Jakob’s Wife – Blu-Ray Review

Director: Travis Stevens

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

As you’ll see if you look at my original review of Jakob’s Wife I rated it rather highly – indeed the film went straight into my all time Top 100 Vampire films and, for me, is definitely a contender for the best vampire flick of 2021. With it getting a UK Blu-Ray release it seemed a perfect time to revisit the film and have a look at the Blu-Ray contents.

Barbara Crampton as Anne

Of course, when revisiting a film that I rated so highly there is a degree of trepidation – will the film stand up to a subsequent watch and I’m pleased to report this did, and I stand by the original score. The film itself focuses on Anne (Barbara Crampton, God of Vampires, Replace & the Sisterhood) and her husband Jakob (Larry Fessenden) and it is their fantastic performances that carry the film.

Larry Fessenden as Jakob

Jakob is a preacher and Anne his wife, whose existence has become second fiddle to his, for instance with him habitually talking over her as though her opinion is meaningless, and we see her becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her lot in life. She almost has an affair with an old flame, Tom Lowe (Robert Rusler, Vamp), but backs away from the temptation after a kiss – but at that moment a vampire (Bonnie Aarons) enters the equation, killing Tom and biting Anne. The vampire, looking a lot like Orlock and referred to as the Master but gender-swapped, very much represents female emancipation from the patriarchy (particularly the Christian patriarchy in this case). The film uses the performances, a streak of dark comedy and a bucket full of gore to entertain.

Bonnie Aarons as the Master

The Blu-Ray looks beautiful and vibrantly captures the use of colour scheme and lighting that Travis Stevens deliberately used as he plotted Anne’s move from timid preacher’s wife to independent woman (vampire) who demands that her husband treat her as an equal. The Blu-Ray extras are a set of deleted scenes and a “making of feature”. The deleted scenes are fully realised, rather than rushes, and I think pretty much deleted for pacing/run time reasons. The one that might have added to the film is the search for the presumed missing first victim, Amelia (Nyisha Bell), and only because it offered a sense of time passing that was missing in the film’s cut. The making of is not really a making of but, rather, a very short set of cast interviews with Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, Bonnie Aarons and Robert Rusler. It is nice to have some form of extras but these are very much "extras-lite" and a real making of, or perhaps a director’s commentary, would have been more welcome – that said the film is a must see and a necessary part of a vampire genre fan’s collection (see the original review for film score). The UK Blu-Ray is slated for a January 10th 2022 release.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Jakob’s Wife – review

Director: Travis Stevens

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

When I first noticed Jakob’s Wife, and watched the trailer I found myself immediately excited. The trailer looked great and it starred Larry Fessenden whose output both as actor and director I love. Of course, it is often a mistake getting excited for a film, you raise those expectations past a point that the film can reach and end up more disappointed than you would have been going in cold.

I’m happy to report, not this time. If anything this rose above those expectations and was such great fun – a character study, a social commentary, a black comedy with the added joy of some very gory moments. Fessenden was fantastic but his performance was eclipsed, in some respects, but also complemented by the stellar performance by the star of the film Barbara Crampton (God of Vampires, Replace & the Sisterhood).

Jakob preaches

It starts with a church, we hear a squeaking and see two rats outside in the carpark. Inside Jakob (Larry Fessenden), who is the pastor, gives a sermon about how husbands should love their wives but his own wife, Anne (Barbara Crampton), looks less than happy. As people leave, they speak to Jakob, including a young woman, Amelia (Nyisha Bell). She is asked why she is there on her own, she admits her mother has started drinking again and Jakob offers to go to their home.

