Pinocchio Vampire slayer – review

Written by: Van Jensen

Drawn by: Dusty Higgins

First published: 2009

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Vampires overrun the peaceful town of Nasolungo, and the only one who is willing to fight them (and even believe they exist) is Pinocchio, the little wooden boy of fairy tale fame. But this is not the Pinocchio you might remember. A growing nose that is a never-ending stake supply and his desire to avenge the death of his beloved father Geppetto make him the perfect vampire impaler.

With Master Cherry the Carpenter and the Blue Fairy, who is a little older and greyer than she used to be, Pinocchio protects the town from an undead menace and discovers that the vampires have a deeper agenda than the mere sucking of blood.

The review: At first glance this might seem a little gimmicky but there is a lot to appreciate in Pinocchio Vampire Slayer. Jensen and Higgins take their lead from Carlo Collodi’s original story and, indeed, give a brief resume of events within the original for those who have only experienced the sanitised Disney version.

That is not to say that they, themselves, do not enter into anachronism with their writing. Modern phrases pepper the dialogue but it was not an authentic language they aimed for but a replication of the dark heart of the original story. Whilst the original tale was an allegory of society, events within the story were as dark as any traditional fairy tale – for instance Pinocchio being hung by the neck.

The story is set post the death of Geppetto at the hands of creatures who only come out at night and die when pierced through the heart by stakes made from Pinocchio’s expanding nose. Indeed, when fighting, Pinocchio lies to create new weapons, which he then snaps off and uses. Later he discovers that these creatures are vampires and that the wood of his nose not only kills them but, burns them if, say, he scratches the face of one of them with a nose. When they die the vampires turn to dust and thus the townsfolk will not heed Pinocchio’s warnings, as he has no evidence – later when it is mentioned that his nose had not grown when he warned them, the nose lengthening is dismissed as myth.

I did have a little issue with the ending as there was a twist that was fairly obvious, but it is a small complaint. Art wise I rather enjoyed this; the black and white led to a stark landscape that fit the story well. There is, of course, a gimmick level to this – we have to accept that, but the entire thing is greater than the gimmick and this is worth checking out. 6.5 out of 10.

Guru, the Mad Monk – review

Director: Andy Milligan

Release date: 1970

Contains spoilers

We are back in the twisted world of Andy Milligan – the man who brought us the Body Beneath and Blood. Indeed this was filmed in the same year as the Body Beneath and, whilst it is primarily about a corrupt priest, Guru (Neil Flanagan), it also features a vampire called Olga (Jaqueline Webb).

We are at the Lost Souls Church of Mortovia – a central European area that is used as Europe’s prison. There is a church, a dungeon and the priest is there to offer absolution to (and brand) sinners before execution or mutilation. Remember that, as it leads to one of the wtf questions about the film. A girl, Nadja (Judith Israel), is dragged in. The chief warder, Carl (Paul Lieber), is clearly too compassionate to work there in the first instance and then, even worse, he realises he knows her.

Carl and Nadja were in love and then one day she just vanished. It turns out that she was attacked by a band of gypsy thieves and then taken with them and used by the leader. She became pregnant and she gave birth by a roadside but complications led to it being stillborn. A woman accused her of killing the baby, she was arrested, found guilty and has been sent to die. Carl goes to Guru for help.

Guru agrees to help him on the condition that Carl aids Guru. The price for his help will be to body snatch the corpses of the executed to make money for the church. In return Guru will administer a drug to Nadja that will make it look like she has died, they can then sneak her body off, revive her and she and Carl can be together. He needs to get the drug from Olga.

Olga reluctantly gives him the drug but on a condition also. He should leave the bodies of the executed for a while so that she can drain blood off them for her ‘experiments’… of course read into this that she will drink their blood as she is a vampire. Despite Carl’s histrionics they succeed in the plan and Guru insists that Nadja must stay hidden in the church for three months whilst Carl repays his debt.

