V-Wars: Blood & Fire: a Chronicle of the Vampire Wars - review

Editor: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2014

Contains spoilers

The blurb: When anyone can turn.

When every street is a war zone.

Our world will burn.

Our world will bleed.

There is nowhere to run!

It's been one year since a virus triggered junk DNA and people all over the world started changing. Becoming something else. Craving blood.

It's been 10 months since the word "vampire" stopped being something from old monster stories and Hollywood movies.

It's been six months since our world and theirs erupted into war.

It's been two months since an uneasy peace was signed.

It's been one hour says that peace was shattered.

War is here again.

The Vampire War.

The review: Regular readers will know that I thoroughly enjoyed the first V-Wars volume and also enjoyed the first V-Wars graphic novel, though admittedly less so than the prose. For those unaware of the series, V-Wars is set in a world where a virus, released from ice drilling, has activated junk DNA in certain people around the world mutating than into vampires. There are a whole range of vampires dependent on genetic background. Indeed in this volume we discover that in this world they have seen and 92 species, including 18 subtypes not in literature. Folklorist Luther Swann postulates that could leave nearly 200 species from folklore as possible new species and further hybrids are possible beyond this.

Like the first volume, this volume is made up of short stories by different authors set in the universe and interspersed between each other. The writing is tight throughout, and the stories entertaining. As somewhat of a vampire geek part of the joy is the wide variety of vampire types used, although purists who prefer their vampires Slavic may be a little disappointed. In this volume I noted the following vampire types: draugr, kyonsi, a snake vampire whose species is not named (but the character has featured in both volumes), upor, cihuateteo, mandurugo (with aswang mentioned in passing), craqueuhhe, neuntöter (which are said to be covered in pustules containing pathogens, making them a plague carrier), nelapsi (with alp mentioned in passing) and kallikantzaros.

Werewolves do feature in this, but as a creature born of the ice virus it is suggested they are a subspecies of vampire. In the V-Wars universe the humans had only come across a few werewolves including a loup garou, and were hunting a vampire killing werewolf serial killer of another variety. Swann does list folklore variants including vampire/werewolf hybrids such as the pryccolitch or the Haitian loogaroo, who were said to be witches that shed their skins at night to become vampire/werewolf hybrids. Others mentioned are the mjertovjec (said to become a vampire on death), the lobishomen and the farkaskoldus.

Whilst many vampires in the V-Wars universe are blood drinkers or flesh eaters the broader definition is a person who has an abnormal need to feed on one of several vital substances including energy. I liked the explanation of the mandurugo being thought to split in half due to their excellent chameleon-like skills, thus only revealing part of themselves to attack.

As I intimated earlier this is a superb volume, as good as the first volume. I do like the short story style breaking the book into vignettes. This could easily translate itself into episodes for a TV series or chapters in a portmanteau film. I think there is perhaps also room for dedicated single focused novels. That, of course, is a fan boy’s wish list, and for now I'll happily sit and wait for the next V-Wars volume. 9 out of 10.

V-Wars: Shockwaves

Edited by: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers

The blurb: The Vampire Wars are raging. We're all infected. Anyone can turn at any time. Your ally one minute could be at your throat the next. Or you go suddenly crave their blood. V-WARS: SHOCKWAVES chronicles the spread of bloodlust, bloodshed, and violence between the living and the undead.

The review: I am a fan of the V-Wars series; I make no secret of that. If you look at my reviews of the first three volumes (One, two & three). You’ll see that I have heaped praise (and 9 out of 10 reviews) on them.

It saddens me therefore that this volume sees a dip in quality. Now that is not to say it is bad. There are some damn fine stories in here. However, it isn’t entirely consistent. It does have some nice arc moments with the emergence of the Red Empire – a quasi-religious group who worship a messiah figure of the Red Emperor – that being patient zero Michael Fayne, who they believe will return and lead them. We also get a reveal, at the end of the volume, of the identity of the Crimson Queen.

For Mayberry fans there are cameos of Joe Ledger and other characters from the Ledger series. We get a welcome return of the V-Wars character Mooney in a tale and the stories range a little further internationally. We also discover that not all the vampires are as a result of the Ice Virus and that some strains had survived and were around before the virus activated junk DNA.

I was disappointed by the editorial decision to keep most of the shorts as complete pieces (bar Mayberry’s own Wet Works and Red Empire, which are split into the more familiar vignette format). There also seemed, despite containing a multitude of vampire types, less of a "who's who" list going on. One of the stories, Young Bloods by Mike Watts seemed slightly out of place, in that it felt that it was set out of the V-Wars at some point in the future, concentrating (as it does) on a vampire only school that had been around for over a decade. However this is the first volume where I have actually felt a story was not as well written as the rest of the volume. Silver and Lead by John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow just felt a little sub-par to me. Now that may be unfair as the quality of prose is so good generally, but it knocked my immersion in the volume.

8 out of 10.

V-Wars: Night Terrors – review

Editor: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers

The Blurb:

• The war is tearing our world apart. Instead of big armies with tanks in the field, the Vampire War is fought in the streets, neighbor against neighbor, family against family. Anyone can turn at any time. The blood hunger can suddenly appear in the middle of a kiss. The person who sleeps next to you every night could wake up in the dead of night...hungry. So hungry...



