’t leave her makeshift home. Of course, he does and he is hunted through the forest by three male betaal. He is captured, nearly fed to the imprisoned Yakshasan and rescued again by Tadaka. They get to the outskirts of their territory and Tadaka tells him to jump from the cliff they are on (to a passing truck on the road below) but she can go no further as it is forbidden – she doesn’t take much persuasion to go with him. He gets home to his funeral (the film is an action/horror/comedy and so, given the comedy side, he has to convince his father (Paresh Rawal) that he is really him and that involves a mole on his butt).

the bhediya

The film then follows the couple as he slowly learns what she is, their eventual estrangement, his (near) death and her turning him – this is forbidden and means that Yakshasan can be freed, and she take his place in imprisonment. Yakshasan was imprisoned because he insisted on feeding from humans (another forbidden thing) and wants to take over the world. Throw in an interlude with the bhediya (Varun Dhawan) who needs to drink betaal blood to recover his powers – and a side note about the betaal and bhediya ancient animosity and then a finale against Yakshasan.

ready to drink betaal blood

The backstory of the creatures is that the great demon Rakhtbeej was granted by Shiva the boon that each spilt drop of his blood would spawn another one of him. Losing against him the Gods called on the Goddess (presumably Kali) and she fought him but each hit caused him to multiply and so she created the betaal to drink his blood and save the world. The other lore we get is that sunlight is an issue when newly turned, they are near indestructible, they cannot lie (and vamp face when they do), we see Yakshasan turn into smoke as he teleports, there is an affinity with bats and one betaal can drink another to death (we see Yakshasan do that and a spirit/demon version of him appears at his shoulder when he does so). With regards vampires a distinction between them and betaal is made and yet the 'V' word is used fairly often, as is Dracula, and many genre film tropes are used (accidental fang, for comic effect, for instance). Ultimately the pitching of vampire/betaal against werewolf/bhediya is straight out of the vampire playbook.

getting her vamp on

The film looks really nice and Ayushmann Khurrana balances dashing leading man and comic focal point really well. The cgi was well done and there was a tad of a superhero vide to this as sometimes happens with good guy vampire films. Being an Indian film I was expecting music and dance routines. There are only two dances (three if you count the one in the credits) but they are diegetic. There are other musical moments that include montage scenes and perhaps these dragged a little given the running time. Indeed, the running time gave opportunity to expands the characters – though one might argue they were no more expanded than a shorter running time would have allowed for – but it does feel too long. Nevertheless I rather enjoyed this and found it amusing. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

The Divine Enforcer – review

Director: Robert Rundle

Release date: 1992

Contains spoilers

On the surface this should be a cult classic but somehow just isn’t, it sits in a place where it should be so bad it was good, but was just bad, and all that is a crying shame. Note that whilst there is something supernatural (or psychic, at least) going on, the vampire in this is a serial killer rather than undead.

It starts with a car and a couple, the woman unnamed and the man named Otis (Don Stroud). He pulls up and it wasn’t overly clear whether he picked her up or she was a prostitute but she certainly gets spooked when he pulls a needle, injects her and then starts suckling at the hole. She gets out of the car and legs it. She comes across a drunk derelict who turns out to be a bit rapey. Otis injects him (he collapses) and she falls into his arm.

Erik Estrada as the Monsignor

Talking of rapey, three guys are assaulting a woman when a man (Michael M. Foley) intervenes and beats them with his martial arts prowess (nastily breaking one’s arm in the process), he rescues the woman. Elsewhere, Otis has the woman he's kidnapped tied up. He pricks her with a syringe and starts to drink her blood. Another cut and we are with Monsignor (Erik Estrada, Chupacabra Vs the Alamo) who is having breakfast. His housekeeper, Merna (Judy Landers), has a newspaper and mentions the serial killer the press is calling the Vampire, who kills women and drains them of their blood. They are expecting new priest Father Daniel, there is a knock at the door and he has arrived early – it is the kung fu man.

Don Stroud as Otis

So, Daniel is a bit of a vigilante and has a gun with a cross on the handle, a crucifix dagger and crucifix shuriken. He starts getting names and details from confessions and goes taking out the bad guys. However, we also discover that he has second sight that he also uses in order to be God’s vengeance. The film veers all over the place, from Otis and Stroud’s wonderfully deranged performance, as he kidnaps women, drains their blood to make smoothies and also takes their skulls, to Daniel kicking ass in the parish’s seedy underbelly.