Nyisha Bell as Amelia

The camera follows Amelia on her long trek home. She gets to a sparsely populated area, ironically where she lives, when she hears a noise. Scared she looks around and then visibly jumps when she notices the rats at her feet. She heads to home but a whisper in the dark says her name. She stops, looks around as something descends slowly behind her… The next day the local sheriff, Mike (Jay DeVon Johnson), comes to see Jakob and Anne – Amelia is missing, but, of course, they cannot shed light on her disappearance.

not domestic bliss

Later that day Jakob’s brother, Bob (Mark Kelly, Angel), and his wife, Carol (Sarah Lind, Blade the Series), have dinner with Jakob and Anne. The conversation gravitates to the missing girl – after some stereotyped guessing of what may have happened, the viewpoints steeped in patriarchy. Anne, in response, states that good people just don’t leave their families. Once their guests have left, we see Jakob cleaning his teeth and then snoring in bed and rolling into her – Anne, for her part, seems aggravated by her husband. In the morning she mentions that a Mill-renovation proposal she was involved in has been accepted and they have a locally born designer coming to help – Tom Lowe (Robert Rusler, Vamp). Jakob makes a point in saying that Tom is her old flame.

in the mill

Anne meets Tom and they have a drink and reminisce and we hear aspects of Anne coming through that perhaps have been buried, her dreams and adventurousness. Tom admits he would not have guessed her marrying Jakob but she says that her mother died, just after Tom left the area, and Jakob, and the church, were there for her. They go out to the mill, clearly implied to have been the place of youthful trysts, and inside he kisses her. She hesitates and then kisses him back but a noise has them descending to the lower level. They find two crates and sit on them, they kiss again but she breaks away – she can’t do it to Jakob.

traumatised

The crate lid starts moving. They open it and there are a couple of rats. The other crate does the same and Tom opens it revealing a mass of rats that attack him, shredding his flesh. Anne backs away as something swoops down upon her… Jakob is phoning to track Anne down as it is late and she comes in, she is silhouetted on the stairs as she says she is going to bed so he doesn’t see that, under her clutched bag, her blouse is soaked in blood. In the bathroom, in a marvellous moment of acting, she is hysterical, hyperventilating – wounded and devastated we can feel her trauma.

Anne changes

So, we then follow Anne and her changes. We get some standard tropes – the wearing of a scarf to hide the bites, the loss of appetite, the being drawn to myoglobin in meat packaging and asking the butcher for blood (which she drinks and subsequently vomits graphically as animal blood is no good). This comes with increased strength, new teeth coming through (behind her front teeth as these are Nosferatu-styled fangs) and, whilst she does move around in daylight, her mouth is burned by the dentist’s UV teeth whitener. However, the bigger change is in her personality, she gains confidence and feels (as she puts it) alive.

Bonnie Aarons as the Master

Now I don't think it too much of a spoiler to reveal that the Master (Bonnie Aarons) is portrayed as Orlock gender-swapped. In this the vampire represents freedom and the vampirism is emancipation from the patriarchy – be that the Judeo-Christian patriarchy that Jakob represents or the wider forms of patriarchy in the form of authority figures such as the sheriff or familial figures such as Bob. Even Tom objectifies and projects his view of what she is onto her. The changes the vampirism brings shifts the dynamics of her marriage, something that Jakob rails against at first and the film is as much 'can he accept a marriage of equals' as 'can he save his wife'?

the Master attacks

Further lore that is worth noting includes the fact that whilst holding the bible seems to fail Jakob at one point, religious items are efficient – be that holy water, or a communion wafer that is placed onto the soil where a vampire has been buried and causes the ground to smoke. This is as much symbols of the patriarchy impacting the feminine as the standard good vs evil. The Master can control minds, a controlled human’s eyes misting over, and cause them to self-harm. Feeding turns (I say feeding rather than a bite as we see a turn after a throat is cut by nails, the head wrenched aside and the blood drunk as it spurts upwards) and a stake to the heart kills. I have mentioned the rats, which the Master can control, and she can also open up another’s sexuality – as she does when, from a distance, she causes Anne to become lost in sensuality.

Anne's new strength

There are some neat streaks of black comedy running through the film – checking on an elderly parishioner, finding her dead and stealing her body to harvest blood, and the subsequent interaction with a neighbourhood kid, are played for dark laughs. But that side does not overpower the character drama. The film does not shy away from blood either and we get a few very bloody attacks. Larry Fessenden offers simply one of the best performances I have seen him give but the show is stolen, very much, by Barbara Crampton who is magnificent. That having been said their performances also complement each other.

