BLOOD VESSEL (2020)

Is there any more consistently popular movie villain than the Nazi? Began with the horror and exploitation films of the 1970s with stuff like Ilsa: She Wolf of the S.S. and Shockwaves, Spielberg and co. picked up the ball and ran with it by choosing them as the primary villain in not one but two Indiana Jones movies in the ‘80s, and the trend continued to the present, mostly in the horror genre. (It’s hard to make a comedy about Nazis, unless you’re Mel Brooks or John Landis.) Nazi Germany’s atrocious part in history almost demands that their presence be treated with seriousness and sincerity, out of respect for the millions of lives lost, even if the movie that surrounds them is completely ridiculous. 

Occasionally, these Nazi-and-monster hybrids turn out to be pretty good, like 2018’s Overlord, 2013’s Frankenstein’s Army, and 2001’s obscure franchise starter The Outpost, but sometimes they’re pretty terrible, like whatever the Puppet Master series has been up to lately. In the middle of those extremes lie a pretty wide swath of very okay offerings, which can be found clogging up every streaming service there is (The Devil’s Rock, War of the Dead – I could go on and on). Existing among them is Justin Dix’s Blood Vessel.

A hodgepodge of Ghost Ship, (and Death Ship), 30 Days of Night, Aliens, and a tiny bit Evil Dead, Blood Vessel opens with a group of military personnel stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Among them are Sinclair (Nathan Phillips, Snakes on a Plane), an Australian soldier and former prisoner of war; Jane Prescott (Alyssa Sutherland, Vikings), a British medical officer; Alexander Teplov (Alex Cooke, Preacher), a Russian sniper; Jimmy Bigelow (Mark Diaco), your Ed Burns-ish yank soldier from Brooklyn or Queens or whatever sounds the most New York; Lydell Jackson (Christopher Kirby, Iron Sky – another Nazi horror thing), a Navy cook; Gerard Faraday (John Lloyd Fillingham), British intelligence; and Captain Malone (Robert Taylor, Kong: Skull Island). After spending an unknown amount of time stranded at sea, they hitch a ride on a passing Nazi warship and climb on deck to see that the ship appears abandoned. After doing a little investigating, they find a little Romanian girl named Mya (Ruby Isobell Hall), a creepy journal of incantations and drawings, an ancient coffin chained shut, and a whole lot of dead Nazis. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie in your life, you…probably know what happens next.

At no point does Blood Vessel feel like something unique or groundbreaking, even though it tries to freshen the ingredients by exploring underseen dynamics in World War II-era movies. Phillips, a native Australian, plays an Australian soldier, to which Bigelow’s smarmy New Yorker says, “I didn’t even know you people were fighting this war,” and in a modern cinematic rarity, Cooke’s Russian soldier is a good guy. Beyond that, Blood Vessel soon becomes your fairly standard vampire flick as each survivor falls victim to the bloodsucking scourge. (And may I quickly editorialize by saying Dix really missed the boat, forgive the pun, by failing to name his movie Naziferatu – no forgiveness required for that pun.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with Blood Vessel, and it’s perfectly entertaining in that superficial Hollywood-ish kind of way, but there’s something about it that prevents the audience from fully engaging in the conflict or sympathizing with the characters. 

Phillips’ Sinclair vies to be the typical hero type with Man With No Name/Snake Plissken vibes, and it mostly works, although the script occasionally does him a disservice and neutralizes some of his swagger. (On the tail end of his explaining that he was a P.O.W. for three years, he shows off a picture of his wife and talks about how she was told he was killed in action and she’d since remarried and had a baby…but how does he know all this if he was locked up for three years?) Each character is given a “thing” to offer them forward action, but most of their motivations feel more like convenient contrivances than anything that lends the movie context. Bigelow’s a dick so he does dick things, Prescott’s a medical officer so she keeps offering to take people to “sick bay,” and Faraday is British intelligence, which means he never saw real combat, which means he’s a worm and acts fragile and wormy the whole time. Dix works well with his obviously limited budget, putting most of his resources into the good-looking practical effects and wisely falling back on visual trickery only when it’s called for. There’s a sense that everyone involved is doing their best with the material while also not taking things too seriously, and that derives in Blood Vessel’s biggest success.