• V-Wars: Night Terrors collects all-new stories from the reporters embedded with the beats (humans) and the bloods (vampires). Each tale explores the nature of terror and peels back another layer of our comfort. Each tale bares our throat to the bite.



• New York Times Bestseller Jonathan Maberry and his team of front-line storytellers bring you all-new tales of horror and heroism, of pain and delight, of deadly despair and soaring courage. The war between beats and bloods is blazing. Pick a side.

The review: Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of V-Wars as a concept and a series and you can find my reviews of the first two volumes here and here. Whilst arguably the first V-War never really ended, this volume is set during the second V-War and one of the great things about the volumes is how the various authors pull your loyalties one way and another. One moment you may root for a human and the next a vampire. There are multiple shades of grey drawn and, even with a hint that there is a corruption within human Government encouraging the ethnic cleansing of the V-War, we are given the warning that even the most benign seeming V organisations – the court of the Crimson Queen – may not be the ideal it makes itself out to be.

This is underlined when, through the eyes of a truly innocent hybrid, we see the grassroots organisation Unity, which espouses mutual living and yet thinks nothing of holding humans prisoner as food for their interpretation of greater good.

Again it is a joy playing spot the vampire type. We are told there are 300 vampire species and 5800 known hybrids (plus hydra, a never before classified species and a one off. Hydra being a teenage girl whose regenerative powers are so strong she may be truly immortal). Lycanthropes generally are vampire types but there is a known (through DNA) true lycanthrope who has human and dire wolf DNA – this may be the person known only as Rancid and certainly Rancid is something else.

One interesting idea was allowing us to meet a male White Lady of Fau. Normally female this ethnically French type of vampire is a seducer and the male one we meet is gay. We meet a vampire (wurdulak) turned vampire hunter as she tries to stop the monsters she perceives herself and her kind to be. There are characters we have met before and new characters too.

V-Wars is begging for a TV series. It’s clever and sassy and there is a wild variety of vampire types that could be played with in that format. In the meantime we have the books and this one holds its own against the others in the series, the use of multiple writers with Maberry’s overall control allowing the series to remain fresh and yet follow its path without irrelevant meandering. 9 out of 10.

V-Wars – review

Editor: Jonathon Maberry

First Published: 2013

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: They are already here.

They hide among us.

They hunt us.

They feed on us.

They ARE us.

V-Wars is the chronicle of the first Vampire War. From the savage murders committed by the patient zero of the plague to full-out battles with vampire terrorist cells, these are the stories of the most terrifying war mankind has ever faced!

The review: With a comic book currently available and a potential TV series, I thought it time I finally got around to V-Wars. The original book is a collection of shorts edited by (and contributed to by) Jonathon Maberry but the authors all had a common world and backstory to stick to. This backstory is shown to us by Maberry in a story entitled Junk. In Junk a b movie actor named Michael Fayne starts having blackouts. Fayne was patient zero for a flu virus known as ice flu (or I1V1), one that had been trapped in ice and released through global warming and that Fayne had contracted whilst filming on location in Alaska.

The blackouts occur as Fayne mutates, the virus causing junk DNA to activate and turn him into a vampire – he is caught because of the trail of decimated bodies he leaves behind but, of course, he is only the first. I would suggest that there is nothing supernatural about the vampires in V-Wars but that wouldn’t be strictly true. Whilst they are mutated individuals, and living rather than undead, they take on the vampiric form that their ancestry correlates with. We get a wurdulac, the woman being of Russian extraction, who can only feed on those she cares for and can turn victims, we get a snake vampire, we get a Jiangshi (Kyonsi) who has to do stretches each day to stop his tendons from becoming taut (the kyonsi is drawn folklore accurately; covered in white hair and has a monster face) and a Hsi-Hsue-Kuei that takes the form of a green haired ogre. Essentially every vampire type is catered for in this universe. As well as this some turn into Loup-Garou and others more traditional werewolves that are natural enemies of the vampires.

The transformations I mentioned (that do obey the law of mass and thus the mass remains constant) seem more supernatural (or praeternatural at least). When it comes to feeds we have similar. Whilst the wurdulac’s feeding seems almost a hard-wired psychological imperative, the kyonsi’s energy draining ability is again much more supernatural. The majority of vampires are blood drinkers, however, though some are flesh eaters and many have a need for human blood/flesh specifically.

Many of the stories are split into parts and the stories intermingle as we jump to just before the V-event to sometime after. We see the reaction of Government, US Homeland Security and the electorate. We see towns become lawless, or controlled by gangs. What we don’t see, I don’t believe, is all out war – but we see the start of such an event and the universe really does have legs enough to go on and on.

There isn't a bad story in the collection, and there isn’t any bad prose. It is all crisp, powerful stuff. Some of the vampires do become guilt-ridden but others revel in their condition. The only real shame of this volume is the time it has taken me to get to it. It is highly recommended and makes me really look forward to the release of the graphic trade paperback and the potential TV series. 9 out of 10.

