My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, I'm Out for Revenge! – Season 1 – review

Directors: Musashi Sakai and Katsushi Sakurabi

First aired: 2025

Contains spoilers

If you think that the title of this anime series is a mouthful, it is, though it is wonderfully descriptive of the plot and is a breeze next to the title of the light novel series it is based on: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World!

the Concord of the Tribes

It is set in a fantasy realm with nine tribes and main character Light (Nina Tamaki (Japanese)/Shannon Emerick (English)) is a human who gained an innate gift of an Unlimited Gacha – a power that allows him to summon unlimited cards that become real and offer support to him and his comrades. Unfortunately, every card seemed to be a dud. After being mugged by Beast Men he was offered a place in a party called the Concord of the Tribes whose stated aim was to work together across the nine races – as an adventuring party – in order to fight inter-tribe discrimination.

Light betrayed

This discrimination is, to be fair, mostly aimed at humans, who find it difficult to level up particularly highly (each character and card has a level, much like a RPG/video game, humans max at around 100) and are treated as slaves in many kingdoms. However, in one of the most dangerous dungeons (known as the Abyss and, given its danger calling it a backwater seems off), Light’s companions betrayed him and tried to kill him. They had been tasked to see if he was a Maestro (a predicted, powerful being) and after deciding he was no threat they look to kill him.

Mai rescues Light

Luckily, Light accidentally triggered a teleportation trap during the attack and ended up in the lowest part of the abyss. About to be killed by a Hell Hound he released a card and gained the Level 9999 support character Mai (Ikumi Hasegawa (Japanese)/Molly Searcy (English)), a super ultra rare card. It turns out that the gacha uses ambient mana to summon and there is little on the surface but, in the lowest abyss, it is abundant. Mai kills the Hell Hound and then spends three years training Light to level 9999 – he uses magic to suspend aging to remain as he was when betrayed. The aim is to get revenge on the party. He uses the unlimited gacha to create a whole kingdom in the abyss and it is here the vampire element comes in.

Nazuna and her card

Including Mai, Light has four level 9999 allies (allies may be the wrong word, every summoned person has fierce loyalty to Light) and this includes Nazuna (Hana Hishikawa (Japanese)/ Chaney Moore (English)) a true vampire knight. She is ridiculously strong and – if the anime character follows the novel version – a half vampire and so does not need to drink blood. We certainly never see her do so. She is displayed as a little bit slow-witted, light-hearted but, like the others, fiercely loyal. She is not used overly much in season 1 but she is very much there.

sacer arbor and victim

I also need to mention that another of the four, the witch Ellie (Ayumi Mano (Japanese)/Ginger Sue (English)) summons a sacer arbor – blood sucking trees that feed off her enemies and the more they are fed the further they can grow. The show has a touch of harem to it, with the summoned female characters all focused, sometime romantically or sexually, at Light - that said it is not nearly as obsessed with sex as some vehicles. There is a large undercurrent that discusses racism openly and a lot of characters are drawn negatively. The most negative thing around Light is his single-minded aim at revenge both at the party (he gets two of them in season one) and the world but, by the end, he gets a redemption narrative aiming at ending discrimination.

Nazuna shows fang

The UK Blu-Ray hasn’t much in the line of extras (just clean opening and ending title animations) but does have both English and Japanese audio. The English audio was actually excellently done – special mention to level 5000 character Gold (Katsuya Miyamoto (Japanese)/John Gremillion (English)) whose English dialogue was excellent, funnily written and great to see British colloquialisms like chuffed and twat creeping into the dialogue. The series really held my attention, indeed I absolutely binged it, the animation was as good as one would expect from a modern anime and this was definitely worth a watch. 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Grindsploitation – review

Director: Various

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

Coming from Troma, Grindsploitation was sort of an anthology based around exploitation cinema. I say sort of as most of its 2.5 hour running time was made up of fake trailers for films. There are a couple of shorts in there, but mostly it’s the trailers. Some of the later volumes of grindsploitation (I believe there are 14 at the time of writing) had a few more shorts that this one did, balancing the trailer to short ratio better.