That would be okay if it wasn’t for her suspicions being aroused as she observes people entering the church but not leaving it. Yes Guru and Olga hunt down the waifs and strays who arrive at the church… such as the busty young lady who ran away from home… remember the wtf moment I mentioned? Why would anyone just happen along to a prison island, as this is meant to be? Which young lady would run away from home to there? Oh well, we haven't even got around to mentioning the fact that Guru is a priest and not a monk, so what is another wtf moment in a Milligan film?

Throw into this the fact that church have decided to replace Guru and the fact that he seems to have multiple personality disorder – having at least a good Guru and bad Guru personality that argue with each other. There is the obligatory Andy Milligan hunchback – Igor (Jack Spencer) – who falls for Nadja and tries to protect her.

As for Olga, she has plastic fangs that we only occasionally see. A stabbing is enough to kill her. She does drink blood and she hypnotises people with her pendant. All in all she isn’t the most lore inspiring vampire but vampire she is. As often happens with a Milligan film, some of the costumes look like they’ve been made from a pair of curtains (and probably were) – and Guru’s formal vestments are no exception.

Like the other Andy Milligan films we have seen there is an earnestness here that stands the film in better stead than it should. This is the worst of the Milligan films we have looked at so far but, despite even its own DVD blurb saying that Milligan’s “movies made Edward D Wood films look like epics”, there is still that something that makes me able to watch Milligan’s stuff with a smile on my face. Of course, it doesn’t change the film’s rubbishy nature, 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

(Tsui Hark’s) Vampire Hunters – review

Directed by: Wellson Chin

First released: 2002

Contains spoilers

Vampire Hunters, also known as The Era of Vampires, is a little odd in that something about it feels rushed at the head of the film as though we have entered the film part way through. Is it true? I don’t know but I do know the running time is considerably lower on the UK release than, say, on the Singapore release.

As it is the film begins with the following legend, “In 17th Century rural China during the Ching dynasty, zombies roamed the land feeding on human flesh, a nasty habit that turned them into vampires. Only a handful of skilled warriors dared to challenge these mystical demons of the night. This is their story.” We are at a temple and a voice over tells us of a group of five warriors battling evil.

The warriors are Master Mao Shan (Chun Hua Ji), Wind (Ken Chang Chi-Yao), Thunder (Michael Chow Man-Kin), Lightning (Chan Kwok-Kwan) and Rain (Lam Suet). Already we see a change in lore with this – the more kyonsi type of creature, which hops, in this is called a zombie. The zombie can become a vampire. We also hear that if you are scratched or bitten by a zombie you will become one yourself. A scratch or bite from a vampire will turn you into a vampire.

The warriors are riding with an entourage of men and reach a General’s grave that is open. The Master feels a vampire could be close and they have a compass that detects the dead, which seems to confirm it. The Master gets into the grave but the men have to step back due to the methane round the grave – the torches will ignite it. The vampire attacks.

Now three things to notice here about our rotten looking vampire. The vampire floats and flies rather than hops. His breath, when breathing outwards, is corrosive and can kill a man or melt stone. However more interesting is his feeding method. When he sucks air in he can draw people towards him and, when close enough, he sucks the blood out of the body from a distance. The blood is drawn from the victim, through the air and absorbed into the vampire – it is a most unusual feeding form.

The battle ends with the methane and some explosives going off, it seems the master was caught in the blast and the vampire escapes. Jump forward four months and the four warriors arrive at the Jiang house as a wedding is to start. They get employed by the butler (Lik-Chi Lee) who dislikes their names and renames them Kung, Hei, Fat and Choi, which translates to Happy New Year! The bride, Sasa (Anya), and groom, Young Master Jiang (Wang Zhen Lin) have to praise the parents. Master Yang (Rongguaung Yu) seems, to the viewer, okay but his wife is clearly dead, waxen and wax melts along her hand.

