John Carpenter's Vampires Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT cablehouse DOT dyn DOT ml DOT org)November 2nd, 1998
John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)
* 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
John Carpenter is a mainstream director who has made some of the most gleefully subversive big-budget movies around. He made the original HALLOWEEN, which all by itself is redemption enough, but he also made THE THING, THEY LIVE, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK -- all films I enjoyed immensely. He also misfires, as he did with his senseless remake of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and the incoherent IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. VAMPIRES is another of his misfires, and it's a big one.
The film stars James Woods, playing one of his more repellent characters, a vampire-hunting mercenary named Jack Crow. He's being retained by the Catholic Church to rout out and destroy vampire nests for money (although of course HIS reasons are personal). He and his team of hunters go in like the Gangbusters, using a weirdly elaborate harpoon-gun scheme to drag vampires out into the open, where they burst into flames like they have magnesium flares in their shirt pockets.
The movie doesn't convince us that the team(s) are terribly competent: they act like rookie cops and don't have any clear overall strategy. One night they get torn to shreds by some kind of super-vampire, and Crow is practically the only one left alive. He staggers off into the night and tries to fit the pieces together: was he set up? Are there more vamps like this one?
For the most part the movie sets itself up as a macho teen-oriented entertainment, but then there are severe deviations from that pattern that wreck the movie. Part of the plot involves a prostitute who is bitten by a vampire and who is useful to Crow, since she has a telepathic link to the master vampire. This woman is forced to do things on camera -- maybe better to say forced to suffer through things on camera -- that do not belong in a big-budget entertainment like this. She's humiliated, beaten, cursed at, and smacked around like a rag doll. Worse, the movie lingers on those details in ways that confounded me completely: they're not that important, but the movie stays with them regardless.
Woods plays Crow to the hilt, which is both good and bad. The man is unrepentantly out for his own revenge, a self-important scumbag. Fine, except the movie has not earned the right to show his excessive behavior in gross detail. We see him beat a priest senseless with the receiver of a telephone. Later, he stuffs a washcloth in the same priest's mouth and slashes his hand open. And then he says things like, "Hey, when I was kicking your ass back there -- did that give you a woody?" He also uses the word "fuck" as often as the first person singular, which in this movie is just that much more spice for the stew. In a movie that took itself more seriously, in a more intelligent movie, Crow's acts MIGHT have the context they needed. They do not in this one.
On a technical level, the movie's impressive, I guess, but the film leaves such a wretched taste in the mouth that it's impossible to enjoy. It also terminates on the stupidest possible note. If you knew your buddy was infected with vampiric blood and was going to turn, would you give him the van that had all your weapons in it and send him on his way? But I guess complaints like that are pointless here. VAMPIRES really only exists to show gruesome action a-plenty, and that it has -- but at the cost of watching a lot of other stuff that's downright repellent and stupid.
More on 'John Carpenter's Vampires'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