The Girl Who Once Drank Blood

The vampire orientated parts of this looked at first to be all trailers. The first was for a fake film called Arbor Day, directed by Jim Towns, and was possibly more genre interest than anything. The film purported to be one of plants becoming aware, mobile and deadly and it gets on the radar when the question is asked, “Trees don’t drink blood?” We are in the realm of vampiric vegetation. Then there was the Shane Ryan directed The Girl Who Once Drank Blood – again, ostensibly vampiric the girl (Amelia Rose) does apparently drink blood. There needs to be a mention of the Alexander Emmert directed The Wendigo, because of the crossover that can happen – though this seems to be the antlered variant (we only see the antlers).

Cannibal Vampire... From Outer Space

The next trailer to look at, by Tony Masiello, was definitely vamp, however. For the fake film Cannibal Vampire Call-Girl Hookers From Outer Space Part 3, it was well into the exploitation camp and I wouldn’t blink if I actually found a series of films with that name. Then we got the first vampire related short in the form of Ruben Rodriguez’ No Strings Attached. A lonely girl (Andrea Castro) has placed a personal ad looking for a vampire and is on a date, in her apartment, with a guy (Chris Riquinha) dressed as a vampire. She is less than impressed and when he suggests getting it on (sooner rather than later as he has to get the costume back to the store) the date is over.

turned hungry

One he has gone, however, a woman (Marilena Rapalo) appears at the girl’s balcony door but when the girl threatens to call the cops the woman vanishes and then appears behind her. Fanged, she is the real deal and has a proposition. She will give the girl what she wants and make her a vampire, all she has to do is consent… which she does. The turning occurs by a spell and the girl is a vampire, the woman is mortal again and I liked the idea of passing the curse and freeing yourself. Unfortunately for the woman, the girl is hungry… and then the man returns as he has left his fangs behind…

Jimmy Olea as Uno

The final part to look at is another short, listed as Uno, directed by Reyna Young, it is subtitled in film as Uno: Badass Mariachi Vampire Hunter. Intertitles suggest that Uno (Jimmy Olea) hunts vampires with his sister Luna (Reyna Young) and brother Roberto (Adam Richardson). But Roberto has been kidnapped and the others are out to rescue him. We have seen Roberto bound with duct tape over the mouth and the rescue section consists of fighting four vampires – which the supposed badasses make heavy work of, especially as Uno insists on shooting vampires, which clearly has no impact. The last one tells them Roberto is dead before being killed. And that’s it…

Marilena Rapalo as a vampire

So, of the two shorts I was really impressed by the first but the second fell a little flat. The Uno character was clearly comedy orientated, and done in an exploitation manner, but the short suffered for having little story content – something that can impact short films of course. The full package, as it were, was a mixed bag but the heavy focus on the trailers overwhelmed the format a little and a better balance with shorts would have helped. It scores, of course, for the vampire bits and I think, on balance, 4 out of 10 is fair.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Circle City Supernatural – review

Director: J.P. Leck

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

This portmanteau film had an interesting conceit in that the wraparound was a radio show with host Lindsay Mallyn (Lindsay Leck), engineered by Sylvia Flores (Patty Najera-Esparza) and they were taking calls from citizens of Circle City who were telling their true tales of the supernatural on Halloween.

The segments of the films were then the stories but the interesting twist to this was that the caller told the story all the way through and the scenes complemented the voice rather than became the whole narrative – there was, therefore, a bit of an old-time radio feel to this.

Lindsay Leck as Lindsay

The stories were very inventive, for the most part, but lacked some level of bite due to the fact that, as the protagonist of the tale was the caller, you knew that there was no ultimate peril within the story. They also suffered due to budget. Take the zombie tale, which was a mother (Laura Morrison Richcreek) relating the dream her son (J.J. Taylor) had in detention, which she claims was a vision of the future – we see a too decayed to move zombie, detail lost in a hazmat suit, and a moving body bag but no other one despite the caller saying the school was full of them. The first story, Do Not Disturb, was an example of the interesting ones where the caller, Melody (Julia Leslie), walks through a mysterious door standing alone in a field and ends up in an old hotel. She recognised that this was something that took the form of the building to trap her but ultimately wanted to devour her.