Merna and Father Daniel

Otis starts going to confession – which Daniel must respect the sanctity of (despite using them as focal points for his retribution) – and this sets them up as enemies. Daniel also meets Kim (Carrie Chambers) a young woman with the second sight, which has latched on to Otis, and he promises to help her. In the meantime, the other priest in the house turns out to be Father Thomas, a grouch who does little more than read about the vigilante and the vampire in the papers and who is played by a woefully underused Jan-Michael Vincent, who was phoning the performance in. I mean, Erik Estrada was underused but nothing on how wasted JMV was. It is possible that Otis also has psychic powers, or he is just batshit delusional – he gets a visitation from victims at one point and a skull talks to him.

This should be a recipe for cult status. It really should. On that score it fails and the whole thing is a slog. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Lord Doesn’t Hate You – review

Director: Fabrizio La Monica

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

Entitled Dio non ti odia in the original Italian, the blurb for this film says, “A young girl contracts a rare and deadly disease. No one in the village can cure her, so the friar orders her to be removed from the community before she can infect everyone.” This is the basic story but the spoiler – of course, given the film is here – is that the film concerns vampires.

This film is very slow burn and, whilst it looks to the balance of good, evil and sacrifice, there is no discussion about such philosophical considerations, rather some quotes and space for the viewer to think. For instance, an intertitle at the head of the film asks “If God exists, why is there evil? And if he doesn’t, why is there good?”. The quote attributed to Boethius.

a father's eyes

The film does not name any character, so we start with a man – who I’ll refer to as the Father (Roberto Romano) – bloodied and tied to a stake. We get a voiceover from the daughter (Emilia Passalacqua) talking of a time when wolves came from the mountains into the village but she was not scared because her father was with her. We cut to her in bed, the local friar (Salvatore Nereo Salerno) telling her that she is sick; she doesn’t have symptoms yet but she will become a danger to the village. The only hope a healer in the mountains and her father will take her there.

Emilia Passalacqua as the daughter

The film then follows the trek through the mountains. The daughter is both terrified and confused as she doesn’t feel ill. The leaving of a doll on the outskirts of the village, which her deceased mother made for her, indicates leaving childhood behind. At one point they hear a twig snap and the father has her hide and shoots their pursuer – he turns out to be the son (Paolo Tinnirello) of a neighbour (Antonino Scaglione), The neighbour's son and the daughter were sweet on each other and he discovered what the village had conspired to do.

Ferdinando Gattuccio as the vampire

There is no illness. The village have a pact with a creature (Ferdinando Gattuccio), never called vampire but presenting as such, and they willingly sacrifice one of their number – we never discover how frequently, but it feels as though it is infrequent if the younger generation are unaware – to spare the rest. The daughter was chosen by the villagers because the father has two other children. Getting to the vampire takes about half the film and then we have the aftermath faced by the father, his family and his neighbour.

fangs

There isn’t much lore. The vampire lives in a cave, has a greyish complexion, long black nails, unnatural green eyes and fangs. It is implied he is able to be abroad by night only and also implied that he controls wolves. The girl observes that the valley with the cave is bereft of birdsong, heavy of atmosphere and the colours are less vivid. The vampire can make other vampires and we also get the ghost of an old woman more for a sense of unease than anything else. The film values atmosphere over narrative and condemns itself into a pretty plodding pace as there is little plot beyond that suggested. Even the deaths – of which there are a few – are mostly off screen. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mention: All Wrapped Up

This was a low budget anthology film directed by Jason Liquori and released in 2007. It opens with Debbie Rochon as herself, negotiating with the production company’s mascot and directing us to a catalogue of films. The film is then made up of four segments that concentrate primarily on mummies – a bog mummy in the first, an Egyptian one in the second, an Aztec one in the third and, interestingly, a reinvigorated, cryogenic man in the final one. But as well as this we get brief moments of vampires, the Aztec mummy itself has a vampiric trope, there's a succubus and we even get an implied werewolf.