V-Wars Volume 1: Crimson Queen

Writer: Jonathan Maberry

Art: Alan Robinson

First Published: 2012

Contains spoilers


The Blurb: New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry takes you on a non-stop thrill ride of action, horror and suspense! Welcome to the V-WARS! These all-new tales chronicling the early days of the Vampire Wars offers the first salvo in the battle between humans and hundreds of new species of vampires! No matter how it ends, The world is going to bleed.

The review: Set in the same universe as anthology prose book V-Wars this graphic novel series starts after the outbreak that has turned many members of the population into vampires.

It is very story orientated, following Luther Swann – a folklorist who is now presidential advisor regarding vampirism. He is assigned to an elite anti-vampire unit (V-8), to advise on the vampire types they encounter, though he himself feels war is not the way forward.

The undertone of racism, (domestic) terrorism and conspiracy are obvious from the get go. There are those in power who want no peace between Bloods and Beats but there are other players – the Court of the (title mentioned) Crimson Queen who see themselves as separate to the Bloods and are infiltrated into every level of society (the Court tend to be vampires who can pass for human) as they are right where they were before the ice virus mutated their DNA.

I was perhaps more taken by the prose volume and how it developed several unrelated (or vaguely related, at times) stories and concentrated on vampire types. In this we see the types but they are not identified and concentrated upon in the same way – indeed the vampires seem (mainly) to be cypher characters for V-8 to shoot at. However the ending of the graphic promised more depth to come. 7 out of 10.

V-Wars volume 2: All of us Monsters – review

Writer: Jonathan Maberry

Artists: Marco Turini & Alan Robinson

First Published: 2015

Contains spoilers

The blurb: Big Dog and V-8 are the top gunslingers in the escalating battle with vampire terrorists. But the hunt for a new and intensely brutal species of bloodsucker puts them in the crosshairs of the world's most dangerous special operative: Joe Ledger. And, the members of V-8 are tasked to hunt down and obtain plans for a stolen vampire gene screener. Collects issues #6-11

The review: After reading V-Wars volume 1 I was left with a sense that I really liked the graphic but it didn’t quite meet the level of the prose. However, with this volume I felt the game lifted, it fell into its own pattern comfortably. The first half of the graphic follows the special unit V-8 as they hunt a nelapsi - but all is not what it seems and they fall into the murky world of black ops and meet Joe Ledger (crossing over from Maberry’s popular Ledger series). The second part sees two members of V-8 following technology into Paris, but the two soldiers have some very real inner demons to battle, meanwhile folklorist Luther Swann makes a stand (helped by George Clooney) and tries to publically broker a peace between beats and bloods.

The stories worked well, the art complemented it and the real world character appearances were welcome as they offered an interesting undercurrent. The focus was much more on the shadowy governmental underbelly – with Agencies on all sides trying to get their hands on rare vampire types and technology. Blind obedience to a cause is questioned within the narrative.

All in all great stuff and the more I see of V-Wars the more I’m convinced it would make either great TV or even films. 8 out of 10.

Bad Blood – review

Author: Jonathan Maberry

Artist: Tyler Crook

First published: 2014

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Life was hard enough for Trick Croft as a college student and a cancer patient—then the vampires attacked and slaughtered his best friend. Now trick knows that his blood is poison to the bloodsuckers, and he will stop at nothing to eradiate them.

The review: A standalone book by Jonathan Maberry – whose V-Wars material has been featured on the blog before, I was greatly struck by this because of its story. Whilst V-Wars does look at individual stories the reader never forgets that we are looking at vignettes playing out on a larger stage. In this case we are focused on Trick and his personal story – despite there being a larger story unfolding unseen (to Trick and therefore mostly to us) in the background.

Trick is attacked by a newly awakened vampire prince, Lord Sturge, and his blood burns and sickens the creature. The Prince has slept through some of our technological advancements and it is the chemotherapy drugs that have made his blood unclean. The Prince promises to destroy everyone Trick knows and so Trick starts to hunt the vampires.

In his quest he slinks into the world of wannabe vampires and meets Lolly, who believes the 'dark ones' will make her a vampire if she is worthy and bides her time as a lap dancer. When she too is violently attacked they discover that her blood is poisonous also. They then meet the famed vampire hunter Jonas Vale who takes them under his wing and trains them.

We discover that the vampires they are up against are from the House of Swords (there are four houses named after the tarot suits) and Jonas suggests “vampires are ghosts. They return from the world of death to haunt the world of the living. They take on human form, but they’re not human. If you know how to look—to really see them—then their glamour becomes transparent and the monster’s true face is revealed.” To become a vampire you must die a violent death, devoid of hope – vampires thus invented human war.

The background was excellently realised and introduced neatly within the very real human story. The art work was lovely, a very light touch style that suited the story but graphic enough when it needed to be. This one is a must get. 8.5 out of 10.