Hudson Leck as Johnny

The vampire story was Fertile Ground where John (Dennis Hanley) calls in and tells the story from his childhood, when he was still called Johnny (Hudson Leck), and he was dared to go trick or treating in an abandoned part of town – whilst there seems no logic to this, it worked in that ‘kids and dares’ sort of way. Apparently that part of town was deserted after ‘the blight’ forced everyone out, the source being a carnivorous plant called the Thicket that attacked for blood. The detail that sunlight killed the plant was also mentioned, causing Lindsay to exclaim about vampire plants from Transylvania.

fighting the Thicket

The name the Thicket came from a man who died with the last seed and it had grown from his decaying flesh. As we follow Johnny deeper into a house he thought still occupied (though he found no-one), we end up descending into the cellar with him and there is what is left of the Thicket. There is also an old-fashioned pump sprayer. The plant is dormant and Johnny realises this as it emerges from dormancy as he touches it and the plant attacks – he fights back with the sprayer and escapes, though he takes a scarlet ‘acorn’ with him. He later figures out that the Thicket had been feeding on rats and the sprayer was rat poison – Warfarin based – and the plant was already dying having drunk the blood thinner from the rats. John is now dying and he intends to put the acorn in his coffin…

mysterious door

The story was interesting and it is always good to get a vampire plant. The plant itself was a puppet with a red metal maw that looked a tad silly, unfortunately, and it is another sign of the ideas the filmmakers had being grander than their budget would allow (puppets appeared in several stories, working best in the actual haunted puppets story). So, there are some good ideas here, some really good ones, if I’m fair, but the conceit that feeds them also hamstrings them by taking away peril (as I mentioned). The film has its flaws certainly but I have to admire the inventive concepts and the effort to reach beyond the budget. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Please Don't Eat My Mother! – review

Director: Carl Monson

Release date: 1973

Contains spoilers

We have looked several times at films about vampiric plants and, to be sure, the Venus Flytrap is displayed as vampiric in the classic Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). However, the reason for listing this as a vampire film is down to the Little Shop of Horrors because, having listed the Corman film as a vampire film it follows that this low-brow rip-off of the film is one also.

This is a sex-comedy and when I say sex, well let’s just say there certainly weren’t intimacy coordinators involved in this one. With nudity and, likely, actual sexual acts this doesn’t quite become a hardcore film but the sex is prominent (and more than a tad creepy).

lunchtime voyeurism

The film starts with a couple in a car. He is clearly randy and she (Flora Weisel) is unsure, after all he is married. He encourages her to have a drink, to relax, and soon they are making out. Watching this, whilst eating his lunch, is Henry Fudd (Buck Kartalian, Monster Squad). Henry is a middle-aged virgin, who lives with his mother and has a knack of finding couples making out/having sex and watching them. The film has three couples in the film that he watches – the first two scenes are cut into multiple sections, clearly intended to be different days but each a continuation of the previous scene. The final scene is not treated like that and is continuous. The second time he watches this couple there is another voyeur watching and Henry shares his lunch with him.

with Eve

Before that, however, Henry is walking past a florist’s (more like a lot than a store) when he hears a strange noise. He follows it and reckons it is coming from a plant and so buys it. The plant, which is clearly a prop, looks a tad yonic and the plant, as it grows, also has a Venus Flytrap element to its design. Anyway, Henry sneaks in past his harridan mother (Lynn Lundgren) and feeds the plant some pro-pro grow plant food. At this point the plant (which has a female voice and is coded female, and later referred to as Eve) comments (to herself) that the plant food is really good stuff.