Blood Vessel doesn’t have the budget or scope of Overlord, the creepiness of The Outpost, or the ingenuity of Frankenstein’s Army, but it’s definitely worth seeing if you’re up for some comic book-styled B-movie horror. The acting ensemble is mostly capable (even though everyone botches the accents they’re going for), there’s a fine amount of blood and grue, and the Nazis-meet-vampires concept is certainly a twist on the formula, even if it unfolds the same way that other monster movies tend to do. You won’t come away saying Blood Vessel is a new favorite, but it definitely sucks in the good way. (Best pun you’ll read all day.)

Blood Vessel is now available on region free Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment, which you can purchase directly from their website.

FRIGHT NIGHT (1985)

Cult titles are funny things. Though some film aficionados will tell you they are a genre unto themselves, instead this label reaches across the entire genre spectrum, plucking titles here and there for the requisite amount of devotion, or sometimes obsession, from its fan base. 

Think Hard Boiled, The Big Lebowski, pretty much anything John Waters has ever made, or when it comes to the horror genre, Fright Night - films that don't do extraordinarily well either with critics or audiences during their initial release, but over time begin to accumulate more and more exuberant film fans ready to quote and analyze or just cherish ad nauseam.

Despite receiving a sequel in 1988 - courtesy of Halloween III's Tommy Lee Wallace - Fright Night took kind of a while to catch on, but once it did, and outside of your more established franchises like Halloween or Friday the 13th, there has never been more devotion to a clunky, kind of silly film from the 1980s - the time in which all cinema was seemingly clunky and silly. 

By now, Fright Night has become legendary for all manner of legitimate and accidental reasons, and there are very few horror fans out there unaware, at the very least, of its plot: that of Charley Brewster (Justified's William Ragsdale) and his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Dog Day Afternoon's Chris Sarandon), who wastes no time in letting slip that he's a vampire by biting a chick in front of the open window that directly faces Charley's bedroom. Since his girlfriend, Amy, and best bud, "Evil" Ed (Amanda Bearse and Stephen Geoffreys, respectively) don't believe him, Charley only has one option: to seek help from Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), former horror thespian and host of a late-night spook-show called "Fright Night" to fight this blood-fanged evil that has moved in right next door.

Fright Night is the definition of 1980s horror, and that's okay. The clothes were big, the hair was bigger, but there was also a non-pretentious charm worming its way through the entire proceeding. Writer/director Tom Holland, no stranger to the horror genre with both Child's Play and Stephen King's Thinner under his belt, shows a bit of flare in what was still the early part of his career.

For the uninitiated, Fright Night is a tough sell, as having a love for 1980s "light" horror is nearly a prerequisite, but the reliance on physical and in-camera effects was a refreshing callback to a less exacting era of cinema (that sounds like a slight, but it's not) where the mindset seemed more to be "let's make a film" rather than "I wonder how far we can push the visual effects." As someone who was always more ambivalent about this title, I was curious to see what a many-years-later viewing of the film would hold for me; while my initial misgivings about the film's uneven tone and (to me) too-long dull stretches remained unchanged, it was refreshing to find myself appreciating certain aspects that I missed the first time for whatever reason: Roddy McDowall as Peter Vincent gives the performance of the film, straddling that line between playing a total forgotten failure, to playing someone genuinely fearful, to then playing someone destined for heroism. He and Ragsdale have fine chemistry and their final fight with Dandridge and his mutant familiar, Billy, is an enjoyably slimy special effects light show. That, and the earlier mentioned charm of physical effects, left me feeling less dismissive and more disappointed that I don't share the kind of love that many, many other individuals share for this film.

