This Dominick Brascia directed movie from 1988 certainly feels as though it is a product of its age. For the most part a werewolf story it is the opening of the film that interests me from a vampire genre point of view. Not that there is a vampire, but there certainly is belief in vampires.
It starts, in black and white, with Grandpa telling young Jim that werewolves and vampires are real and that he is one of the latter. He is really scaring the kid and doesn’t let up when Grandma tells him to. It seems he is drunk, perhaps, certainly bullying and abusive.
Grandpa goes off to sleep in his hammock. Jim, realising what must be done when confronted with a vampire, approaches with stake and hammer and rams that wood through the old man’s ticker. Of course, a stake will kill a mortal human as much as it will a vampire… And that’s almost it, claiming to be a vampire (more than acting as one, I feel) and a belief in vampires leading to parricide.
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| grandpa staked |
Cut forward and Jim is lead singer with wannabe rock stars the Bad Boys. They keep getting hassle from the local police for being too loud in rehearsal, so the band, and a few girls, go to Jim’s farm – left to him by his grandmother – to practice out in the country. Only it seems the stories about werewolves, at least, were true. I said that killing Grandpa was almost it, clearly the murder has had an on-running effect on Jim and at one point he has a nightmare when those with him had fangs, so dreaming of vampires also.
The imdb page is here.
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