John Carpenter's Vampires Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)October 29th, 1998
JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES
(Columbia)
Starring: James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, Sheryl Lee, Thomas Ian Griffith, Tim Guinee, Maximilian Schell.
Screenplay: Don Jakoby, based on the novel _Vampire$_ by John Steakley. Producer: Sandy King.
Director: John Carpenter.
MPAA Rating: R (violence, gore, profanity, adult themes, nudity) Running Time: 107 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It's refreshing to see a film about vampires that's actually about vampires. Not vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, not vampirism as a metaphor for drug addiction, not vampirism as a metaphor for persecuted minority groups, or as a metaphor for anything else -- just blood-suckin', sun-hatin', butt-kickin' vampires. JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES is the kind of slick horror package that's increasingly hard to find: raucous, sanguine and almost utterly devoid of sociological sub-text.
Based on John Steakley's novel _Vampire$_, it incorporates that oh-so-90s-vogue vocation of vampire hunting into the context of an old spaghetti Western. Jack Crow (James Woods) is one of many vampire hunters on a Vatican-funded mission to eradicate the plague of the undead. One night his team is obliterated by Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), the oldest vampire ever to walk the earth. Crow and his one surviving associate Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), accompanied by newly-recruited young priest Father Guiteau (Tim Guinee), have to find Valek and kill him before he can locate a mysterious relic which might give him the power to walk in the daylight. Add plenty of flying body parts, stark Western vistas and Carpenter's own twangy Tex-Mex score, and you have a simple, economical horror yarn.
It all makes for fine gruesome entertainment, but it should have been better. John Carpenter has always been able to incorporate wry, weird humor into his films -- remember the crawling head in THE THING, or practically all of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, for that matter? -- and he manages again to pull of a few nice bits of black comedy. Woods, playing Crow with snarling relish and a serious bad attitude, gets most of the choice lines, all of which are either unprintable or incredibly offensive or both. Carpenter's sense of the horrific usually involves a kind of self-aware outrageousness, turning his displays of blood-spraying special effects into absurdist cinematic goofs too purely escapist to get worked up over.
Unfortunately, VAMPIRES keeps upsetting its delicate balance of humor and horror by taking frequent detours into mean-spiritedness. It's one thing to play with notions of political incorrectness; it's quite another to get off on it. The only human female characters in VAMPIRES are hookers who hang around just long enough to get naked and get turned into lunchmeat; when Woods really wants to insult someone, a bit of gay-baiting always fits the bill. Even if you grant Carpenter and screenwriter Don Jakoby the slack they seem to be searching for -- it's okay that a woman is stripped and smacked around because she's a vampire-in-waiting, and it's okay that a Catholic priest participates in a human sacrifice because another priest is a stand-up guy -- the tone simply gets nastier than it needs to be. Everyone is too unpleasant too often.
The thing about VAMPIRES is that when Carpenter rolls up his sleeves and dives into genre action, it's a lot of fun. In fact, if he had rolled with the tone of the first 25 minutes, he might have had a minor classic on his hands. The opening assault on a New Mexico vampire "nest" is wild, silly and superbly paced; Valek's first attack is a creepy and crafty splatter-fest. From there, VAMPIRES gets progressively more angry and ominous, before it finally rights itself for the climactic confrontation between Crow and Valek. There's not enough interest in characterization here to make the casual brutality of Crow and Montoya somehow psychologically appropriate. Psychology's got virtually nothing to do with JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES, a slice of Halloween mayhem that works wonderfully when it lets the good times roll. For a vampire movie without a "message," it offers some mixed messages it could do without.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 stake-outs: 6.
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