A group of bandits ride through the forest. Now the DVD has various language options, if you watch this dubbed into English, rather than in Cantonese, then the bandit leader has a Mexican bandito accent going on! I kid you not. Anyway, having dropped her off, the bridal entourage was returning to town and are found slaughtered by the bandits, whose aim was to rob Jiang. They too are attacked by the vampire (who does a neat ‘enfold a head in his robe and then suck whilst floating upside down’ trick). One bandit survives.

In the morning Sasa (who was wife number 7 after all his previous brides died on the night of the wedding) awakens to find her husband dead. It appears he has been bitten by a poisonous snake. In town, her brother – Dragon (Horace Lee Wai Shing) – is meeting with money lenders when the bandit arrives and says they were attacked by a vampire. He had sent them to rob his brother-in-law’s estate and has to kill the money lenders.

The warriors know, through trails of killed birds and scorched gouges on trees, that the vampire is close by. Meanwhile Sasa wants to return home but tradition demands she remains at her husband’s home. Her father-in-law takes her to see her husband. He is now a waxen corpse. It is a Jiang family tradition that the bodies of the dead are not buried but preserved with chemicals and wax and there is a whole bunch of them down in the cellar.

Of course, the problem with that is the fact that they are not correctly buried. Dragon really wants the gold and has been working with the Jiang butler (who killed all the previous brides just to get Sasa bumped up the matrimony lists). The butler suggests getting a zombie wrangler (Kuan Tai Chen) to reanimate all the corpses to distract Jiang whilst they find and steal his treasures. Thunder has fallen in love with Sasa and the vampire is still at large.

Lore wise this is really quite different. As well as all the aspects that I have mentioned so far, we note that an infected scratch will burn in the sunlight (and zombies and vampires are destroyed by the sun also). An infected person might be saved by powdered coffin wood – though the nature of the treatment is not shown on screen. The vampire is resilient, surviving being virtually cut in two and can burrow and move below the earth. Explosives seem to be the answer for vampire problems.

The zombies are not as tough. Like the kyonsi they can be controlled by prayer scrolls and bells. However they are sentient, they have memory and can speak. Both the zombies and the vampire look like the corpses they are.

This was good fun, with some decent action and higher production values than many of the Hong Kong offerings. Unlike many movies of the same lineage it doesn’t have an overt humorous side and even when it throws a joke in – like Happy New year – it is subtle. It does, unfortunately, feel as though a lump is missing from the beginning of the film and that is a shame. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Blood: the Last Vampire – review

Director: Chris Nahon

Release date: 2009

Contains spoilers

Some of you will have read my first thoughts on this and will remember that I wasn’t too impressed with this film. However, I share one trait with our long toothed friends and that is a certain obsessive compulsive need – theirs is to count grain and mine to collect vampire genre stuff.

So I sat with the DVD and hoped my impression of this would improve but, if anything, it sank lower. Continuity errors started appearing and anachronistic things such as… I rather like Deep Purple and so, in a fight scene, I noticed we got the song Space Truckin’ – from the Machine Head album, 1972 – the film is set in 1970. Then there were the plot moments that screamed, “Why!” at me.

The film is based on the short anime Blood: the Last vampire. It follows a modified version of its story until about half way through the running time when the anime’s story is done and the film wends its own merry, half-assed way; utterly ignoring any lore/story from the superior, alternate universe anime series Blood+.

After hearing about a 16th century war and the demon hunter Kiyomasa, who was killed by the big bad Onigen (Koyuki), we find ourselves in 1970 Tokyo. Kiyomasa’s daughter, Saya (Gianna Jun), is on a subway train and there is a man. She recognises him as a demon and kills him. The scene is straight from the anime and is actually rather effective. The train stops and a pair of ‘cleaners’ get on. On the platform is Michael (Liam Cunningham), lead agent in a group of shadowy demon hunters, and his subordinate Luke (JJ Field). Luke sees the man didn’t transform and accuses Saya of killing a human. He claims she is out of control, Michael says they need her.