Whistling Past the Graveyard – review

Author: Jonathan Maberry

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: A lonely, nerdy paperboy encounters ancient evil on the shadowy back roads of his home town. A little girl spends her nights dreaming of monsters and teaching herself the art of murder. Sherlock Holmes journeys to America for an encounter with the ghost of a murdered woman. A samurai sails to a forgotten island to battle the living dead. Special ops soldiers fly the void to fight space pirates. A heartbroken junkie seeks vengeance for his murdered friend. Whistling Past the Graveyard is the first print collection of short fiction by New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. These creepy tales of horror, suspense, adventure and mystery take readers to the troubled little town of Pine Deep, to the Feudal Japan of the Samurai, to the angry red planet of John Carter of Mars, and elsewhere. These are strange journeys through nightmare land, with a five-time Bram Stoker Award winner as your guide.

The Review: This is a collection of short stories by Jonathan Maberry, who we know primarily for his V-Wars series – though none of the stories in this collection are from that world.

The stories come from either from other Maberry worlds or are standalone and those connected to other series can be read without knowing the series. The collection contains four stories from his Pine Deep stories – one set before the three novel series and three afterwards. Now, I haven’t read those books (they are now on my wishlist) and the stories worked without that but as some of the characters come from that series, whether incidental in these or central, I can’t help but think I’d have got even more out of these having read the novels.

What we discover is that the country town of Pine Deep was a scene of a massacre known as the Trouble – officially the scene of domestic terrorism, where drugs were put in the water and the town tore itself apart in hallucinatory paranoia, thousands dying. In actuality there was a mass outbreak of vampirism, and I kind of got the impression of Salem’s Lot with a lot more death and destruction and fight back. The Trouble is covered in the trilogy of novels.

In this we get three post Trouble stories each with vampires featured one way or another – plus something that eats vampires in one story and vampires who avoid human blood (for survival’s sake) in another. In the pre-trilogy story, we actually get a haunted house that offers a glimpse of a broken future and feeds off the despair – so almost a vampiric building. This story really did strike me as one that fans of the Pine Deep books would really enjoy.

All the stories contained within were strong, to tell the truth. I particularly liked a period Japanese based story and an outbreak of Spanish disease (or zombies). I’m scoring, of course, for the vampire shorts and I was impressed with the fact that the author managed to hook into a wider series but also keep them accessible for someone who hadn’t read it. The writing was crisp, as I would expect from Maberry, the action explosive and the book eminently readable. 8 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

V-Wars: Season 1 – review

Director: Various

First Aired: 2019

Contains spoilers

This is a hard one to review. Overall I enjoyed watching it, and did so as a fan of the novels, but the movement away from some of the premises built in the book proved a weakness for the series overall – I get that often the filmed media has to take liberties with the source material but it was a difficulty on several grounds.

The first difference was slight, that the infection reactivating junk DNA was a prion rather than a virus. Once infected then someone with a certain ‘predator gene’ would start to transform into a vampire. The show concentrates on the initial outbreak, rather than pitching through different moments in time as the books do – this was a change that I understood.

arctic suicide

The series begins with a suicide in an arctic research centre. Doctor Luther Swann (Ian Somerhalder, the Vampire Diaries) is sent to find out why contact has been lost and takes his best friend Michael Fayne (Adrian Holmes). They both become ill but Fayne has the predator gene, Swann does not. This was an unfortunate series of changes – Fayne is patient zero in the books but is an actor who becomes infected on a shoot in Alaska. Swann is a folklorist and this makes him valuable to the Government in understanding the threat they face – making him a whizz scientist made the occasions he went out with the troops seem implausible.

Wurdulak bites

The issue (and the biggest change book to screen) with not having him a folklorist is that the vampires are for the most part rather generic; they have improved senses – seeing the blood rush under the skin, for instance – and a maw of fangs. There is an absolute lack of variance, however. We do meet a pair of wurdulaks – Danika (Kimberly-Sue Murray) was a casual lover of Fayne and gets infected that way. She infects her sister Mila (Laura Vandervoort, Dresden Files: Bad Blood, Mom’s Gat a date with a Vampire & Rabid). The wurdulak’s are shown having more traditional fangs and described as injecting a narcotic venom in their victims to keep them alive and pliant (rather than murdering their prey).

Laura Vandervoort as Mila

Whilst it was nice to have a general difference they are described in show (and in the books) as only preying on loved ones – having to forge an emotional bond with their victim before they can feed. We get that and yet Mila is able to eschew feeding for drinking blood bank acquired blood. Admittedly she looks like she is not enjoying it but a wurdulak should starve is they have no loved one to feed from and that was not covered at all. We get a sense that Mila is going out killing other bloods (as the vampires call themselves) but that thread was not taken far enough – but her hatred for her sister was a series highlight.

Adrian Holmes as Fayne

Other than that – as mentioned, the bloods are generic and that was the biggest miss – the programme makers could have had a different vampire per episode and that would have made this much more interesting. Instead we get a conspiracy by the DNS, rapidly constructed internment camps (that did nothing to quarantine people, indeed where was the CDC quarantine) and a villain in the form of Calix Niklos (Peter Outerbridge, Forever Knight) who is less sinister than he might have been. Indeed, the full Government conspiracy seemed somewhat contrived.