growing

Soon, however, she is talking to Henry (with whom she makes it clear, eventually, that she wishes to stay platonic with – he’s a mammal after all). At first she asks his to supply flies – and as he has to catch them (we only see him catch the one but he does later have more captured off screen) this kind of codes him as Renfield. However as she grows (and her plant pot mysteriously grows also) her tastes move on to frogs, and then dogs (with cats as a dessert). At this point Henry takes a second job in the pound. Eventually his mother breaks into his room, convinced that there is a woman in there, and is eaten and the plant has progressed to being a people eater.

eating the cop

In the main she wants young women – she eats a cop (Carl Monson) who comes snooping and keeps spitting out his badge and gun; the spitting of the gun lifted from the earlier Corman film. The plant sometimes emits smoke, which I assume is a carnivorous plant version of a fart. We later also get Henry forced to purchase a male plant (with male voice) called Adam. Adam and Eve do reproduce. The comedy in this is generally poor and Henry, in truth, is more than a little creepy. The sex scenes are thrown in ad nauseum, as this was aimed at that sex-comedy market, and this is far from the pleasing film Little Shop of Horrors proved to be. Nevertheless, this film apes the earlier film entirely. 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

#DRCL midnight children, Vol. 1 – review

Art and story: Shin'ichi Sakamoto

First published: 2023 (UK)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Dracula meets manga in this surreally beautiful and chilling retelling of Bram Stoker’s quintessential horror classic.

In this beautiful, evocative, and often surreal retelling of Dracula, a fearsome enemy comes from the east, bringing with it horrors the likes of which have never been seen in the British Empire. Standing opposed are Wilhelmina "Mina" Murray and her stalwart companions, united in a cabal that eclipses gender, nationality, and station until they can achieve victory.

The work of the devil dashes Russian cargo ship the Demeter upon the cliffs of Whitby Harbour, unleashing a demonic plague onto the unsuspecting students of Whitby School. Meanwhile, Mina struggles to find her place as the only girl at the male-dominated academy. She will have to prove herself when this unspeakable evil lays claim to her beloved companion Lucy Westerna.

vampiric vines

The review: I spotted this hardback volume, the first of a series, and was struck by the artwork. This is a retelling, a reimagination even, of Dracula and begins with the Demeter. It starts with the mate going to the captain having seen a shadowy figure on deck. The captain notices a growth covering the mate’s back, pulls on it and rips away moss, growing on him, the roots penetrating into his flesh, his blood… and I was hooked. This, for me, is a rewilding of the tale. Back to taking on the cargo and the ship has both several crates with the adornment D as well as plants bound for England. A Romanian sailor tastes the earth in one of the 'D' crates (it is rotten and he is now tainted), a cut hand drips blood, which causes sprouts to suddenly grow from the tainted soil. Eventually, with the voyage having taken a dark turn, the captain realises that indentations in the crates can be positioned to show a figure – as though Dracula is disaggregated across the crates. Those who are tainted attack the rest of the crew, as do vines that come from the crates, the captain is saved by his cross.

It is a stunning, wild opening with imagination playing with the contagion of vampirism in a wonderful way. The Crew of Light in this are all at a school in Whitby but are constructed differently from the novel; Arthur is still son of Lord Godalming though school age, Quincy is African American and Joe Sewa is Japanese. They all look down on Mina – a working class Lancashire lass, whose humble beginnings and gender draws derision (she is the first female student at the school, on a scholarship). Jonathan only appears in flashback, where he is a child in a wheelchair with Mina and may be her brother, and is mentioned as being in Transylvania, There is also Luke, drawn with a feminine form but coded male. At night Luke's spirit, Lucy, takes over and is coded female and friends with Mina (something not remembered when Luke) this adds a gender fluidity to the character and a queering to the attraction that Arthur feels. Joe looks after a student, Renfield, who is chained in his room and not only drawn female but also drawn wearing a nun’s habit. As you can tell this is a very different and surreal look at the story. Dracula, when we eventually see him, is almost a chthonic figure, a chaos taking form.