In her room Saya retrieves a bottle of blood (and drinks it wearing the school uniform Michael hasn’t given her yet). We see memories of her childhood with Kato (Yasuaki Kurata), her father’s retainer. He taught her that to tell if someone is a demon then look into their eyes – they have no souls. Actually the flashback sequences are the best sections of the film. Michael visits and tells her that there have been open feedings on a US airbase – a sign that Onigen is close – Saya will go undercover to the base (in the uniform he gives her, you know, the one she previously wore).

One questions, given the fact that there is no uniform policy at the airbase’s school, why she would be given said uniform. Being oriental, she already stands out in the occidental orientated school. Also at the school is Alice (Allison Miller) – the daughter of base commander General McKee (Larry Lamb). After a lesson, in which the monstrous nature of Frankenstein’s creation is discussed, Alice ends up in aikido. The instructor, Mr Powell (Colin Salmon), makes her stay behind with bad girls Sharon (Masiela Lusha) and Linda (Ailish OConnor).

How bad? Well, they are really demons and they pull real swords to use on the girl. Saya has checked the school records (though what they revealed to her is not revealed to us) and comes to the rescue, throwing Alice from the room and then decapitating the transforming girls (something Alice spots through a grate). The blood is very lumpy cgi blood, but as it is demon blood I could live with it. Alice gets her dad, which brings the military and the Agency (who are posing as CIA) at odds with each other. The bodies are gone and Luke acts like a loose cannon (so why Michael didn’t deal with him then and there is beyond me).

Alice goes to confront Powell, who is also a demon, and finds herself hunted by a horde of the little blighters. The resultant fight scene, to me, underlines one of the main problems with the film. The film relies on fast cuts in the fights, which to me is not good. Often the fast cuts are between slow motion scenes, these serve only to try and fool us into believing that the fast cuts are not the problem they really are. This is not good fight choreography.

After dispatching the horde they face Mr Powell, who transforms into full demon form, grabs Alice and runs over the rooftops – with Saya in hot pursuit. This is our next problem. The cgi. Okay, the blood I could live with but this was awful, the demon form looks crap, unreal and sticks out like a sore thumb. I did appreciate little moments, like slates coming down from the roofs in its wake, but the actual demon design and execution was sub-par.

Eventually Saya gets Alice back and Powell sprouts wings, taking to the skies. They continue the chase, by jeep, onto the airbase and down a runway, until Saya kills him. She tells Alice to forget what she has seen. However Luke has gone rogue, killing off military personnel (namely the General) to cover their tracks, going behind Michael's back and ordering a hit on Saya and there is the question of Onigen... However, for me, Onigen is part of the questions never answered, real plot issues that I will look at now.

The first question never answered is how the Hell Alice knew what Saya was? Okay, she is in a room when Saya’s bottle of blood is shot but, when they have a moment of safety and she realises Saya has been shot and badly wounded, just how does she know to feed the girl her blood? It made me sit up and notice for all the wrong reasons. Saya has shown no overtly vampiric tendencies to Alice and the girl was under fire when the blood bottle was shot and so is unlikely to have noticed the contents. It was bobbins.

The second was Onigen being Saya’s mother. Okay the Luke/Darth aspect was so clichéd it was untrue but worse it was a case of, well how’d that happen? Why did the great demon hunter sleep with the great demon? Was he raped? It is never said. Why did Onigen wait until after Saya was born to kill him and how did the baby Saya end up back with Kato? There is some rubbish about Onigen waiting for her to grow into her powers, but wouldn’t that have been easier under her mother’s tutelage?

Whilst I am at it, how was Alice, a schoolgirl, able to drive a truck? That aside, why did the driving of the truck lead to a scene virtually cut and paste from Underworld Evolution, only done with less panache? Indeed, when the two girls end up in a kind of dream-world, for the final confrontation (through the looking glass, Alice), why was it Alice – a school girl who, only two days before, had concerns no greater than how to steal daddy’s car to go party – who realised they were not in Kansas anymore, rather than Saya!