Ian Somerhalder as Swann

Not as contrived as the constant Deus ex Machina that leads to Swann miraculously escaping danger very often. Swann has been forced to kill his second wife (Jessica Harmon) and so his son, Des (Kyle Breitkopf, Being Human), is his primary focus – it is a shame therefore that Des is played through as a story cipher often, unfair on the actors who might have built a lot more of their relationship if the script had allowed for it. The last scene we see Swann in is, unfortunately, blooming ridiculous looking.

a vampire

However, if you put all the issues listed above aside, I found myself enjoying this little slice of nonsense. The disappointing part is that it could have been so much more. I hope, if they get a second season, they start exploring the vampire types in much more depth. I also hope that they forget where they took Swann in that coda because it isn’t conducive to an interesting, flawed but rounded character. Because I enjoyed it, 6 out of 10 reflects enjoyment versus the issues listed – not a bad score but given how highly I rate the books, a pity.

The imdb page is here.

Patient Seven – review

Director: Joel Morgan (segment)

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

The portmanteau film is more difficult than a simple anthology film because the surround somehow has to weave the tales together. Sometimes this weave is very loose. In this case it was made all the more difficult as the portmanteau stitched together previously made shorts – so the whole thing had not been a concept.

The portmanteau in this case is set in a mental institution and visiting celebratory psychiatrist Dr Marcus (Michael Ironside, Tales from the Crypt: Come the Dawn, Masters of Horror: The V Word & Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe) wants to interview six problem patients and he will use his treatment of them to form the basis of his new book.

Michael Ironside as Dr Marcus

The trouble is the patients are clearly not the persons in the shorts. So they might play the adult version of a child, or in the case of the superb section, the Body, the short depicts the dream that the patient (Daniel Lench) has of being in England and being a murder victim wrapped in plastic – hence his phobia of plastic wrap. The patient we are concerned with is patient number 6 (William Mark McCullough) who believes in vampires and paid a man to kill a number of vampires he had discovered.

the glare

This, of course, leads to the question of why the patient hadn’t killed them himself – especially as he appears keen to kill the last remaining vampire himself. Of course this is because the actor wasn’t in the short and there had to be an artificial hitch between portmanteau and short – this one failed to work in any form of satisfying way. However I will say that William Mark McCullough had a wonderfully intense glare that did work really well.

interviewing John

So, the short runs in the form of a man, John (Robin Berry, Suckablood) in a police cell being interviewed by D.I. Collins (Ayden Callaghan) regarding a series of murders – a girl staked in the heart, a man with his head cut off and a couple doused in acid. However, as John recalls the murders they were all vampires – one staked, one beheaded and the couple doused in holy water. The twist in the tail is a bit obvious, to be honest, but it is a nicely put together short if content low and just a bit of vampire eye candy, when all’s said and done.

vampire

So, the segment itself is nice enough to look at, with an obvious twist and little in the way of story. Its place in the portmanteau feels the most forced and it doesn’t have the black humour of the Body or the depth of some of the other shorts. Altogether this film worked – I am a sucker for portmanteau films, even reconstructed ones like this – I score this type of film on the vampire segment only and, in that, this struggled to raise itself above average. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Tales from the Crypt – Comes the Dawn – season 6 – review (TV episode)

Director: John Herzfeld

First aired: 1995

Contains spoilers

The astounding thing about this season 6 Tales from the Crypt episode, which I saw when it aired on Zone Horror, is the fact that it originally aired over a decade before the film of 30 Days of Night and, indeed, 9 years before the original 30 Days graphic novel. The episode itself was based on a story from The Haunt of Fear comic books and all that just goes to show there is little new in the world.

That’s not to say that this is the same as 30 Days of Night but the setting and over arching premise match.

Following a moment with the crypt keeper (John Kassir) sitting around with a bikini clad blonde we cut to a bar in Alaska and the barkeeper, Mona (Susan Tyrell), looks a little perturbed when a man enters the bar. He is Colonel Burrows (Michael Ironside) and he asks for a bottle of schnapps and two glasses. Of course Michael Ironside has appeared on the blog before, having been a vampire in the Master’s of Horror episode The V Word and Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe. This time he faces the vampires rather than is one.

The reason he has asked for two glasses is because his employee Sergeant Parker (Bruce Payne) comes through the door with both their bags. Again Payne is no stranger to these pages. He was Billy’s manager in the wonderfully strange Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire and the circus owner, and vampire, in Howling 6: the Freaks. In this he plays a none too pleasant character who immediately starts upon the bar keeper due to her lack of teeth.

Burrows is conciliatory, but it is for a reason. He is looking for a guide who is not concerned with hunting permits and endangered species lists. To the barkeep that sounds like her ex, Jeri (Vivian Wu), a person who would fish with dynamite. It does sound like Jeri would be the one, except Mona turned Jeri in to the sheriff herself as she doesn’t like poachers. She picks up the phone to call the sheriff about the newcomers but it appears that Parker shoots her – I say appears as we don’t really see any violence in this, just indications that it is happening.

They find Jeri – and double check that she is who they are looking for, presumably due to her gender. Jeri is refusing to help until the Colonel notices her purple heart won in Iraq. He was there also and ordered the bombing that he believes saved her. When she discovers this she agrees to act as their guide. She takes them to an abandoned weather station where grizzly bears now roam.