I really did like this one – 9 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

The Sisterhood – review

Director: David DeCoteau

Release date: 2004

Contains spoilers

I guess that it is just about time that I reviewed a DeCoteau film. I have, lurking in my collection, I’ve Been Watching You – which will need reviewing at some point – and Ring of Darkness – needing a ‘Vamp or Not?’ – but for now we concentrate on this.

Now for those who don’t know, DeCoteau is a prolific horror director who is also openly gay and, as a result, does like to put a homoerotic edge into his films. Even in this, where the concentration is on a sorority with a bit of rampant lesbianism, he manages to get buff guys posing in open shirts or lounging around in black shorts. Trouble is, of course, that it is nothing but low level (and very softcore) sexploitation, there is no great furthering of gay cinema in his works for his works are, as far as I have seen, piffle.

This begins with a guy (with black shorts) and a girl getting it on. Now the nudity in these films is… well it isn’t, there is always underwear in the way. Be that as it may they are having a good time when someone comes in – we only see a leg. The girl apologises and runs and is pursued. She runs from the house – the sorority house of Beta Alpha Tau (BATs), just check out the sign.

Why were her actions a problem and is our blue neon faced pursuer the main vampire? Who knows, the film reveals nada about this later but, assuming the pursuer is the vampire, it is pretty darn ineffectual. This girl in underwear can out-dodge the chaser willy nilly. Eventually, however, she gets to the building roof and takes a tumble.

Cut forward in time and Christine (Jennifer Holland) is attending a new school. She shares a room with Reagen (Kate Plec). Christine is majoring in chemistry but takes a psych class taught by Ms Masters (Barbara Crampton). In there she meets Josh (Storm David Newton). Masters goes on about psychic phenomena and then a floating pen writes Christine on the white board (unseen by the class it seems). Christine freaks and runs. Josh chases after and they talk about inane things and then she bumps into Masters who says her reaction was understandable!

What we later discover is that this probably is in context of the fact that Christine’s parents died recently. Anyway Masters does some psychic testing and discovers that Christine is very psychic – Hell, her eyes flash purple as she puts candles out by thought alone! Masters tries to recruit her as an agent to infiltrate BATs as they may be evil… as it is Reagen wants to join the sorority and Christine gets drawn in after Josh (who declares that he is saving himself for marriage) stands her up.

Masters gives Christine a cross as protection but then singularly fails to tell the girl anything about what she knows… talk about working in the dark. Later, when Christine questions the evil of the sorority and sorority leader Devin (Michelle Borth), Masters says that she should look in the cellar – a suggestion that is then ignored for the rest of the film.

“Where are the vampires?” you might ask and, other than the question mark over neon face at the beginning, it would be a fair question. We seem to get a crash course in lesbian temptation, Devin and her friends can go out in the sun and the cross, whilst annoying to Devin, is soon disposed of. Certainly Devin can cast spells on folks and get what she wants. Little of this is (specifically or at all) vampiric. That will come, for 30 seconds at the end of the film.

It is all centred on the initiation into the sorority. Devin produces fangs and, after a quick psychic blast by Christine, Masters can stake her. It is somewhat of a damp squib as the whole vampiric appearance weighs in at not a lot of time at all. As for Christine is she good, is she bad – she flip flops in attitude more than a freshly caught fish gasping for air on the deck of a trawler.

There is a vampire coda set in a coffin but that is too little too late. We have sat through MTV style cuts, poor film stock and some of the lamest acting I‘ve seen for quite some time and the money-shot, so to speak, is subsumed by being short, uninteresting and boring. As for lore, not a lot is known. Devin has psychic powers and likes to corrupt. She has been around for 400 years. That’s about it.

It is not a good film, with a mixed up story, poor locations, bad effects (given its relative newness) and really poor acting. One to avoid, methinks. 1 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

God of Vampires – review

Director: Rob Fitz

Release date: 2010

Contains spoilers

The problem with indie film-making can often be that the filmmakers can’t see the woods for the trees. How much more so could that have been with a film that the filmmaker started working on a massive ten years ago? The first thing I really should say is that God of Vampires maintains a purity of vision that belies that first statement. It is a gritty, grainy affair that is far from Hollywood perfect in many respects and yet I sat watching it with a big old smile on my face.