the succubus

It is in the third story, The Jaguar’s bite where we start with our vampires and more vampiric elements. The film starts with a couple in need of some guidance, one feels. She (Marcienne Dwyer) assumes he (Brian Prost) is having an affair but he wakes more tired than before he goes to bed and hires a paranormal PI, Stewart (Jason Liquori), to prove he is being visited by a succubus (Gina Markette). Stewart manages to see it through a video and, after a little tussle, gets rid by spraying water on her – not holy water, mind, but mineral water as though he is dousing an oversexed animal.

a vampire

The film goes on to him being hired to track down a stolen Aztec mummy (le Nguyen) – the museum believing that it was not a simple robbery/homicide as the police believe. The mummy was an Aztec warrior who would drink the blood of his enemies to take their strength and became an incarnation of a god. To defeat him, his enemies drained his blood. So the mummy is draining the blood of new enemies (those who disturbed his tomb) and that’s our trope. The vampires (Alberto Giovannelli and Christina Daoust) are led by monster hunter Rose Lenoire (Brunhilda Zekthi) to the mummy where one of them drains it (killing it) then explodes because he contained dead blood.

Debbie Rochon as Mistress Misty

There is a further vampire in final segment Milleniman in which, to try and save his daughter (Chanel Bagwell) badly injured in the previous segment, businessman Sebastian Fairweather (Kevin White) is tricked into being a guinea pig for a cryogenic experiment. He is accidentally woken a millennia later where the human race has been decimated in wars and the survivors are physically weakened. He is wanted by the Mayor, Mistress Misty (Debbie Rochon), as he may hold the key to some of the medical issues they face – she, it is revealed at the end, is not human but a vampire.

the Aztec Mummy

And that’s it, we get a blood drinking mummy – it is suggested that spilt blood revived it but the blood drinking is mentioned as an M.O. and the dialogue makes it clear that it isn’t a vampire (in the traditional sense), a moment of an energy devouring succubus and three fleeting visitations of actual vampires. The film is straight to video and some of the effects are knowingly (or, at least I hope it was knowingly) terrible. Possibly the most interesting idea was that the man trapped in cryogenics was a mummy also, giving that monster a sci-fi edge.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Love at First Bite

At a scant 5-minutes, Audrey Zane’s 2024 short movie is a succinct little piece that starts off in a Halloween party. Christine (Kiara Petrucci) is dressed as a vampire – and you’d be forgiven for assuming that this is a film with characters acting like vampires. Clearly bored, she heads into the bathroom and discards her drink. Looking towards the mirror she produces fangs, which she can’t see as she casts no reflection. Yes, she’s a real vampire…

showing fang

On her way out of the building she sees another lady, Lilah (Elizabeth Baker), sat in the corridor, apparently drunk and dressed as a vampire. Christine approaches her and asks which vampire she is. Lilah says she is one of Dracula’s brides and Christine responds that it’s a coincidence as she is Dracula. As Christine explains that Dracula doesn’t need to be a guy, my mind went to some recent contention with a genre commentator railing against gender swapping Dracula. It seems to me that a creature who has mastered shapeshifting into wolf (or dog), bat and even “floating moats of dust” could happily shift between genders at will and as desired.

Lilah and Christine

Getting back to the short, Lilah noticed Christine in the party and noticed the social walls she erected, saying as much and Christine is impressed with her observational skill. Perhaps Lilah is doomed to be a meal rather than the bride of this Dracula but what if they were both vampires who were pretending to be vampires?

The imdb page is here.

The Beta Project – review

Directors: Brett William Mauser & Dane Berkshire

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

Based on a one-off webisode called The Project, as far as I could tell, this was an interesting little film that resolved in a way that was a tad unsatisfying (as I’ll explain) but did an awful lot right despite the low budget. From a TMtV point of view, whilst there is talk of demons, and we do get Lilith (Dane Berkshire) as the Mother of Demons, there are monsters within, referred to as crusties, that have fangs, can turn and can be staked through the heart.

Lana in the storage area

It starts off with Lana leaving a building and going into what looks like a large storage area. We see a head pop down behind her in the dark and eventually she finds herself surrounded by two men and a woman. The older man starts a sales pitch, essentially, offering her life, happiness and eternity. This is observed from the shadows by Mike (Brett William Mauser) who is slightly startled when Rose (Katrina Nash) comes up behind him.

offer accepted

Mike confirms there are three crusties and he was about to introduce himself. Rose stops him. Lana has been offered a choice and so they can’t intervene – Mike hates that rule. The film has a lot to say about free will and destiny (and the mutually exclusive nature of the two things). Lana accepts the offer and is bitten, falling to the floor. Mike and Rose go in, she taking on the younger pair of crusties with a sword and Mike going after the older one. He shoots him and then puts a bullet close to the heart (enough to slow but not kill). By the time he gets info out of the crusty – Lilith, thought dead, is back – Rose has despatched the other two and, after Mike feigns letting the third go, she kills him.