The art is magnificent all the way through, the story surreal and yet recognisably Dracula, the use of gender, class and race is interesting and will lead to the knowledge that the #DRCL infection “shall spread regardless of race, station, sex, or age” and it is likely that stepping beyond these distinctions will be needed to combat it. I am smitten. 8.5 out of 10.

In Hardback @ Amazon US

In Hardback @ Amazon UK

Mandrake – review

Director: Tripp Reed

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

First things first, this is a Syfy film and so you can gauge the quality on that fact. I watched it primarily because I thought it might fall into the realm of vampiric plants and it does, kind of, it is arguably a vampiric landscape but… And there is a but… we might see some death by plant but there is little indication of blood drinking. The dialogue does steer us that way though.

It starts with a woman running through the jungle. After a while she backtracks carefully, to hide her retreat by stepping backwards onto her footprints and then peels off to the side. She is being hunted by two somethings and they appear to be monstrous – later they are revealed to be Yambarri (the indigenous tribe) warriors in elaborate helmets etc. Despite her ruse she is caught.

the team

A group of travellers arrive at a small Latin American airport, they have been paid to help locate treasure in the jungle and so one, Lin (Wayne Pére), is an archaeologist and another, Carla (Jon Mack, Drakul), an anthropologist (and linguist). The third is a soldier for hire, McCall (Max Martini), and it is he that the border guard are not happy about until their contact, Santiago (Nick Gomez, Vampire Riderz & Vampires Suck), greases the wheels. The area they are heading in to is contested ground between government and rebels but the rebel leader has given an undertaking to be out of the area for a couple of days.

the dagger

They don’t head to basecamp, rather they are sent orders to go straight to the area where the artifact they are looking for is meant to be. That artifact is a conquistador’s dagger that the businessman who has bankrolled the expedition, Harry Vargas (Benito Martinez), covets as it belonged to an ancestor. They reach the area and find an indigenous graveyard and find the one tomb mispositioned (laying North/South rather than East/West. It has glyphs on the stonework but Lin doesn’t wait for Carla to translate and opens the tomb. Inside is the remains of the conquistador and the dagger buried in the position of the heart.

stabbed by vine

Removing the dagger causes something like a seismic shock to hit the area, Lin ends up strung up in a trap and Yambarri warriors attack them. The group gets split up and McCall is dismissive of reports of the jungle attacking the others – until he sees it himself. So, what’s happened? The story as it comes out is the Yambarri were invaded by the conquistadors and so their shamans summoned something to save them. This appears to be the jungle brought to life in the form of a kind of plant/animal hybrid. Having said that it also appears that the jungle itself attacks the invaders. However the creature was a killing machine attacking invaders and Yambarri alike and so they created a totem using the hilt of the conquistador’s knife attached to a Yambarri blade and, by stabbing the invader in the heart, they made the beast dormant. Removing the blade awakens it… so kind of a stake equivalent but using sympathetic magic (stabbing a sacrifice rather than the creature itself).

sacrifice

This doesn’t quite add up as the woman from the beginning was part of a team sent in first (that our guys didn’t know about). The team are dead and she was held – and then sacrificed to the creature (though, again it might be more to the jungle itself) once it was awakened but the inference was they sacrificed outsiders anyway. The sacrifice sees them tied to a sacrificial stone, the shaman (J. LaRose) summoning the creature and vines cocooning the victim who is subsequently ripped in half by the vines.

J. LaRose as the shaman

What we do not see is blood drinking, however we get reference to it. The shaman, when telling the backstory, translated by Carla, suggested the creature was summoned to drink the blood of the invaders. The warning glyphs mention this too but say that the jungle feeds on the blood of invaders. The team, at one point, use fire, which it doesn’t like but it doesn’t kill it (and as an avatar of the jungle, if that’s what it is, then it wouldn’t) – ultimately, they must find a way to make it dormant again. A couple of points, reminiscent of vampiric plant film Ruins had the area devoid of animal and bird noise and a person stabbed by a vine subsequently having vines moving below the skin.

