In addition to the earlier screening announcement of Toronto, Vampires will also be playing in Montreal at the same time, and throughout Germany as part of a film fest there. Basically, what you are in for is a kickass damn vampire film, and the best film from John Carpenter in ages. He doesn't pull the punches, he drives this film home. Here's Arthur Morton's look.... Expect a review from Hallenbeck soon...
Harry: just call me Arthur Morton.
I witnessed a screening of John Carpenter's Vampires at Sony Studios recently. Let me begin by saying that while I absolutely love John Carpenter's version of The Thing, I am not a fan of his work as a whole and in fact often find his movies meandering, unfocused and boring, if entertainingly leftist. I had low expectations for Vampires although I had heard mutterings that it was good.
I thoroughly enjoyed the film and feel that it represents some of Carpenter's best and most confident work as a director. It's hard to explain very much about what goes on in the film without giving away its surprises. Suffice it to say that the story concerns James Woods, who leads a grungy, profane group of high-tech vampire "slayers" hunting for the nests of the undead, primarily in the southwest United States. As the story opens Woods and his band descend on an abandoned farmhouse and wipe out the nest, but neglect to find the elusive "master" vampire which they know must be existing in conjunction with the others. The attack scene is mounted with great energy and humor by Carpenter, and involves an interesting method of combining advanced "stake-delivery" technology with an effective way of insuring that the vampires are killed by exposure to sunlight.
The upshot of the scene is that the vampires are destroyed, but the "master" remains. Later, as the slayers are engaged in a raunchy celebration party rife with half-dressed hookers, the master vampire interrupts the proceedings and exacts his revenge. The plot is driven by Woods's desire to even the score with the master vampire, who has decimated his team, plus the origins of the master vampire and his desire to find a sacred "black cross," and a hooker (Sheryl Lee) who has been bitten by the vampire and who consequently begins the 48 hour transformation over to the "dark side" of vampirism.
While it owes something to earlier "vampire westerns" like Near Dark and From Dusk Until Dawn, I found Vampires far more entertaining and narratively driven than either of those two pictures. Woods is absolutely terrific in a role that is just plain uncompromising. One of the great elements of the plot is the way in which people who are bitten by vampires cease to be human in the eyes of the slayers; Lee, the female lead, is dragged around, kicked and in general treated like a stray dog by the remaining slayers. After recent "horror" movies like Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer (which play out like episodes of Friends with a few murders thrown in) it was refreshing to see such a nasty, dark-humored horror tale. There is plenty of gore and some great, subversive humor—particularly effective is Woods, a profane, Tarantino-like character, meeting with his superiors, who exist in a completely different world. The plot of the movie is a pretty vicious indictment of the Catholic Church, and the abrasive fury the slayers direct at the vampires resembles something you might get from a rat exterminator who's been on the job too long. This is also one of the best-looking John Carpenter movies I've ever seen, with some great, burnished cinematography and incisive editing: it has a powerful narrative pull that sweeps the viewer through what could easily have been a bland retread of earlier movies. If there's a problem, it's with the climax, which really needs an additional shot or two at a couple of crucial moments. There are no cute cast members from Party of Five here; the cast is composed of seedy-looking middle-aged men, and even Sheryl Lee has such a worn-out, sleazy quality that she seems to have been bitten by vampires before the event actually occurs.
Carpenter isn't exactly a spring chicken any more and it was amazing to see him do something this focused and full of energy. It's definitely the best thing he's done in ages and one of the more effective and uncompromising horror movies I've seen in recent years; hopefully this will get some kind of decent theatrical release in the fall.