Lilith and Colleen

Six months later and an operation is in place, led by Hank (Trey Bayer) for the Project. They have used Stan (Brad Scribner) as bait. He is in a warehouse, where he has been beaten for four hours. This is at Lilith’s behest and watched by Colleen (Jane Dare Haas) – I didn’t pick up on exactly who Colleen was but it is inferred she has political ties – Lilith takes over the interrogation using femininity (and, one guesses, demonic power) to try and find the location of the Desert Rose (at the end of the film revealed to be a sword). Stan, of course, doesn’t know but he does spill he is working for the Project just as they are making their entrance. Colleen and Lilith look, separately, to get out and Lilith kills all the agents. Interestingly Colleen, after this, stabs Lilith with a small blade that causes the Demon Mother an injury and, we discover later, is magical in nature as monsters that can spontaneously heal fail to do so when injured by it.

Mike and Rose

Having failed to eliminate Lilith, Rose initiates the Beta Project – which involves pulling a team of four women together. These end up being selected as Mehnkah (Gidget White) – an accountant at the Project chosen at random by Mike, Ajay (Cristina Cruz Rodríguez) – a smuggler, Worm (Allie Smith) – who is in a crew with Ajay, and Joy (also Dane Berkshire) – a rogue DEA agent who is described as a banshee (but unaware of this, it seems). They manage to pick up Ajay at a deal gone south but Worm is captured by Colleen’s people and Joy is captured by Lilith, posing as a cop…

dusting a crusty

All of which is great and there is some nice character building with regards Ajay and Joy – with actress Dane Berkshire working with herself really well, with both characters feeling unique and the interaction feeling totally natural. Where the film left me unsatisfied was in the end where the rescue missions end and so does the film itself. It felt more like the first act of the film rather than the first film of a series. It is, however, testament that (as it comes in at feature length) the film did not drag despite only feeling like the first act. So, the film delivers an opening premise but with a huge amount left to explore. A strong 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Breakfast with Dracula – review

Director: Fabrizio De Angelis

Release date: 1993

Contains spoilers

First of all, a technical note. I got an Italian Blu-Ray of this film. I have two main players on my PC, the better one does not take screenshots but the other both takes screenshots and is multi-region. This disc just wouldn’t play on that second player due to undisclosed technical reasons and so I couldn’t take screenshots. If that is the case I will try and find a trailer, for screenshots (I couldn’t find one), or look for screenshots on the internet. There were VHS quality screenshots from Kim Newman’s website but I eventually decided to just go with no screenshots with this review.

This is partly because it won’t be a long review. There isn’t much of a plot going on and this is an Italian comedy – such films as Uncle was a Vampire and Young Dracula not offering that much of a pedigree, I’m afraid. The film follows Vlady Drak (Daniele Liotti), who follows his dreams by hitching to Miami with a view to becoming the next great male model.

Unfortunately, he isn’t very patient and every time he goes to an agency he leaves if there is a queue of potential models. He spots an ad in a paper for a room and visits. The house is massive and the butler, Bud (Scotty Daffron), was expecting him, it seems. There is a roof collapse that kills Vlady but he dreams of the past and wakes in the coffin. Bud serves the Dracula family, Vlady is the last male heir and this is his inheritance/destiny. But he still wants to be a model.

He gets a background spot on a commercial – but his fangs emerge. The director hates the main model and gets Vlady to try the main role – it’s a perfume ad and he is meant to be intoxicated with a woman’s scent. His draw to her neck and his fangs are, the director thinks, sensational and he becomes the next big thing. He starts sleeping/necking his way round Miami but needs virgin blood to survive (not an easy ask in Miami). The manager of the agency hates him but the owner falls for him… and she happens to be a virgin… oh, and falling in love cures vampirism. Not much of a story and pretty much cinematic fluff. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.