the creature

It isn’t a great film, the creature cgi looks poor for a start, and it has some awful moments – such as Carla attending to a leg wound (where the vine has stabbed into a character) whilst saying she knows about field dressings and then applying a tourniquet below the wound rather than above. We also get a moment where a camp worker hears something in the undergrowth (that sounded like Keyop from Battle of the Planets) and is grabbed and dragged off. Was it the Yambarri or the jungle itself? The film doesn’t say. Incidentally the film didn’t seem to mention the (not indigenous) mandrake of the title, so I’m not sure why the film has the title it does. However, as a Syfy flick it is about right. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

The Woman Eater – review

Director: Charles Saunders

Release date: 1958

Contains spoilers

Another film I have to thank Simon Bacon for; this is an obscure British horror flick and has an interesting premise, a plot hole that a fleet of London buses can pass through and more 50s misogyny and casual racism attached to it than you can shake a stick at.

Not that it’s a totally terrible film, though this is mostly down to a sterling central performance by George Coulouris who plays the central antagonist role.

at the Explorer's Club

It starts off with Dr Moran (George Coulouris, Tower of Evil & A Clockwork Orange) going to the Explorer’s Club. He tells the story given by a dying explorer of a tribe in the Amazon, probably Inca in origin (who, of course, did not inhabit the Amazon Basin), who had a "juju" that could return the dead to life, and he was going out there the next week. He persuades a young man to go with him, despite another explorer warning that Moran is a strange fellow.

Marpessa Dawn as the sacrifice

In the jungle and Moran has jungle fever but they press on. They get to a clearing where a ceremony takes place. A native, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughn), plays Bongos as a witchdoctor dances and a woman (Marpessa Dawn) is mesmerised. The young Englishman charges in to stop the ceremony and gets a spear in the chest. The mesmerised woman is led forward to a tree with grasping arms and screams… An undisclosed amount of time later and other Englishmen recover Moran, now deep in jungle fever, and take him home. So, racism… it lies in the fact that the film codes anyone not white as part of a homogenous whole… there were Amazon tribes-people clearly of African heritage, the Incas, as mentioned, did not live in that part of South America and Juju itself is a term from Central and West Africa.

Jimmy Vaughn as Tanga

Anyway. Five-years later, in England and Tanga is playing the tom toms again, but in Dr Moran’s basement/laboratory and a woman is mesmerised until the moment before she is thrown into the grasping arms of the carnivorous tree. How Tanga and the tree came to be in England and more importantly why Tanga is working with Moran are points never answered – it becomes, however, the central plot hole as Tanga is, it transpires, only playing along with Moran. Moran for his part is having Tanga extract a fluid from the tree – produced after it has devoured a woman – which will bring the dead to life. He is then trying to boost its efficiency and testing it on a disembodied heart.

Jack and Sally

Moran is a mad scientist, yes, but also a representation of the misogyny in the film. He states at one point, when talking about his goal and the women he is sacrificing, “What's a few worthless lives compared to what I'm giving the world. It's turning death into life.” Women, to him, are worthless then and he treats his ex-lover turned housekeeper, Margaret (Joyce Gregg), with absolute disdain. Into the household comes Sally (Vera Day), a young lady looking for work. She is treated shoddily by her recently met beau Jack (Peter Forbes-Robertson) but agrees to marry him (though Moran has designs on her himself). The police are looking for a missing girl as well.

tree with victim

The tree is, one suggests, vampiric vegetation. It eats people, yes, but is more than just carnivorous as Moran suggests that those eaten become one with the tree. It then, as mentioned, produces a liquid that can bring the dead back to life. What Moran does not know is that Tanga and his people have only revealed half the secret and the body returns but not the mind – creating a zombie. Fire is effective against the plant given its nature. The plant does not give an indication, in film, of being conscious or sentient but it doesn’t attack the men when stood by it and only seems to go for women. It is worshipped by Tanga and his people as a God (so, again, how did Moran manage to get it). Despite the serious issues, however, there is fun to be had and George Coulouris, as mentioned, gives a sterling and deranged central performance. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

The Ruins – review

Director: Carter Smith

Release date: 2008

Contains spoilers

Thanks to Simon Bacon who put me on to this, suggesting it contains “all manner of vampy vegetation”. Based on a novel by Scott B Smith this does, in my opinion, if not owe a debt, certainly brings H G Wells’ The Flowering of the Strange Orchid to mind. That is no bad thing.

