Vampire Riderz – review

Director: Dan Garcia

Release date: 2012

Contains spoilers


Now, when a film contains the rapper turned actor Sticky Fingaz (Blade the Series) and also mentions a daywalker in the blurb then it is only natural that certain connections are made. In this case these would not be accurate, this is neither a Blade film nor Blade rip off and the whole Blade franchise can breathe easier for that. Originally called Speed Demons when available to purchase for download, the DVD has changed the title to Vampire Riderz.

Walter Jones as Terrance

The film starts with a woman in a car (it seems) with a man and he attacks after she encourages sex. This is a flashback scene. Some attack scenes (from later in the film) over the credits and we see a girl hitching (ignore her, she’s vamp bait for later). We also see two guys Terrance (Walter Jones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Tiny (Smalls). Terrance is concerned about finding ‘the one’ (in a romantic sense) and both drink, play pool and bicker.

staked

Actually, however, they are vampire hunters and see a male and female preying on a woman. They confront them (in the bar), attack them, and finally leave the victim with the female vampire (never thinking to go back as far as I can tell) as they chase after the male vampire. He leads them a merry dance until Tiny tosses a stake that brings him down. He isn’t dead though. Terrance stakes him and woosh, he vanishes in a flash of light (later killed vampires do not die as noticeably; perhaps the cgi budget would only stretch so far?)

Sticky Fingaz as Wade

In the meantime we see a woman, Jane (Marina Sirtis), being followed by biker vampire thugs led by Wade (Sticky Fingaz). She ducks off behind a car and the vampires, being crap hunters, lose her. She calls daughter Lala (Angela Sarafyan, also Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and tells her they have to go. They end up at a bus and we see Wade burst into their motel room (how he finds it after failing to spot Jane when stood next to her is beyond me) where he finds a timetable. Hitcher girl gets propositioned by a sleazy driver, somehow gets away (it sounded like she used a taser though the film shows nothing) and ends up on the same bus with a boxer (who is fodder as well), two comic geeks, Chance (Al Santos), a sarcastic salesman and a priest, Father Lemoine (Terry Kiser), who has lost his faith.

Nick Gomez as the Master

Anyway, they are attacked, the bus bursts tires and they end up at a junkyard where a solstice (sic) party celebrating New Year is occurring. We have had punctuated moments through the proceedings with a vampire Master (Nick Gomez) who is dying and who was contracted, it appears, to act very poorly. It seems that every five hundred years the vampires (or just the Master – it doesn’t make too much sense) must sacrifice a daywalker (who happens to be Lala; Jane being the woman at the head of the film, I guess) by burning them and then consume their ashes for a further five hundred years of immortality. Lala doesn’t know who she is.

a bite

Bad plotting and dialogue abound. Positively, Terry Kiser was particularly good but his dialogue was awful – one moment refusing to bless Jane as he has lost his faith, the next leading a round of prayers. The good guys and the hunters hold up in a shed, with half a dozen tyres providing a particularly ineffectual looking barricade. Yet again the hunting-deficient vampires don’t find them and so the humans decide to go out and fight them anyway. The hitcher was built only to die and whilst some characterisation was entered into it didn’t really go anywhere. There won’t be cops out here, warns a hunter, this is vampire land and they avoid it... and yet cops had already been out (and immediately died).

Marina Sirtis as Jane

If you cut out the Master section, tightened the script, re-wrote the dialogue and just made the scenes make a bit more sense, then this might have been a passable movie. They had a fair bit of talent in front of the camera (though Mister Fingaz simply growled a lot). As it is, the film was absolutely rubbish, poor camera work, bad lighting and all in all shoddy. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.