Ooo… the more I think about this the worse it gets. This isn’t helped that they made, in respect of the action sequences, a girl, in school uniform, with katana and fighting demons… boring. The acting is low to middling, but the actors had little to work with. The saving graces are the flashback sequences and the fact that if you really do take your brain out you can bypass the worst bits of the script – think and it will really annoy you. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Vampire Party – review

Directors: Stephen Cafiero & Vincent Lobelle

Release date: 2008

Contains spoilers

Vampire Party is the US release name for the French comedy that is entitled “Les Dents de la Nuit” or “Teeth of the Night”. It is a comedy, though I (partially) disagree that it is an ‘Airplane!’ style spoof – as suggested by the DVD cover. Whilst it does have elements of the spoof, it is true, it also has a black humoured streak through its centre that the average spoof could not touch.

Of course, comedies are always difficult to review as what I find funny, you may not. But I can tell you now that this one most definitely tickled my funny bone.

The film starts off with a girl riding atop a man, the scene seems dreamlike and, indeed, it is for as a weatherman starts to give his report on the radio she morphs into the weatherman. The man is half asleep and dreaming! The weather report becomes a faux-news report and this gives us the background on our three main characters. The man is Sam Polisatokoniminsky (Patrick Mille) and he loves to party, it is what he lives for. He tends to party with Alice Wouhou (Frédérique Bel), an aerobics instructor with serial love affairs and Prune Descoins (Julie Fournier) a banker who makes the best daiquiri’s in the world. That night the girls are going to an open bar for women only. Following the opening we get a wonderful cartoon credit sequence that, deliberately I thought, brought the Fearless Vampire Killers to mind.

The girls meet up at the bar and Alice is upset because she and her latest lover, Albarn, have split up. Sam turns up in drag – he won’t allow gender to spoil the party (or, more importantly, deny him access to the open bar). As he dances with some poor unfortunate, Alice tells Prune how she would like to end it all, this changes when Prune reminds her that the sales are in three weeks! Alice is still crying and drops her purse when a man comes up (and Barry White plays) and asks her to come to a party – he gives her an envelope containing an invitation.

The invitation, Sam recognises, is for the Medici Night – almost an urban legend in the party world, it is the Holy Grail of parties. Alice believes the man is a gentleman and gave her the invite because she was crying and so Sam has Prune pepper spray him. Streaming with tears, his mascara running, he approaches the man. He returns with two more tickets – the man didn’t care about his tears so Sam stole them from his jacket. We then cut to the Chief of Police, LeFranc (Antoine Duléry), being informed by Le Duc de Journiac (Tchéky Karyo) that he is required to attend the party.

The night of the party comes and, to get there, they all go to a skyscraper from where helicopters will fly them to their destination. We meet some of the other party goers, main characters out of the 400 guests. There is Jessica Conti (Hélène de Fougerolles), married to a mobster (actually he sells out of date sausages), she is followed by a bodyguard, Georges (Joseph Malbera), who does not have an invite himself. He is able to get on the helicopter but not get into the party. There is Serge Krinine (Sam Karmann), celebrity dentist. Finally there is Edouard (Vincent Desagnat), who bought his ticket on e-bay. Edouard sees Alice and has a ‘Titanic fantasy’ but then he does that every time he sees a pretty blonde, even if they are dead! Their destination is a castle.

As the three main characters go into the main party, Georges looks for a way to follow his charge. He sees a car coming and flags it down asking to see the invite and then walks off with it. The driver pulls a berretta, which Georges relieves him of and then, accidentally, shoots the man dead. As he gets to the party he is given a pin and directed to the VIP area. If the main party is bacchanalian, the VIP section seems sombre. Journiac addresses them all, he mentions the book of pacts, seems obsessed with hairstylists and, as he suggests that they will reign supreme, the microphone he uses makes him look like he has a “Hitler moustache”. He reveals the main party and announces an open bar and the VIPs vamp out. The real owner of Georges’ invitation turns up and kills the bodyguard.

