Night of Vampyrmania – review

Director: Richard J. Thomson

Release date: 1993

Contains spoilers

The oddly named Night of Vampyrmania was a straight to video French film that is a portmanteau film in which the segments and wraparound all deal with vampires. But what vampires… The worst of makeup effects, a Christmas theme and one of the best (conceptually) stakings on film (though, not great in how it was presented, only in concept).

The film starts with an eviscerated body – though the fuzzy vhs transfer left much to the imagination – lying beneath a monument and then we meet the priest…

son of Dracula

The priest segment is the wraparound – entitled the Last Son of Dracula, though we only get the title later. In this segment we see the priest leave a building, drive a car and then pull over to tell us of the battle between good and evil and Satan’s more terrible soldier, the vampire. He then directs us to watch the next film. In-between the two primary segments we see him hunt down the last son of Dracula, as the title suggests, and what makeup when he gets to him – rubbish plastic fangs and the worst bald cap you can imagine…

Santa

The first story is entitled Red Xmas and we see a woman, Agnes, window shopping in a Parisian night with a young lad (her brother), whilst carrying a present. We notice a creepy looking Santa watching them and following. The Santa is in an alley when he is followed, in turn, by two ne’er-do-wells. They confront him, pull a knife and try to rob him. He crushes the head of one with his bare hands and, as a third robber on a motor bike appears, grabs the second and bites him – causing the dying robber to warn the biker that Santa is a vampire. The biker chases him until tricked into riding into the Seine.

party people

Agnes and her brother gets to her friend’s house, where they are to spend Christmas Eve, and we see that Santa has caught up to them (no explanation as to how he found them), as they go in the brother sees him over the road. Myriam is having a rather tame Christmas party with friends (and no booze, though a bottle of rum does appear). The party is eventually invaded by loud ex-military neighbour Mr Schwarzkopf – complaining about the noise and then inserting himself into the party. Meanwhile Santa gets in through a skylight.

staked by Christmas tree

He kills a couple who had gone to a bedroom first and then descends into the house aiming to kill everyone. Daftness includes killing someone by throwing a table fork barely into their stomach and the vampire being killed – and it is this that is conceptually genius. The vampire is staked (though we do not see the penetration – after all they couldn’t even run to proper fangs) by Christmas tree… genius… The segment does have a twist I won’t spoil.

Jacques

The other primary segment is called Hell Taxi and it follows entirely annoying (and creepy) character Jacques as he tries to meet his new neighbour, Cindy. When we first meet him, he is spying on her by binocular. Meanwhile a music student gets a taxi and, on entry, chains appear round his arms and the driver, Drakul, takes him off to an abandoned building where he drugs him and goes at him with axe and hacksaw whilst collecting his blood.

Drakul with saw

Of course, Jacques sees the taxi (indeed he fails to be picked up by it) and Cindy is later kidnapped. He wants to rescue her but is also spurred into action by the appearance of Krulda, who shares Drakul’s face but escaped vampirism and can now materialise at will. Drakul is kidnapping people as vampires had been surviving on blood from hospitals but it was bad and making them ill and so he is farming victims to feed his people – why that needs axes and hacksaws is anyone’s guess…

fangs on show

So, there you go, the first story had little in the way of plot to it (the twist tying more into the priest’s spiel than the actual story) and the second had more, but it wasn’t very good. The acting was awful but not as bad as the effects. Mr Schwarzkopf struck me almost as a prototype for the character René in 2009 zombie flick La horde, though not anywhere as funny (or funny at all). This isn’t a great film and is almost (rightly) lost to the vagaries of time though it can be tracked down from specialist dvd-r sellers. 2 out of 10 (and the Christmas tree wins most of the score).

The imdb page is here.