Much has been said (and maybe too much) about the gay undertones present in the film: the subtle homo-eroticism between vampire Jerry and the curious Charley, who seems more interested in peering through the window at his new neighbor rather than pouncing on his girlfriend who's waiting in his bed and saying, basically, "Okay, we can sex now." Added to that would be Stephen Geoffrey's surprising foray into gay pornography in his later years, as well as Amanda Bearse's eventual coming out as a lesbian. All of this added together has painted Fright Night as "the gay vampire movie," which may or may not be accurate, depending on with whom you speak that were involved with the making of the film. (The gay theory is a common one for not-at-all-gay cinema.) While it's sincerely doubtful any of this significantly bolstered the film's infamy beyond trivial talking points, it certainly does add another layer to this film's otherwise harmless and enduring legacy.

I guess I'm a curmudgeon, but I don't see the big deal in this beloved cult title. Still, it 35 years later, it continues to climb to the top of most other genre titles released on a yearly basis that come, take a dump, and leave, and no one even remembers they were there. But Fright Night manages to live on, and as I've said before, especially about flicks that aren't my bag, remaining in the discussion this many years later is a triumph. 

THE MONSTER MOVIES OF LARRY FESSENDEN

Larry Fessenden is kind of the crazy uncle of the horror genre, and it's likely you may have come to know him from his dozens of on-screen cameos in which he's probably killed. He's like the Sean Bean of the low-budget horror world: if Larry Fessenden pops up on-screen, chances are he'll be dead soon. And he'll love every minute of it. But to credit only his "Where's Waldo?" like appearances in the last twenty years of horror films would do the man a severe injustice. Because Larry, when he's not bleeding out on the ground for his fellow horror filmmaker colleagues, is not only producing some of the best independent horror out in the world right now (The Innkeepers, Stake Land, House of the Devil, I Sell the Dead), but also directing his own.

Fessenden's unique and recognizable style adheres to the slow-burn approach. It's making your audience wait, agonizingly, for the alluded horror to manifest into an undeniable foe. But even when other filmmakers, for instance Ti West (a frequent collaborator), finally let loose in the third act, Fessenden, while doing the same, still finds a subtly eerie way to go about it. You'll find no dripping-eyed specters in the dark or satanists in the basement. No, in fact, it's something a lot more deadly and a lot more...important.

Fessenden's pro-environmental agenda may slip by unnoticed if looking at his work in separate chunks, examining each film only as its own entity and not a part of something bigger. It's not until undertaking the grand slam marathon of his films that it starts to become noticeably thematic. And for the three out of four total titles included, that pro-environmental stance cannot be ignored. Film after film shows people from all walks of life disrespecting the very thing that's given them sustenance and shelter and and a sustainable world in which to live, and it all comes back to bite them in the proverbial ass in one way or another.

Even though Fessenden is known as a horror filmmaker, his films aren't terribly horrific - at least not in an obvious way. As he says in his commentary track for The Last Winter, he admits that his films would probably be considered "slow and dull" by general film fans, and that's probably true. His films are less about the horror our characters are experiencing, and more about how these characters are affected by the before mentioned horror. For instance, in No Telling, there's nothing supernatural at all. And except for mild sci-fi aspects, there's nothing presented that couldn't necessarily happen. No Telling isn't about some Frankensteinian creation brought to life by a mad scientist which then runs rampant through the countryside slaughtering the innocent. Instead, it's about the bastardization of man, and how someone can change and go to such grisly lengths for what he believes to be the betterment of society. Same goes for The Last Winter, which, though made in 2007, is more relevant right now given the "debates" on whether or not we should get off our ass and maybe try to save the planet. Are there monsters in The Last Winter? Sure, there are. But are they real? Or are they figments of the isolated driller crew's imaginations? And if they're not real, then what's left to think? Is it collective guilt in knowing the repercussions of their presence on the icy tundra creating their own monsters?