Inside, having started an outside generator, she shows them a grizzly track. The Colonel leaves Jeri and Parker to set traps whilst he checks the perimeter. Jeri is all too aware that the Colonel will be selling the bear’s organs on the black market and how much they might bring. She attempts to seduce Parker but his loyalty is to the Colonel. As it happens, the Colonel has discovered a severed bear’s head – he knows something is afoot and demand the truth from Jeri.

She gets away and takes out the generator. The hunters switch on flashlights and explore, and find a room with… well I don’t know what to be honest. They appeared to be bloody cocoons. Did they contain the vampires in dormant state? Were they food storage bags produced by the vampires? I honestly don’t know and the show didn’t see fit to explain at all – which is a bit frustrating. They discover the bags are rather sticky and back off.

A little girl appears and says she is lost. Parker realises that her temperature is too cold and she turns, showing fangs. Jeri then reappears. Her job is now looking after the townsfolk, who I guess are all vampires (Mona does reappear later, guns don’t kill vampires). Jeri was injured by the bombing in Iraq and her blood is now poisonous to the vampires (a reference, perhaps, to Gulf War Syndrome). The Colonel bombed his own men and so, far from saving her as he believed, he injured her and killed many of her comrades.

One of the two men will get out to face Mona, stake her off camera and then realise that it is 10 AM and still dark – 2 months of darkness a smiling Jeri will say as she lets the goblin like vampires into the cabin, which is the irony of the episode title of course. Which of the two that may be I won’t spoil but the reason for spoiling the twist was to show exactly why the episode pre-empted the 30 Day franchise.

None of the performances are bad but the entire thing is a little lacking. Perhaps it was the lack of actual action or gore? Perhaps it was because the vampires actually did very little? Perhaps it was because the lore was hinted at and then avoided like a vampire avoids the sun? Indeed the only thing we really discovered was that sunlight can kill these vampires, but at the time when the show was set that didn’t matter. A shame, as this could have been really good and instead it falls below average. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page for the episode is here.

Honourable Mention: Blood Lust

This Benedict Mart film from 2016 was one that I really wanted to be a straight-out vampire flick – though I know before watching it that it features sirens. Unfortunately, it came out a little less than a definitive genre pic, despite flesh eating. Maybe it was the hastily explained lore vs very little observable flesh eating. It is certainly of genre interest but just missed out having that definite V factor for me.

It starts with an artist, drawing on a rocky shoreline as he narrates for us the legend of the sirens – this fellow narrates a few times through the film. With sketches and some stills of the sirens themselves we are told of three sisters, in film revealed as Callie (Rikke Leigh), Lydia (Eloise Juryeff) and Tess (Helen Rule), tasked with accompanying (and, through that company, protecting) Persephone. But they abandon her and Hades kidnaps her and so the Gods fling the sisters to a distant island (somewhere off Britain) and turn them into the “ravenous” sirens. Whilst the sketches show them with wings, in film they only have human form.

Rikke Leigh as Calie

We get a scene with Chef Annie (Chloe Partridge) who is cooking whilst husband Dan (Matt Silver) looks on. He drops a heart she asks for and his comment makes it clear they have had relationship problems. He goes downstairs to throw the heart in the bin and someone clubs him from behind with a wrench. When he eventually comes round, in hospital three days later, he discovers that Annie is dead, murdered. Sometime later he is struggling with his job as a food critic as he can only face vegetarian food (much to his editor’s chagrin), not even when cooked by friend Ryan (C. Thomas Howell, Kindred the Embraced, Blood Wars, Mutant Vampire Zombies from the Hood & Justice League: Gods and Monsters). He has met and is falling for a woman online – she happens to be Callie.

the sisters together

So, long story short (though to be fair the film is quite short at 74 minutes), he becomes concerned when he hears strange things when Callie is on the phone to him and then cuts off contact. Then he gets a text message from her saying ‘Rescue me’ and so goes to the island where she runs a guest house with her sisters. It is readily explained that Lydia sent the text (and we also discover that should one of the sisters leave it will mean the death for all three – though I suspect that actually meant their immortality would end, otherwise why would any of them choose to leave). The sisters feed a drink to guests, which causes their secrets to come out, though they can also charm the stories with song, and they then eat the evil-doers.

the bite

There has to be more that isn’t explained as Lydia also lures Ryan to the island and so she must have some insight, though apparently not enough to simply know who is definitely bad and who is good. The issue is that whilst we get to see some stalking, a few (not overly gory) attacks and them cutting up meats, we get little in the way of horror level gore and no real feeding scenes (though we see them serve a cooked heart to hotel guests). We do get one neck bite – but it is more in anger than for feeding. It is within narration we are told by the narrator that they are “feasting on the guilty a little too eagerly” and so we know the fate of their victims through this but it all seems a little too shy, like the filmmakers pulled back from a horror that could have given us a vampiric narrative and failed to properly display the trope. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Dracula: The Original Living Vampire – review

Director: Maximilian Elfeldt

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

When the trailer for this flick surfaced, the alarm bells rang. The production company, the Asylum, are known for low grade films that cash in on bigger budget films. In this case it would seen to be an attempt to cash in on the alternative title for the forthcoming (and delayed) Morbius the Living Vampire (actually looking like it’ll just run on the title Morbius). The similarities start and end with the title I suspect.

