John Carpenter's Vampires Review
by Mark R Leeper (leeper AT mtgbcs DOT mt DOT lucent DOT com)November 4th, 1998
VAMPIRES
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: There is an intriguing story about
the relation between vampires and the Catholic
Church in VAMPIRES, but it is pushed to the
background so that John Carpenter can try to outdo
other vampire films for gore and violence. Even a
James Woods performance (here a little substandard
anyway) cannot save this film from itself. Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4 to +4)
VAMPIRES starts out almost in the style of a spaghetti Western with an attack on a small homestead in New Mexico. The house has a nest of vampires and Jack Crow (James Woods) is leading a team of vampire hunters in to clean them out. While the initial imagery is a little over-dramatic, it gives way to what is a fairly decent action sequence. That is enough action to last us a while and we could, director John Carpenter would let us, get to a story line. But it is not very long and there is not much plot until the next big action scene. Then there is only a bit more of plot before the next action scene after that. The plot is kept to a minimum and the interesting ideas in the plot really get the short end. And that is something of a pity because the film, based on the book VAMPIRE$ by John Steakley, gives us a myth for the origins of vampires and explains why vampires are so intertwined with religious imagery. This could be an interesting departure from the standard vampire film, but Carpenter decides to tell us about it rather than to show it. What Carpenter saves his serious screen time for a sequence of spectacular fights between hunters and vampires. There is a lot of fighting and lots of gore. Anything intriguing is kept to a minimum to so it does not get in the way of pleasing the action film fans. This has not always been Carpenter's style. His 1981 version of THE THING has action but also challenges the viewer to do a little thinking about the film's central science fictional question.
Jack Crow heads a vampire SWAT team, cleaning up nests of vampires with high-tech spears and crossbows. In the early part of the film his team is wiped out by a particularly mean vampire Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) who has been tipped off to who Crow is. Now Crow team is gone and he is down to himself and his sidekick Tony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters worse, he does not know the people on his own side, Tony and his backers, he can trust. Meanwhile Jack is sure the vampires are looking for something that must be hidden somewhere here in New Mexico.
If this is sounding like a very tired police corruption plot with a few obvious substitutions, that's exactly what it is. The same story looks just as well with two partner cops looking for a gang of hood who are themselves looking for a packet of heroin. But Carpenter goes against a familiar principle of film: show people, don't tell them. Just about everything in the plot other than the fights we are told about in the dialog and not shown. Fundamental questions in the plot like where does Crow get his funding, why are the vampires in New Mexico--what do they want and why do they want it, what is the connection of the vampires and the Catholic Church, how did Crow come to be a vampire hunter and why devote his life to it? The answers to any of these questions could have been dramatized, but instead are revealed through dialog.
Now if all this was not bad enough, Carpenter misuses the James Wood persona. Woods plays a particular sort of cool lowlife very well. But Carpenter leads off the film by having Woods do some Sergio-Leone- style mythic posturing. While his crew prepares for an attack he stands staring fixedly through shades at the house that will be his target. Woods does not work as a larger than life mythic hero. That is not his style and it just does not work very well. There are some simple things that Carpenter should be looking for as director that he misses. In one scene we are looking at a motel room with dead people on the floor. One female corpse is on the floor in front of a chair so that there is about an inch of daylight between her and the chair. As the actress breathes the gap widening and narrowing makes it obvious her arm is moving up and down. One also wonders how the existence of vampires is kept secret. These vampires do not maintain a low profile.
There are arguably logical flaws in the film. There is some question in my mind whether Carpenter has a consistent policy on what effect bullets have on vampires. It would take some rationalization to explain why in some scenes sunlight has a dramatic effect on vampires, yet in a scene toward the end a vampire can walk under a burned roof that lets him be swept by beams of sunlight.
I suspect that the book on which this film was based was better thought out. While I might recommend this film to an action audience I would say that what I look for in a vampire film VAMPIRES rates a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. Perhaps I will read the book.
Mark R. Leeper
[email protected]
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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