The next thing to note is that God of Vampires is a kyonsi (or Kiang-shi) movie. Now these are primarily, as we know, a product of Hong Kong cinema. In fact the other such movie that springs to mind, hailing from the US, is the Jitters - a particularly awful film. I can tell you at this stage that God of Vampires beats it on every level by a country mile.

Frank Ng (Dharma Lin) is a hitman. His latest job has taken him to the lair of a Chinese crime boss (Bruce Harrington). He is ruthlessly efficient as he silently takes out the guards and, in a moment of neatly done comedy, manages to talk to a truancy officer (Barbara Crampton) about his brother Bobby (Clayton Huyne) as well as salesman. Ultimately the boss manages to take himself out, clumsily tripping over a body and discharging the shotgun he carried into himself.

Frank and Bobby’s parents are dead and Frank is the boy’s guardian. Of course he isn’t a conventional role model. Frank goes to the fixer (Pete O’Herne) a never seen paranoiac who pays him for the last job and passes him the details of the new one. It is simply the name of, and meeting place for, a contact.

He meets his new customer who offers him a million dollars gives him the vaguest of descriptions in respect of the target and then states that he wants the head as proof. Frank doesn’t even blink at the request but the price goes up by $200,000 for the beheading. He raids his new target's hideout, following the men who are taking a kidnapped girl to him and terminating any person in his path.

The target is a long haired gentleman with rather sharp nails (Shyaporn Theerakulstit). The girl pulls away a talisman from his wrist and he stabs her. Frank comes up behind him and puts a bullet in his head and two in his belly. He prizes the girls fingers open and takes the talisman, just as the man stands again. His skin now seems dead and he attacks Frank who just manages to get out of there alive.

He goes to the fixer, holds the talisman up to the hall camera and states that the target wasn’t human. The fixer will look into it and Frank says he’ll be in a better place – a bar down the road. One of his contacts comes in with some information (essentially the address of a Chinese restaurant) but with the disturbing news that the fixer is dead. As he leaves the contact looses his head, literally.

The kyonsi enters a better place and slaughters the customers, except for Frank. He proclaims himself as Frank’s God and tells him that he will cause Frank to suffer. Everyone he loves, everyone he knows, even those he casually brushes by in the street will die. Frank goes to the restaurant and meets the herbalist Uncle Ping (Ben Wang). It is down to them, the restaurant staff and a customer called Percy (Craig Ciampa), to stop the kyonsi.

Rob Fitz did change kyonsi lore around quite a bit, but that’s okay given it seems to change from film to film anyway. The kyonsi we have met is the master and only he can make others. These are our blind kyonsi – hunting people’s breath – and are so because the master removes their eyes. He does this to make them subservient as the removal of the eyes rips away the part of the soul that resides there.

The turning process involves ritual magic – there is no bite and turn element to this. The master turns Bobby at one point and Frank finds him tied with a sackcloth over his head. When he removes it the boy vomits a liquid at him and then grabs him with a rather long tongue. This is entirely new lore and Uncle Ping actually states that he didn’t know they could do that.

The restaurant guys certainly don’t know their Chinese vampire lore and create crosses and stakes. However we see the master staked to no avail and he suggests that beheading will only inconvenience him. To be killed they must have a Chinese death certificate placed on their head (and a really neat way of mass producing these is added in film) and then they must be dismembered by a blessed blade.

In a rather nice scene – before their crash course in kyonsi lore – a pair of vampire lifestylers come into the restaurant. The waiters hold up a cross and the man (Brett Bergeron) licks it, in an exaggerated style. Thinking him to be a vampire he is held down and staked, much to the consternation of his date (Consey Beck). She doesn’t last long as an actual kyonsi chooses that moment to attack.

The film is great fun. If I had to liken it to anything it would be along the lines of El Mariachi, not in content or style but in spirit, a low budget film the belies and surpasses its budget by having something rather special at its heart. The film does more right with its action sequences than many high budget cousins and there are buckets of blood – which in truth start a little pink in colour but improve as the film progresses. The grainy nature of the film (and it does appear to have been shot on film) actually lends a positive aspect to the movie.