The vampires invade the party and, at first, most don’t notice. Our main heroes, of course, try to escape. They end up with all the named main human characters at some point. Krinine has been invited to turn – Journiac wants a dentist in their ranks, when you live for eternity and rely on fangs you need good dental work. One reason this film works is because it mixes black humour, slapstick, sexual humour, stereotype humour, post-modernist aspects and genre specific humour. Jessica (played as a stereotyped dumb blonde) wants a man, her husband doesn’t touch her anymore, and is taken to a bedroom by one of the VIPs. She immediately gets on the bed and crouches with her backside in the air, whilst asking to be taken; the man sniffs her posterior – he can’t help it, he explains, his mother was a werewolf. He then pees round the bed.

Vampire lore wise we hear that Dracula is the competition and that this line of vampires descend from Catherine De Medici who, in 1572, massacred Protestants – referring to the historical St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. The Medici night is a massacre in celebration of that and LeFranc is needed for the cover story – the partygoers will be said to have boarded a plane that subsequently crashed, LeFranc will make the announcement. We discover that vampires have no reflections and, at one point, garlic is found. A vampire threatened with it, eats it to laugh at the myth and then his face bloats and gets sores as he is actually allergic to garlic anyway!

Holy water works and makes the vampire dissolve – there is a whole joke about the Thorn Birds that I won’t spoil. They can survive being shot and having their necks broken (decapitation is mentioned and seems to be another method) but the main way to kill them is to pierce the heart – Buffy using a stake is mentioned, so Jessica produces a vibrator from her purse but this is dismissed as a weapon. On death they burst into flames and those flames can (and in one scene do) spread. The resultant remains are a charred mess.

Sunlight can also kill a vampire, though the castle has metal shutters that cover every window preventing sunlight from getting in and also preventing escape. Physical transformation is possible but is by spells from the book of pacts (and thus not restricted to vampires). Such transformations can be to guinea pigs, little people and even characters from Heidi. We get a pair of vampires defeated by aerobics, at one point. Vampires can smell blood type, Alice was invited because she is an O negative.

I really enjoyed this, irreverent and fun with a variety of humour. The cast was engaging and the play with genre conventions refreshing – more so than some of the standard spoofs that emerge from the Hollywood stable of film making. The effects worked well and little nuances were worthwhile. Nothing within the film was over-used, and the pace kept a nice speed. I’d recommend this one, with the caveat that humour is very much an individual thing. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Haunting Desires – review

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Release date: 2004

Contains spoilers

Oh, Fred Olen Ray, you do make some pants movies and this is one of them. With barely a story in place and your performers on auto-pilot this is a poor excuse for a softcore ‘erotic’ movie.

Admonishments aside, let’s look at the film – after all that is what we are here for.

Haunting Desires starts in a strip joint and, let’s face it, vampires in strip joints have become more clichéd than vampires in castles. Like their gothic counterpart, the sleazier end of the vampire habitat can be a good place to film your movie… if done properly… when not… Well we have a dancer, Melissa (Belinda Gavin), and one of the patrons – Edward (Glen Meadows) – seems to be getting a little bit overly stimulated, pulling his tie off and all. We see a guy wandering around, later revealed to be club owner Adrian (Evan Stone), he is dressed like some sort of pirate and thus sticks out like a sore thumb.

Now the club is called Underworld, though later Adrian calls it the Underground by mistake, and as another dancer comes on stage Edward is approached by Melissa who asks if he wants to take things to the next level. He assents but suggests his van. Now, when I watched this I thought I had heard this wrongly at first… a van, says the man in a suit… but van it is, with mattress in the back. Now, given we later hear that he is a rich guy, there really is something incongruous with this set up. Anyway, they get it on until she grows fangs and bites. He pushes her off and she giggles and then guess what he does… Does he throw her naked butt out the van? No. Does he get his naked butt out the van and run? No. He drives off, naked, with the vampire giggling in the back of the van. He then seems shocked when she heads up front and bites him again, for the few seconds before he crashes and dies over the steering wheel!