The film begins with a woman in the dark, terrified and alone. Soon something pulls her deeper into the dark. After scenes of rain forest we are by the pool in Mexico where best friends Amy (Jena Malone, the Neon Demon) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) are with their boyfriends Jeff (Jonathan Tucker, Masters of Horror - Dance of the Dead) and Eric (Shawn Ashmore).

Jena Malone as Amy

Amy realises she has lost one of her favourite earrings when German tourist Mathias (Joe Anderson, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2) approaches with it. They get talking and he mentions being there with his brother who has gone off with an archaeologist to see a Mayan temple that isn’t on the maps and he is going out to find them the next day. He invites the gang along. That night Amy gets very drunk and, when Jeff goes to bed, dances with and then tries to kiss Mathias until Stacy stops her.

the ruins

The next day Amy is rather ill and doesn’t want to go but Jeff persuades her. They travel by bus, Greek Dimitri (Dimitri Baveas) going with them (his fellow travellers left behind as they are worse for wear after a boozy night). They take a taxi (read pickup truck) the rest of the way, the reticence of the taxi driver (Patricio Almeida Rodriguez) overcome by money. They are dropped by Heinrich’s truck and make their way on foot – Amy, in flipflops, not impressed. By a river they see a couple of Mayan girls on a cliff above them and Mathias moves foliage revealing a hidden path (the nature of it giving Amy bad vibes). At the end of the path they reach the pyramid, which is covered in vines with red flowers, with only the steps upwards clear.

the Mayans

They move to it when a horseman (Sergio Calderón) rides in. He dismounts and starts yelling in Maya language whilst waving a gun. More armed riders arrive and the gang desperately try to communicate. Amy takes a snap of him and he becomes angrier and Dimitri takes the camera and tries to take it to him but, as he approaches, a bowman fires an arrow into him and the leader shoots him in the head. The gang run up the pyramid and find the archaeologists’ camp, but no people, on the top and a shaft down into the structure. At the foot of the structure more Mayans arrive and create a camp. So, what’s going on?

at the top

As the story progresses, we discover that the vines are vampiric, and intelligent it would seem. They cover the pyramid, encroaching onto the top, and are also lining the shaft and spread throughout the inner temple – one might question how, given the lack of sunlight, but it is as well to read that the consumption of blood replaces the need for photosynthesis. The vines themselves seem to have spread – by touch – spores onto the clothing of the gang, which is growing like mold. The Mayan villagers are essentially quarantining the gang to stop any spread (we see them salt the earth around the pyramid), they kill if one of the quarantined move away from the pyramid but otherwise are content to leave them to the vines.

stealing amputated legs

The vines are fast moving and, in the night, Stacy gets one wrapped round her leg and feeding from a wound she sustained. They think they pull the vine out of the wound but later we see tendrils moving under the skin and spreading. Mathias breaks his back early on and Jeff (a med school student) decides he needs to amputate his injured and vine attacked legs (after incorrectly suggesting septicaemia is a bone issue). As soon as the lower limbs are removed (below the knees) vines reach out, grab the limbs and pull them away.

sucked dry

The vines can also mimic, through the flowers vibrating, luring into a mass of them by emulating a cell phone ring (which they believe is Heinrich’s) and also emulating voices and other sounds. It seemed that they were also able to manipulate Stacy, once inside her, making her think she hears the sound of Eric and Amy having sex (or possibly that was simply the result of her descending into madness because of the things moving inside her). We do, at one point, see the archaeologist who seems drained to a dried-up husk – so at times we get a sense of flesh eating but at others a sense that it is the bodily fluids (primarily the blood) that are wanted. There is an observation that birds and animals avoid the pyramid and one wonders then (given its remoteness and lack of knowledge of its whereabouts) how the vines manage to sustain life – they might fall back on photosynthesis perhaps, but it isn’t a question addressed in the film.

