Directors: Charles Band & Ted Nicolaou
Release Date: 2018
Contains spoilers
I don’t know what it is about Full Moon Pictures and recycling their material. This is the fourth film in the Full Moon's Bunker of Blood series – in which they put a wraparound animation about the Gore Collector (a really short wraparound in this case) and then recycle a load of clips from their movies.
In this case they recycle the Subspecies series (you can read the reviews of films
1,
2,
3 &
4), the spin-off
Vampire journals and the decadent Evil series (reviews for films
1 &
2) – interestingly the first Decadent Evil film recycled 10 minutes of Vampire Journals itself.
 |
| wraparound animation |
One wonders why they bother, especially with the promise of new original material on the horizon, but it isn’t the first time. They sent my hackles up with
I, Vampire: Trilogy of Blood, which took three 90-minute vehicles and edited them down to three 30-minute shorts. This doesn’t even do that and, in some ways, that is the saving grace. Rather than making shorts out of the various films this literally stitches scenes together like some cinematographically-conceived Frankenstein’s Monster.
 |
| Radu rises |
The down side is obvious, these scenes from full length vehicles are condensed into 90-minutes and so there is no real narrative, no sense of character or character building, no sense of time or geography – this is no more than a clip show. I should also mention that they list the character Mummy in the opening credits as a vampire and add a fang to her on the DVD cover – she was always a witch and there is a clip included that names her as such and makes it clear she is active during the daytime (the vampires are not).
 |
| victims to the slaughter |
However, on a plus side, there are some very nice vampiric scenes on display – especially the vampire detection ceremony from the first Subspecies film with a white horse and masked villagers – that was a cracking scene and looks great today still. But it still has no context.
 |
| vamping it up |
In truth I can’t see why someone would watch this unless they are a massive Full Moon fan (and then, surely, they’d watch the actual films) or by accident. Generously it would make a decent backdrop to a horror themed party. I dropped I Vampire to a zero-score due to its pure exploitation of the viewer and the fact it didn’t work at all. With that in mind (and ignoring the fact that this is one of several such clip vehicles) I won’t drop this as low, because the lack of storytelling made it easier to watch than the previous vehicle's butchered storytelling.
1 out of 10 – Full Moon, I love many of the films herein, the score does not reflect their quality at all, but please make new material and stop recycling the old.
The imdb page is
here.
On DVD @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
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