In the morning the cops are on the scene, led by Detective Trout (Jay Richardson) – for some reason Ray does like to call his lawmen by the name of Trout, see the Lair. Also appearing at the scene is crime columnist Jill O’Connor (Beverly Lynne). Trout stops her getting anywhere near his crime scene. Jill goes home and ends up in a horny tryst with husband Tommy (Thomas Jakob) – the scene breaks and Tommy is leaving for a meeting, the lovemaking was Jill’s fantasy and clearly their marriage is, in reality, passionless. As he goes, Mr Andrews (Waris Treyman), her editor we assume, turns up and essentially tells her that her stories have gone off the boil and she needs to get the old fire back. He reminds her of when she broke the white slave ring in Chinatown. She retorts “Oh, come on, I was practically raped with a broom handle!” In response Mr Andrews muses, “You just can't make stuff like that up.” – Though you clearly can as it was in this script!

So, to keep her career afloat, Jill breaks into the morgue. She photographs the coroners report and then looks to take a shot of the victim. We see the fang wounds. She is just stood around when he sits up and puts his hand on her shoulder. She freaks… of course… and then Trout walks in. The victim is still led down and apparently dead and Jill sounds like a fruitcake when she suggests he is still alive (this is the last we see of him as his family are having him cremated that very day!) Trout decides to be kind and buy her a coffee and toss her some info. He was killed, Trout says, by being stabbed in the neck by a sharp implement. The motive was robbery, all his blood was stolen. Jill gets home and she has stolen the bagged up belongings from the coroner’s – a little fact that Trout never realises.

There is a matchbook and Jill calls the number written inside – it is the club and she puts the phone down. After an interlude where she phones Tommy and we discover that he is either having an affair or with a prostitute (an excuse to have some simulated sex on screen with no story impact), the phone rings and it is Adrian and he knows her name and says the address is on the matchbook – inviting her to the club. When there he gives her a drink (spiked) and denies knowing Edward. He claims he knew her number due to caller id and then the drug kicks in. She ends up on the stage , drugged and being fondled by two strippers. She awakens in her car and, when she tells him, Trout too ends up checking the club.

It’s all standard then on. Adrian and the (massive total of) three dancers are all vampires. He is seducing Jill into their world and can turn into a majorly crap bat. We hear that he is 2000 years old. They are obviously sensitive to sunlight as the windows in the living area are bricked up. Their eyes can flash with bright light (as can the ankh pendants they all wear). Jill is bitten and clearly under their influence.

As for the ankh pendants, they are something of an Achilles heel as tear one off and, poof, the vampire goes up in smoke. Adrian can fire laser beams out of a ring (don’t you just love it when that happens... not). But these can be reflected off shiny metal trays and can kill the vampire firing them. Serves him right for having funky death rays – it just shouldn’t be allowed.

The vampires are also very fast. How fast? When a bullet is fired it flies in crap cgi slow motion and is snatched out of the air by Adrian… what a man…

The film, itself, is drivel. The acting is awful generally – Richardson and Lynne coming across as a low rent Laurel and Hardy, whilst Evan Stone whispers his way through the scenes in an attempt to appear seductive/menacing at the same time, I’d guess. The story is drivel and goes nowhere fast, culminating in a pointless twist that we have seen countless times. Why the vamps do what they do is not explored (especially perplexing is why they have suddenly started leaving bodies to be found), how the club can go on with a grand total of three dancers is not explained (especially as there is one point when all three are in the private area, meaning things must have been boring for the clients up front!)

This is a pointless, non-erotic, badly plotted and acted piece of fluff. Avoid. 1 out of 10 reflects that the crap bat is so crap it deserves recognition.

The imdb page is here.