Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune – review

Director: Calvin Morie McCarthy

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

With a title like this we can expect some B movie beats and we certainly get them with this indie offering. It perhaps offers a little less in the way of expected mayhem but it tries its hardest, but is trying actually enough? Read on…

The film starts with Billy (Rollyn Stafford) and his gal camping and fooling in the woods. Overhead what looks like a meteorite shoots through the skies (misidentified throughout as a meteor) and crashes into the woods, which Billy’s gal notices but they are quickly fooling around again.

into the tent

At the crash site we see that it is actually a spaceship and a figure (Steve Larkin) in a spacesuit appears. Back in the tent the fooling around continues but is then interrupted as a branch is (deliberately) broken. Billy gets sent out with a knife but a passing escaped asylum patient (Calvin Morie McCarthy) puts an axe in his head. The axe murderer goes after the gal but the spaceman – now without helmet and looking a tad batlike in features – grabs the axeman.

Yuri's friends

In the city Starr (Jax Kellington) meets up with friend Cassi (Chelsey Falbo) and they go and get coffee. Starr is in a relationship with Buzz (Luke William Nelson) and Cassi has been dating Buzz’ best friend Yuri (Alex Onda) for a couple of months – though they haven’t taken things to a physical level. Buzz and Yuri are doing a stocktake for the camping trip they aim to go on – the essentials being booze and drugs, optional items being actual camping gear. They go and pick the women up.

Julene Fontaine as Larissa

Also in the car is Larissa (Julene Fontaine), Yuri’s bookish little sister who is currently reading Dracula. They head into the mountains, smoking dope as they go (with the exception of Larissa). At this point we have seen one particular issue with the film already – extraneous detail. For instance, I suppose the axe murderer at the head of the film was meant to be funny but it was an addition too far. Simply using the vampire would have worked better.

Alex Onda as Yuri

Likewise the detail around the characters – I think there was an attempt to build character but it was detail without character building. Yuri has a story about being lost in the mountains but, despite itself, it adds nothing to character. When at the cabin they are staying in, Larissa hears Starr bad-mouthing her for being boring and immediately joins in with the boozing (that might happen, true) but suddenly, in a later scene, just goes to bed mad at the comments Starr made. The details needed to dovetail into character and action and they didn’t seem to and the characters remained fairly two-dimensional.

eye mojo

The film itself spends a long time with the vampire following the gang (and other people, and we see through its purple vision) but it all takes too long. There is a random attack on hikers (and a chopped off penis) but it adds not much to the proceedings. There is a pace sapping montage scene on the hike and a further one of them partying. Eventually Larissa bogs off, goes for a bath (to provide a gratuitous boob shot I suspect) and to read Dracula. Out of the bath she sees something (the vampire) from her window and goes outside to investigate… this is perilously close to the end of the film and so the denouement of the attack on the cabin/friends is rushed and pretty tension free. It is also strange as there is mist that comes under her door, indoors, but the vampire is still outside. In the same scene they put a light across the vampire’s eyes, ala Dracula but there is no actual hint that they are hypnotic.

a bite

It’s a shame as, with a bit more connectivity to the plot and less stereotype, the characters could have been built up. Alex Onda, in particular, came across as personable and there might have been a good tension built with a protracted siege (the space vampire does not appear to have much in the way of tech despite having come in a space ship, so the siege could have been drawn out). Rather we get an attack on a random redneck threesome – drawn for humour, but drawing away from any focus. We see the vampire bite a neck and it is intimated (though not shown) that it laps blood from an axed skull. There is absolutely no background to the vampire, though one character stumbles onto what appears to be a communication link, and so we know there are other vampires that we see through that. The creature sfx actually works well in a B sort of way. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.