The film actually wasn’t as God-awful as I expected but it certainly wasn’t great. The issue with the film are manifold as I’ll explain.

assignation

It starts with a pair of shadows crossing a bridge. The first a woman, her hair dyed and I’ll explain why that’s an issue in a second, the second a long haired, cloaked man – never seen directly at this point but quite obviously Dracula (Jake Herbert). As he approaches she seems rather pleased to see him and they kiss… cut to a bedroom and some sexual antics that end, unsurprisingly, in a scream (and not of pleasure). I have to mention that, when they meet, she appeared to have a flash of fang - that may have been just motivated perception on my part or indicative of it not being his first visit to her.

Stuart Packer as Renfield

Cut and, after some "Read All About It", we see Amelia Van Helsing (Christine Prouty) at the crime scene – the woman from the opening scene dead on the bed. Amelia is chief investigator into the rash of murders in the (unnamed) city. She discusses it with her boss – he isn’t named until a scene a little later but he is Captain Renfield (Stuart Packer). The press are sensationalising things, the headlines suggesting the killings being a copycat of murders a century past (the cops have done sue diligence and the creepy castle tied with those murders is empty).

Christine Prouty as Van Helsing

So, a couple of things here. The establishing shots suggest a fin de Siècle, perhaps early 1900s setting, with occasional carriages on the cgi manipulated streets. The houses seem to be lit primarily with candles rather than gas or electricity. However the clothing often feels more modern (at least for some of the characters) and the dyed red hair was distinctly a modern shade. Van Helsing carries a gun that, and I’m no weapons expert, feels WW2 era (perhaps modelled on a Mauser; Edit 21/1/22:  though it may have been a Luger, please see comments), but more she is lead detective (which feels out of era) and in an open lesbian relationship with Mina (India Lillie Davies), which again feels incongruous to the timeframe.

Michael Ironside as Seward

So, she goes and speaks to the coroner, Seward (Michael Ironside, Masters of Horror: The V Word, Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe, Tales from the Crypt: Come the Dawn & Patient Seven), but he can tell her very little – the body has a pair of punctures at the neck and is virtually emptied of blood. She takes a vial of what little blood is left to her friend and chemist (and occultist) Jonathan Harker (Ryan Woodcock). Meanwhile we see Renfield pass a file to the mysterious (in film plot terms but we all know he’s Dracula) murderer and call him master.

Jake Herbert as Dracula

That latter scene was both a shame and a grace – given that he’s called Renfield the film didn’t dangle a “is he good, is he bad” carrot before us – we know now he is working for the vampire and, given his name, we would have expected as much and it would only be a shock if he wasn’t. That said, there was some millage in not revealing it now and doing so more shockingly later. It is Jonathan who deduces it’s a vampire they're looking for – something Amelia is unwilling to accept – and Mina gets a new foreign dignitary client through her law firm, with a brief to help him purchase properties. Dracula has a hang-up about redheads and there is a reincarnated (or at least believed to be) love aspect.

Dracula's vamp face

All the normal tropes are there – Dracula can turn into a bat (or a mass of them to be honest), stakes kill, holy water burns, crosses ward and sunlight (as the Dracula megatext suggests) destroys. A bite can turn. Beyond this, and beyond the issue with when this was trying to suggest it was set, there is precious little atmosphere and the dialogue is distinctly average at best. The actors aren’t brilliant for the most part – unfortunately Jake Herbert just hasn’t the presence needed for Dracula and the later makeup when he vamps out is poor. Michael Ironside phones in his performance – however a performance phoned in by Ironside is still better than most. The lighting was particularly poor in places, not too dark per se, just gloomy, often without highlighting the character in shot.

Amelia and Mina

I noticed a direct referencing in the script to othering – but rather than the vampire being othered, Amelia accuses the murderer of othering and killing women. It works within the serial killer motivation context (and the term serial killer is used, which again does not fit the time period) and adds an academic layer of interest in terms of the othered monster othering victims. The Amelia and Mina relationship failed because of the incongruity with the time period – I don’t have an issue with queering parts of Dracula (I know there will be an accusation of it being 'woke' from some, but queering the vampire story is an integral part of the genre) but, let’s face it, it was far from original – after all a female Van Helsing has already been done. Not a great film but not as bad as expected – 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe - review

Directed by: Matthew Hastings

Release Date: 2005

Contains spoilers

It is a rare occasion when Amazon recommends a region 1 film to me, being that I live in Region 2 and, so, when they recommended this I thought; it’s cheap so I may as well. I fully expected to hate the movie and found myself pleasantly surprised. That is not to say that it is the best film in the world, this is a lower budget, take your brain out B movie and yet it has a certain something.

From the title (it also has an alternate title “Bloodsuckers”) you can tell that this is a sci-fi, in fact this owes much to Whedon’s “Firefly” (2002). Essentially we are in 2210 and humanity has colonised the stars, this is a pessimistic view of humanity, the type of humanity who would strip mine an entire planet. We have discovered that there is intelligent life out there and it is all vampiric.

