Sammy Slick: Vampire Slayer – review

Director: Christopher Leto

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

Sneaking onto Amazon’s VoD, comes Sammy Slick: Vampire Slayer and I have to admit I like the artwork, a little reminiscent of the art for I Had a Bloody Good Time at House Harker but with a definite sense of style.

Artwork aside there is some decent photography in here, a sense of professionalism for an indie (and, I understand, crowdfunded) flick but there are aspects that are a little off also and I get the feeling the filmmakers could have tidied some aspects up a little and exploited other aspects a bit as well.

Klein Wong as Sammy Slick

The setting is Ybor City, Florida and we see a man, soon to be revealed as the eponymous Sammy Slick (Klein Wong). He realises that someone is trailing him and just before a street corner goes into a run. The pursuer chases and finds Sammy stood waiting. After suggesting that the guy doesn’t know who he is, he stakes him. He gets into the entrance area to a building and another vampire stands before him, two come up behind. He fights the first, staking him, and the other two run away.

breaking the fourth wall

In the building is his office and his secretary Ash (Ariella Aegen) tells him he has an appointment. In his office he breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience and explains that he is a vampire hunter and a private eye and goes through some of the lore. They have fangs, drink blood, don’t reflect and need invitations. However, they like garlic, can go out in sunlight, are very charming and have a weird lavender aroma. He uses a custom silver stake (as we see the grain later, wood painted silver) but crosses don’t work – this, we discover at the end, isn’t entirely true. He has hunted vampires for four years and hates them.

Barbora Sulova as Sofia

Later he does another fourth wall break for more information, including the fact that a vampire does not turn a human and they reproduce amongst their own kind – making them a separate species. I get that direct to the audience exposition allows an easy way to get the rules over but it really felt like more could have been done with the fourth wall breaks. Anyway, his appointment arrives. She is Shana (Arielle Fray), a stripper, and she thinks her new boss, Sofia (Barbora Sulova), is a vampire. She explains that regulars are going missing and then describes an attack she witnessed on a smoke break.

vampire kill

He checks the club out (he doesn’t take Ash, though she asks) and decides that it may well be a vampire hide out and gets out of there as fast as possible. The next morning, he is woken by a knock at his apartment door and it’s a delivery. He invites the deliveryman in and then realises his mistake. There is a skirmish and the vampire gets away. Sammy and Ash decide it would be better to stay close but they are attacked on the way to his apartment – an attack foiled by Ash and a pencil to the vampire’s neck (distracting him for Sammy to then stake). Turns out she was a vampire hunter too and had sought out Sammy for a job… one wonders why that hadn’t come out in the two months she had worked for him prior (I mean, the gal has firearm stake launchers in the boot of her car).

double bite

Its little things like that in the story that makes the narrative struggle. There is a whole network of vampire hunters apparently and the police cover up messes (the vampires go into a cgi dissolution but a cop covers up a human body left in Sammy’s bed) and yet dozens of men are going missing and the cops are nowhere in sight generally and hunter backup is not called. Sofia is a Vampirus (or big bad female vampire) and all the dancers (bar Shana) are vampires – making one wonder why they kept a non-vampire on the books and alive. So, there were bits of the story that just didn’t hang right for me. The action wasn’t particularly convincing either – I understand Klein Wong is a cage fighter so I suspect that is down to choreography or direction rather than the actor’s skill.

Ash and Sammy

However, the central characters worked well, especially due to Ariella Aegen’s screen presence. She just felt very natural with an infectious smile that added to the humorous back and forth between her and Sammy. The comedy was lowkey. The vampiric imagery, when we got it, was rather good – a sequence with vampires biting hypnotised/drugged (the film didn’t say) humans in the club after hours had some great shots. I need to mention D'Andre Noiré who played a half-vampire/half-human who had been created in a lab (suggesting cross species breeding isn’t a thing), who was a hit man for the vampires – he just oozed screen presence.

D'Andre Noiré as Shock and Awe

This had promise and I wanted to like it a lot more than I did – but it wasn’t terrible, it was just things that occur through indie/budget filmmaking. Some of the locations were a tad off, the club for instance was just a big space, some chairs at the wall and naked girls with dancing punters – it didn’t feel like a club (lack of stage, for one thing). The script could have been tightened (after repeated incursions into his apartment, you’d have thought he would have actually gone to ash’s home instead, or how Sofia’s right hand, Izzy (Honeylet Conlu) had somehow heard a rumour that the hunters were going to trail Sofia home… where did she get the intel? Only Sammy and Ash knew about the plan) and the action made more impactful. Nevertheless, it was worth the time spent watching and 4 out of 10 should be read with the thought that this is a block to build upon.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK