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DECEMBER 13 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : MARTIN (HEIR TO THE BLOOD LUST)
From moria.co.nz
Director/Screenplay – George A. Romero, Producer – Richard Rubinstein, Photography (colour and some scenes b&w) – Michael Gornick, Music – Donald Rubinstein, Special Effects/Makeup – Tom Savini. Production Company – Braddock/Laurel.
Cast: John Amplas (Martin Matthias), Lincoln Maazel (Tati Cuda), Christine Forrest (Christina), Elyane Nadeau (Mrs Santini), Sarah Venable (Housewife Victim), Al Levitsky (Lewis), George A. Romero (Father Howard), Fran Middleton (Train Victim), Tom Savini (Arthur)
Plot: Martin Matthias arrives in Pittsburgh to stay with his uncle Tati Cuda. Cuda is steeped in the superstitions of the old country and is certain that Martin, though seemingly only a teenager, is in fact an 84-year-old vampire. Martin is contemptuous of Cuda and insists that none of the superstitions work. At the same time, Martin has a compulsive need to go out, drug women and drink their blood.
The single image that is unalterably associated with the vampire to this day is that of Bela Lugosi is a dinner-suit and cape, leering with hammy menace and proclaiming “I neffer drink vine” in thick European accent. It is an image that entirely dominates the vampire film, is associated with it even by those who have never seen the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula (1931), is the basis for umpteen bad parodies and at least for one person to come outfitted as to every fancy dress party. For all the influence it has though, the 1931 Dracula is not a particularly good film and Bela Lugosi one of the worst actors to ever work in the horror genre. However, for the next quarter of a century, the vampire film took its lead from Lugosi – all vampires were becaped and thickly accented foreign menaces.
It did not take long for Universal’s monster team-ups of the 1940s to turn the Lugosi vampire into a cardboard cutout and it took Hammer’s remake Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) to revitalise the vampire. Here the vampire emerged for the first time in colour and Christopher Lee’s performance gave the vampire a raw, animal charge, bringing out all the inherent sexuality that Lugosi had lacked. However, each generation’s revivals, as they are wont to do, eventually become trapped in their own creative dead-end and by the 1970s the Hammer vampire film had petered out into puerile softcore erotica and a series of tired Dracula sequels that seemed to find increasingly little for Christopher Lee to do.
By the mid-1970s, the vampire film had reached a creative dead end. The traditional image of the vampire in cape and period surroundings had been milked for all it could be. Various attempts to update the vampire – Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), the tv series Dark Shadows (1966-70) – only ended up transposing the figure into the present cape and all and in so doing made it more than clear that the traditional vampire was an anachronism. Dracula A.D. 1972 set Christopher Lee’s Dracula absurdly at odds with Swinging London and all Dark Shadows did was to confine its vampire to a vast Gothic mansion that might as well have been period. By the late 70s/early 80s, all that could be found of the classic image of the vampire was in comedies such as Vampira/Old Dracula (1975), Tender Dracula (1975), Dracula, Father and Son (1976), Love at First Bite (1979), Mama Dracula (1980), Once Bitten (1985) and the ultimate indignity, the porn film Dracula Sucks (1979). The only effort, until Martin came along, that tried to come to grips with updating the habits and behaviour of the vampire for the modern world was the tv movie The Night Stalker (1972). Later films such as Salem’s Lot (1979), Fright Night (1985), Near Dark (1987), Nadja (1994), The Addiction (1995), Blade (1998), Ultraviolet (1998) and Vampires (1998) would be more successful at relocating the vampire film into the modern world.
In 1976 came Martin, which attempted what is the most potent cinematic deconstruction of the vampire myth to date. Martin is a remarkable film. It dismisses all the mythological elements of vampirism. The vampire in Martin has no supernatural powers. It is able to go out in daytime. It lacks the raw animal magnetism of its cinematic forebears – it even gets an amusing speech bemoaning its lack of mind control abilities or any of the seductive powers of its cinematic counterparts. Martin, the vampire, appears as a weak, slightly autistic teenager – he is a pitiable creature who owes its ancestry more, if anything, to Norman Bates than Bela Lugosi. Any sense of Martin being evil exists only in the minds of the vampire hunters. On the opposing side, the requisite Van Helsing type is played as a close-minded religious extremist. A Catholic priest (played by director George A. Romero himself) turns up but is more interested in social services than spiritual issues; in fact, appears somewhat perplexed when the vampire hunter raises the topic of metaphysics, although does at least offer an appreciation of The Exorcist (1973). In fact, the question of whether Martin actually is a vampire or not is left ambiguous. Like the unjustly neglected Incense for the Damned/Bloodsuckers (1969), Martin makes the point that a vampire could just as easily be a sexually dysfunctional individual with a blood fixation. Or equally that Martin could simply believe he is a vampire because of the family’s oppressive religious fixations. The film never does confirm for us whether Martin is a vampire or is just mentally ill, which surely makes Martin the first existential vampire movie.
Director/screenwriter George Romero makes all manner of striking contrasts. He deliberately juxtaposes cliches of B-movie vampirism with modern-day realities. In one striking scene, Martin plays a prank on Tati Cuda the religious extremist, stalking him in an alley, dressed in cape, white-face and joke-store fangs, and then pulls the costume off to laugh in his face. Black-and-white period scenes that could have been taken out of any classic vampire film are vividly placed alongside modern more unromanticised visions – the seduction of a woman in her boudoir is contrasted with a modern scene where Martin has to drug his female victim; scenes of villagers with burning torches are contrasted with a cop car chase. There is not inconsiderable humour in some of the scenes where the myth is placed alongside contemporary incongruities – throughout the film Martin calls up a radio talkback show to speak about his problems as a vampire where he is promptly referred to as The Count. Indeed, it comes as a surprise to see a vampire film that is located in the poorer areas of Pittsburgh simply for the fact that prior to this we had rarely seen a vampire film set in the real world.
On the minus side, the pace of Martin is slow moving. The score is dull. At one point, George Romero seems to feel the need to throw in a car chase in order to spice the proceedings up but it feels out of place. However, the individual set-pieces in between are genuinely striking. Particularly memorable is the opening where Martin drugs the woman on the train then slits her wrists to drink from her, all the while promising that he will be gentle, even trying to wrap her limp arms around him in the affectation of a caress. Also highly amusing is the scene where Martin invades the home of a housewife he has carefully stalked only to find her in bed with another man, whereupon things start to go disastrously wrong.
Martin came from George A. Romero who a few years earlier had set the world alight with his cult favourite Night of the Living Dead (1968). Throughout the 1970s, Romero maintained a presence as an independent director but never easily found the same success as Night of the Living Dead again. He made other genre films such as the suburban witchcraft film Jack’s Wife/Season of the Witch (1972) and the excellent but unsuccesful The Crazies (1973) about a madness-inducing germ warfare spill. Martin was highly acclaimed by almost all who see it but has suffered from spotty cinematic and video distribution, although is a film that is as much deserving of cult success as Night of the Living Dead was. It took Romero’s Night of the Living Dead sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1979), for him to fully emerge as a name again. George Romero’s other genre films are:– the Stephen King-scripted horror comic homage Creepshow (1982); Day of the Dead (1985); Monkey Shines (1988) about a psychic link between a paraplegic and a murderous monkey; Two Evil Eyes (1990), an Edgar Allan Poe collaboration with Dario Argento; The Dark Half (1993), from the Stephen King novel about a writer haunted by an evil doppelganger; Bruiser (2000) about a man whose face suddenly becomes a blank mask; Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009). Romero has also produced the Tales from the Darkside (1983-5) and Monsters (1988-9) horror anthology series, as well as the films Deadtime Stories (2009), Deadtime Stories 2 (2010) and the remake of The Crazies (2010). His scripts include Creepshow II (1987), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) and the remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990). The making of Martin is also briefly covered in the Romero documentary Document of the Dead (1989).
DECEMBER 13 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : VAMP
From nytimes.com
GRACE JONES fans who want to see her always in glory -their number is legion - are likely to be sore about ''Vamp.'' And people who enjoy a sendup of bloody horror films probably will not feel any better about it.
Ms. Jones is the leader of a flock of vampires who nest in the sewers of Los Angeles and run an after-dark strippers' club, where some customers become so enthralled they have to be carried out feet first. Three loutish undergraduates, assigned by a fraternity to bring a stripper to a party, go to the club to hire one, and the strippers find them delicious.
That should be a fine setup for lampooning horror films, and for showing off Ms. Jones. ''Vamp,'' which opens today at Loews State and other theaters, does neither very well. True, there are a couple of delicious Jones sequences. She appears on the club's stage, her body painted by Keith Haring, performing one of her own songs while she caresses a Haring chair shaped like a seated man. Later, naked except for three coils of silver wire strategically placed, she works her wiles on one of the students; a rare, genuinely funny moment occurs when he realizes she wants his body but doesn't suspect what for. And there are a few brief scenes in which, transformed into a misshapen monster with clustered columns of teeth, she is truly terrifying.
But about three-quarters of the film is filled with the antics of the students - Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler and Gedde Watanabe - who are set upon by a weird street gang, attacked by countless adult vampires and one batty little girl, pursued through sewers by the living dead and chased by two huge trucks. From that catalogue one could guess, without wasting time seeing the movie, what they are supposed to be burlesquing. But the writing and directing of Richard Wenk are so weak, and the story he and the producer, Donald P. Borchers, dreamed up is so confused, that ''Vamp'' often seems as silly as the films it tries to ridicule. Many incidents seem to have been tossed in along the way.
The gore is impressive in the clawing, chewing, biting, gouging and burning sequences, but often so repulsive it disorients the viewer. Otherwise, ''Vamp'' is visually a mess. A film that takes on cheap horror films should not look like a cheap horror film. Even most of the sight gags fail - although Ms. Jones's vampire coffin (King Tut's sarcophagus with her face on it) is all right and, when the two survivors of the last orgy of carnage climb out of a manhole, it is pleasing to notice that the vampires' sewer runs under the Hyland Plasma Center near downtown Los Angeles. In this unimaginative junkheap, that little bit of wit is noticeable.
OUT FOR A BITE-VAMP, direction and screenplay by Richard Wenk; story by Donald P. Borchers and Mr. Wenk; director of photography, Elliot Davis; edited by Marc Grossman; music by Jonathan Elias; produced by Mr. Borchers; released by New World Pictures. At Loews State, Broadway and 45th Street; Quad, 34 West 13th Street; Olympia Quad, Broadway at 107th Street, and other theaters. Running time: 93 minutes. This film is rated R. Keith...Chris Makepeace; Vic...Sandy Baron; A. J....Robert Rusler; Amaretto...Dedee Pfeiffer; Duncan...Gedde Watanabe; Katrina...Grace Jones; Snow...Billy Drago; Vlad...Brad Logan; Cimmaron...Lisa Lyon; Fraternity Leader...Jim Boyle.
DECEMBER 13 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : VAMP
From horrorwatch.com
Frat boys Keith and A.J. have volunteered themselves to find erotic entertainment for a big party that’s going to happen tonight. Needing someone with some money and a ride the two get their buddy Duncan to tag along with them to help score some ladies of the evening. Heading to The After Dark Club, our trio of friends hope to score some tail, but they may have bitten off more than they can chew, because the ladies at The After Dark Club will definitely be looking to take a bite... out of them.
Want to know how to make a great 80’s cheese cake vampire movie? Here are some of the ingredients you will need: Lots of day glow color schemes, Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles, Rudy from Meatballs, Dedee Pfeiffer, Michelle’s lesser known sister, An albino biker played by Billy Drago and finally, throw in the uber funky Grace Jones as the evil Katrina. Take all of that mix it together throw in some titties and blood and you have Vamp, the movie that proved once and for all just how useless Formica was against the undead.
If National Lampoon ever made a vampire flick I’m guessing Vamp would be it. This is a basic 80’s college comedy with a few vampires thrown in for good measure. Vamp tries to be a horror movie at times, but I think it’s more of a comedy and not really a dark one at that. But after re-watching this one I did find myself thinking about how much From Dusk Till Dawn may have borrowed from it in a few ways.
The vampires look good and Grace Jones does some impressive scenes as Katrina and she looks really good under her layers of body paint, but for some reason she never gets to say anything. The rest of the cast, like I said above, is a potpourri of 80’s teen movie stars and thrown in Dedee as the romantic interest and you have your movie, well you also have to include the side plot involving Billy Drago’s gang, then you have your movie.
There is a little blood splatter, some tried and true vampire gags and just a little skin to keep you watching this one, but not much else. Back in the day Vamp was OK and not much has changed, except for the fact that everything about it was done better in From Dusk Till Dawn, so maybe it borrowed more than just a few things.
3 of 10.
DECEMBER 13 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : VAMP
From horrorchronicles.com
Keith and AJ are two college kids looking to get into their local fraternity; not too impressed with the rites of their initiation, they volunteer to setup a night of fun and frolics for their friends that's sure to impress and show their devotion. AJ has the bright idea to get a stripper from the local city, of course this involves having money and transportation. Thus they enlist the help of Duncan, a guy with more money than sense. He's more than happy to offer everything they can dream of, if they only pretend to be his friend for a week. This sets up a night of comedic horror as the three haplessly stumble into a den of vampires who's queen, Katrina (Grace Jones), is a bit partial to teenage blood.
Bit of an 80's cult classic here, Vamp is 25 years old and it sure looks like it. It's over the top 80's style working in tandem with it's somewhat peculiar characters will be sure to put some people off. However, Vamp does have a lot of things going for it, firstly it's got boobs. Maybe not as much as some people would like but they are there.
Secondly the acting quality is great, perhaps not massively brilliant but for this type of movie it is good. Particular mention goes out to Grace Jones as the mysterious and somewhat menacing Katrina. Even though her stylism is a bit skewed to the rest of the movie she does bring a lot to her character which does bring additional character to the movie as a whole. Acting wise, no complaints.
There really is not much gore here at all, so let it be known: Vamp is not gory. At all. In fact there is very little in the way of special effects period. The costumes and makeup are solid enough for an 80's flick and the vampires look menacing and evil enough to pass. Basically put: what's there is good, there just isn't much there.
Perhaps coming back to what i said earlier about Vamps unapologetic strong 80's style is what endears it to so many people. The same thing that works for it, also works against it. Personally i really enjoyed watching Vamp, i enjoyed it's quirky sense of dark and light humour, it's pastel colour-ism and the fine looking women. You can work out for yourself if you think this is your 'cup of tea', but for lovers of 80's cinema this is one you've definitely got to catch, even if only on rental.
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