The vampires are not the vampires of superstition, crosses, sunlight and holy water don’t work and there types are many and varied. We meet a few of the species in the movie. The first type we meet are the Voorhees. These are more your typical vampires, they are fast, can run up trees and are of a decent intelligence level. They heal too quickly to make conventional weapons much more than a slowing down tool and must be killed by penetrating the bony chest cavity and piercing the heart. Obviously their name is given in reference to the Friday the 13th (1980 onwards) movies.

When we enter the film a V-San (or vampire sanitation) crew from the starship Hieronymus (which I wondered whether was in reference to Boch or to the vampire hunting assistant in Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter) are cleaning up the voorhees gory mess. This is a rag-tag crew made up of Captain Churchill (Joe Lando), Roman Kuchinsky (Aaron Pearl), Rosa Wong (Leanne Adachi), half-vampire Quintana (Natassia Malthe) and rooky second in command Damian Underwood (Dominic Zamprogna).

It is through Underwood, on his first mission, that we are told much about the Voorhees. They appear to be flesh eaters, they can infect humans and turn them (as can many of the vampire species) and, when seen on scanners, they are rotten, skull like creatures.

Following the clean-up (and it is clean-up and not rescue) they get a distress call from a research station. There they find one survivor, Fiona (A J Cook) and we meet the next type of vampires, Leatherfaces (in reference to ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974)). This type of vampire hunts in large packs, they wear the skin of their victims as trophies and they are bleeders, shoot one and they will eventually bleed out. During the mission they loose Churchill and Underwood has to take command. The crew is at odds. We have heard that Underwood was booted out of the military because of a disaster that occurred and, we later discover, he took the blame for due to misplaced loyalty. Rosa and Roman blame him for Churchill’s death, they also dislike Quintana because of her vampiric nature. Underwood has realised that the defence systems of the research station had been shut off prior to the attack and suspects foul play, he has to pull the crew together to solve the mystery.

Quintana is played by the very beautiful Natassia Malthe and is one of the best reasons to watch the film. Not only gorgeous, the character is fascinating and I had the feeling, as I watched, that this is how Bloodrayne should have been played. Her character is the daughter of two scientists who were captured and turned and her childhood, amongst humans, was a science experiment. She has to drink plasma, can read minds and can sense vampiric presence. There is an interesting “sex scene” between her and Underwood. She cannot physically have sex as she will go “Black widow” during and has vampiric tantric sex, where she stimulates his mind and makes him feel that he is having sex with his, now dead, wife (Carrie Flemming). This was clever and a tease, one expected to see Quintana (hence the tease) but the introduction of the concept of Underwood's now deceased wife built the character even more.

The film is gory, no doubt about that, and one feels that the majority of the budget was blown on gore and cgi spaceships. That is generally no bad thing but the cracks do show occasionally and one of those times is on a space station. They realise the space station has been overrun and end up in an outside location shot that made little sense as this is a floating station in space. They would have been better sticking to internal shots that might have been samey but would have been more logical, the location did jolt. Whilst there, they realise that all the deaths were caused by a vampiric creature who injects a deadly venom that necrotises the flesh of the victim, they like their food dead but still warm. When they see it, just one it appears, Quintana does not know what it is and they waste it.

Unfortunately it is the host, not the actual vampires, these are worm like vampires that take over a host (and several are in the same host) called Vermus Nosferatii. The worms flee the dying host and it is an Alien (1979) type moment. Most are killed, by electrocution through tasers, and they capture one that Quintana gets to speak. The creature is clearly a hand puppet (you can see the fingers below the construct) but that didn’t really matter – I just thought it was an ingenious use of budget.

The rest of the main actors are fair enough, in general, Zamprogna as Underwood very much comes across as the altogether eager rooky that he is meant to. Probably the most disappointing performance was by Michael Ironside as Muco, the Voorhees leader and big bad of the movie. He played the role much too pantomime, which is a shame as I like Ironside generally. Unfortunately some of the incidental human characters, including that of Fiona, were poorly portrayed.

This movie has problems, it is true, but I was able to detach brain and thoroughly enjoy myself. There is good characterisation and tension between the characters and a rich background that, if all things are fair, should lead to much fan-fiction being produced. It has been commented that this felt like a pilot for a series and that is true, and down to this background within the film I feel. Parts of the plot do not stand to scrutiny (Underwood being the key to the entire thing was altogether too contrived) and some of the acting is poor, but most of the main characters are played with competence. Probably the key to the entire film was the fact that they added a high level of ingenuity, though much of the plot and look could be traced to other films it felt like they had thought outside the box when they constructed the film which offered a creativity often lacking in modern low-budget films.

This is B movie heaven, expect no more and you won’t be disappointed, however it will irk the traditional vampire movie fan. I did like the cross-reference, in the names of the vampire species, to other horror movies – it could have back-fired but was actually a nice touch. There are sfx and location problems, but if your brain has been taken out you can live with it and the makers did well with what was obviously a lower level budget. I’m going out on a limb here and giving this movie 5.5 out of 10, probably too strong a score but given as this is a film I will definitely be watching again – though perhaps it helped that I expected to hate it.

The imdb page is here.