There are sound issues. The dialogue seemed very slightly out of whack, making it appeared dubbed. This may have been deliberate and, if it wasn’t, actually managed to work giving the film a dubbed Hong Kong film feel. More problematic was the fact that the dialogue was a little low in the mix next to the soundtrack. The soundtrack worked but dialogue could be lost a little – especially the head kyonsi’s dialogue given the fact that there were effects (it appeared) on the voice. Not enough to lower the score but noticeable enough to mention.

As I mentioned, I watched this with a big old smile plastered on my face and that is the effect a film should have. 7 out of 10 for a labour of love that really paid off.

The imdb page is here and the homepage is here.

Honourable Mention: The Boulet Brothers’ Halfway to Halloween Special

Drag stars the Boulet Brothers (aka as Dracmorda Boulet and Swanthula Boulet) are probably best known for their horror themed drag contest Dragula. Halfway to Halloween is a TV special created exclusively for Shudder and released in May 2023 (half way… you get the picture) that is actually a variety and sketch show. It was directed by The Boulet Brothers with both Nathan Noyes and Michael Varrati directing segments.

I was a little shocked, as I watched it, that there was a lot less drag than I thought there would be. In fact they have a large number of celebrity appearances including Kevin Smith, Matthew Lillard and Barbara Crampton. With a range of comedy-based sketches covering a range of the horror genre.

feeding

The segment that brings about this mention is one staring Dracmorda and Swanthula. In black and white with intertitles, and deliberately looking like a stage, we see them take a blindfolded and bound man by boat to where their coffins are. They feed on him and retreat into their coffins. Within they transform into bat creature type vamps who drive and sing (mime) to Rasputina’s track Transylvanian Concubine.

bat mode

That’s it, a musical number but with some great visuals (the coffins are fabulous), but no real story as such. It’s pure horror drag done for the small screen.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon UK

On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon US

Vamp or Not? Replace

Replace is a 2017 body horror directed by Norbert Keil and after vacillating between this article or just outright declaring vampire and reviewing the film I decided to run with the ‘Vamp or Not?’ because I want to explain my motivation for classing this as part of the genre .

It is kind of difficult, sometimes, to watch a film and know that, whether consciously or otherwise, the filmmakers have essentially took the core strictures of the genre and built something with it. You then suggest it might well fall into the vampire camp and people nod in that way that suggests they believe you are mad/obsessed/both.

opening corridor scene

The underlying genre aspect reared its head right from the beginning. Having seen a female figure, Kira Mabon (Rebecca Forsythe), silhouetted in a corridor, clearly blood on the plastic backdrop, we hear her speak. She states that she doesn’t want to grow old, she remonstrates that she needs *more* (though not what of). There is a Báthory-esque element to this, and it ties the film instantly to a certain sub-stratum of the genre. We then see her with Jonas (Sean Knopp), their conversation set around the gender politics of aging, they go back to his place and she strips…

the strange skin condition

In the morning she awakens and he is not there. She leaves to walk home, ringing a friend who hangs up on her (given what we discover, it isn’t clear who she is speaking to). She finds herself back at his apartment but somehow she has the keys and, as she moves around the apartment, we realise it is actually her apartment. She washes her hand and notices that the skin has become white and flaking. She has an hallucinatory flash where she sees a child.

Rebecca Forsythe as Kyra

She finds a photo of her and Jonas and notices that the skin condition has spread to two fingers. The skin rips to raw flesh beneath. There is a knock at the door. She looks through the spy hole and sees two elderly ladies and then she collapses in pain. By the time she opens the door they have gone but a neighbour, Sophia (Lucie Aron), appears and catches her as she collapses again. In the flat Sophia suggests that they had not met before but she moved in a few months previously and had been hoping to meet Kira. She does not recall Jonas at all. They have a drink and a glass is broken, ripping some of Sophia’s skin. Kira takes it and places it over her flaking skin and it seems to absorb, replacing the small patch of flaking skin it touched.

creepy doctor in creepy clinic

So, as things progress kira goes to a clinic to see a doctor, Crober (Barbara Crampton), who suggests that she has been treating her for some time (in her really creepy, black and red décor clinic). Kira has complained about memory loss previously. Crober gives her a script for pain relief whilst she does tests (though the pharmacist suggests it is for a cell rejuvenator). Overnight the condition spreads and she goes to a less salubrious hospital – but the doctor is of no use. She sneaks into the morgue and cuts skin from a corpse but it does not absorb – she is nearly caught.

Lucie Aron as Sophia

She goes to a bar and, at the end of the night when she is the only customer, she follows the barmaid into a cellar area and attacks her. She stabs the woman in the neck and cuts the skin from her and this takes, curing the spreading decay. What we then discover is that she seems to be suffering from a cellular degeneration of the skin cells, which are ageing and dying rapidly. To cure this she murders, to take the skin and layer it over her own. So in the vampiric sense she is maintaining youth but, rather than bathing in blood ala Báthory, she is stealing skin but she is murdering in order to do so.

hallucinating what should be

The further twist (and so spoiler) is that the creepy surgery is behind all of this as Kira was an elderly woman who was prepared to do anything to regain her youth and (amongst others) volunteered for experimental (and obviously dangerous) treatment. The visions she has are resurfacing memories of her old life, of her husband before he left her for a younger woman, of her daughter as a little girl. At one point she hallucinates her reflection as she should be, a nice twist on mirror-lore. The ability to regenerate herself with someone else’s skin is an unexpected side-effect of the treatment but ultimately we can say she was created by science.

a victim for later use

In the end, whilst the modus operandi is stealing skin, this takes the Báthory trope and plays with it. The desperate attempt to maintain life – at the expense of another – the fear of age, the almost addictive nature of her cure (on a psychological level) are all picked from the genre and, ultimately, makes this a part of the genre. This film is definitely Vamp.

The imdb page is here.

Little Bites – review

Director: Spider One

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers  

Is Little Bites a vampire film? Well there is certainly something vampiric going on and central monster Agyar (Jon Sklaroff) shares his name with the titular character of a vampire novel by Steven Brust, though this is unconnected. Director Spider One also directed vampire film Bury the Bride, so one assumes the vampiric activity was deliberate.

Mindy and Agyar

It starts with Mindy Vogel (Krsy Fox, Bury the Bride & Underworld: Evolution) sat in a darkened area with the aforementioned Agyar. He states that he is hungry and she tries to direct him to a leg, but he wants the arm. She protests, it is infected and needs time to recover, any worse and she will have to go to hospital – something he protests and, of course, he ends up with her arm, which he bites and suckles at.

Mindy looks ill

He is a monster that lives in her cellar and is feeding repeatedly from her over time. She is become more and more exhausted and ill, dark rings around her eyes and her body a patchwork of wounds (there is a full chunk of flesh missing from her back but in the main they are bite marks and so it is clear that he is sucking her blood). He actually wants her ten-year-old daughter Alice (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro) but Mindy has sent her to stay with her grandmother (Bonnie Aarons, Jakob’s Wife). As grandma doesn’t know what is going on with mum, she is less than impressed. Mindy believes her sacrifice is protecting Alice.

Jon Sklaroff as Agyar

Things become more awkward when someone tips off child protective services and a caseworker, Sonya Whitfield (Barbara Crampton) pitches up and wants to speak to Alice. As the film progresses, we get Mindy trying to feed Agyar from alternative sources and a realisation of where her strength actually lies. Agyar declines one meal as they taste of misery and despair and he prefers the taste of someone with something to lose – Mindy. We also discover he does not feed from the dead (which is an occasionally used vampire trope) and that he can simply devour a person whole and in one go in a matter of minutes (and will then lick the room clean).

multiple wounds

This was interesting and was carried in main by Krsy Fox, though Jon Sklaroff is charmingly sinister. Agyar has done this before – we actually meet someone who appears to be a previous victim and he talks of the many others. However as interesting and quirky as this was the ending jarred a little as it relied on a reaction from Alice that the film hadn’t built to. Beyond that the main thrust was Nietzschean, dwelling on “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Overall, this was a neat little horror jaunt 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US