sent mad

This was actually rather fun and one I hadn’t really considered for watching until Simon mentioned it. Of course, it is good to see vampiric plants once in a while and I think this should get 6 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Up-coming: Plant Week

For the next week on TMtV I will be concentrating on three films that fall under the banner of Vampiric Plants. Plants and vampires being conflated is nothing new. In folklore, ethnologist Tatomir Vukanović suggested that there was a belief in vampire watermelons. His findings (reprinted in Jan L. Perkowski’s Vampire Lore) suggested:

The belief in vampires of plant origin occurs among Gs. [Gypsies] who belong to the Mosl. faith in KM [Kosovo-Metohija]. According to them there are only two plants which are regarded as likely to turn into vampires: pumpkins of every kind and water-melons. And the change takes place when they are 'fighting one another.' In Podrima and Prizrenski Podgor they consider this transformation occurs if these ground fruit have been kept for more than ten days: then the gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like 'brrrl, brrrl, brrrl!' and begin to shake themselves. It is also believed that sometimes a trace of blood can be seen on the pumpkin, and the Gs. then say it has become a vampire. These pumpkins and melons go round the houses, stables, and rooms at night, all by themselves, and do harm to people. But it is thought that they cannot do great damage to folk, so people are not very afraid of this kind of vampire.

Vukanović was unique in reporting this belief and there is, of course, a chance that those he spoke to were having fun at his expense. Stepping out of folklore and into literature, there is the fine example from 1894 in the form of HG Wells’ The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, a story that can be read as a cautionary tale warning that man cannot tame nature but there is a reading where, like many of the fin de siècle vampire tales, the story represents a fear of reverse colonialism. Fitting, perhaps, as all the films we will see in the coming week have an aspect of colonial (or post-colonial) invasion.

Illustrative images from Little Shop of Horrors and the Creepshow episode Mums.

DC vs. Vampires: All-Out War Part 2 – review

Written by: Matthew Rosenberg, Alex Paknadel, Matthew K Manning, Danny Lore & Mirka Andolfo

Art: Illustrated by: Pasquale Qualand, Francesco Mortasino, Acky Bright, Haining & Mirka Andolfo

First published: 2023 (THB)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: With Baron Cinder and his lieutenants kept occupied by the mother of all diversions, the team attempts a daring raid on the Blood Farm to retrieve the one person who can bring sunlight back to the world.

However, they have not reckoned on the terrifying presence of the Baron’s vampire knights-familiar faces whose blades are every bit as bloodthirsty as they are. And that's just the beginning of the team's troubles!

Follow along in DC vs. Vampires: All-Out War Part 2, collecting DC vs. Vampires: All Out War #4-6, and DC vs. Vampires: Killers #1!

The review: Following on from All Out War: Part 1 This concludes the side project in the DC Vs Vampires series. Following Mary Marvel, Deathstroke and others as they raid Baron Cinder’s blood farm and then, having failed, move on to Central City and discover another way that they might get the sunlight back (which will allow Supergirl to power up). Unfortunately, Superman is also there and vampire (how he has managed to keep his sunlight dependent strength is explained, at least partially).

What I found really interesting in this one was the idea that Mary Batson (the child alter ego of Mary Marvel) has been turned into a vampire but her magical, immortal body has not (equally her brother Billy is the other way round, with the child human but the Captain Marvel persona a vampire). I found the ending a tad off with the story, just in terms that it did leave a thread hanging. I did, however, really enjoy the additional story that explains how Harley Quinn’s blood becomes poisonous to vampires and the very short piece about Poison Ivy and what the vampirism, merged with her physiology and her connection to The Green, becomes. 7 out of 10.

In Hardback @ Amazon US

In Hardback @ Amazon UK