To reiterate, Fessenden's films are not for everyone. They are, in fact, surprisingly low-key, philosophical, and thoughtful, which doesn't jive with Fessenden's on-screen persona as a hammy joker with a frat-boy demeanor. The uninitiated should know this before tackling his filmography.

Warning: not for dog lovers. 

No Telling, one of the three environmentally conscious films in Fessenden's filmography (so far), might be the preachiest, but it's never done in a way in which you feel you're being preached to. The discussions of the evolution of the farming industry, and how it changed once large corporations got involved, is shared by our characters more than once. And, though one of those involved in this conversation is ultimately proven to have gone sick with power, every argument supporting his or her side doesn't come across as stacked in one's favor and against another. Everyone presents solid arguments on why he or she feels the way he or she does, and this is done purposely to show that while we like to think maintaining a pro-environment mindset by default is the way to go, we may not be considering all possible ramifications from not making those harder choices for the greater good.

Performances in the film are excellent, with special mention of Miriam Healy-Louie as Lillian, caught between the two opposing viewpoints of pro-nature vs. pro-progression, personified by the two men for whom she either maintains feelings of devotion, or for whom she's beginning to feel devotion.

Probably the most well-known of Fessenden's filmography, Habit temporarily hangs up the environmental bent in favor of presenting a more straightforward vampire film in the vein (no pun!) of Nadja and Abel Ferarra's The Addiction. 

Mostly a vampiric take on Taxi Driver, the idea behind Habit is to express the isolation many people feel even when stacked on top of and next to each other in stretching miles of apartment buildings. This somewhat sexually explicit film filled with subtle bloodletting explores human relationships and how they can change disconcertingly quick. Fessenden deserves tons of credit for playing the on-screen role of the victimized Sam, who seems intent on drinking himself to death at the same time that the mysterious Anna seems intent on drinking him to death.

Fessenden returns to his pro-environment tale, though in a far more subdued way, with his take on the Native American mythology of the wendigo, a shadowy figure presented as an intangible force resurrected to restore the natural balance. 

A sort of Straw Dogs meets The Shining, underrated actors Jake Webber (Dawn of the Dead) and Patricia Clarkson (Six Feet Under) play parents to their young son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan, the youngest "Malcolm in the Middle" brother), who find themselves being victimized by a local hunter while vacationing at a winter getaway in upstate New York. Though based on a supernatural myth, Wendigo avoids being overtly supernatural, with the horrific images of a stick-assembled monster tromping through the woods a heavily implied figment of Miles' imagination. Its ambiguous ending is going to bother the hell out of some viewers, but it falls in line with Fessenden's aesthetic of leaving the horror as a matter of discussion rather than of obvious force which needs to be defeated.

A tremendous cast of actors brings the frigid events of their collective haunting to life as they confront The Last Winter. The most technically achieved film of Fessenden's career (and one finally shot in 35 mm), much like his other films, at first presents a straightforward concept before it transforms into something else. 

Sort of a spiritual sequel to Wendigo, oil drillers for a company called North Shore find themselves dealing with unexplained events following the disappearance of one of their own, followed by the subsequent discovery of his frozen eyeless corpse. One by one, the crew begin to exhibit strange and even dangerous behavior, all which seem to follow on the heels of a conflict spurred by the on-site foreman, Ed Pollak (Ron Perlman, Sons of Anarchy) and James Hoffman (James Legros, Zodiac). Hoffman, an environmental specialist brought to determine the site's stability, announces he's going to recommend that North Shore shut down the site's operations, which doesn't sit will with Pollak's alpha male. Soon the men and women of the base begin to see phantom images of transparent animals tearing across the icy tundra, or discorporated visions of their own departed appearing to them in their bunks. Another ambiguous ending - one of Fessenden's most haunting - is in store for those who dare to see if they can survive The Last Winter.

Larry Fessenden, the on-screen kill guy, might be a recognizable name in horror-loving households, but Larry Fessenden, the director, may not. He may never be as celebrated as John Carpenter or George Romero, but his devotion to and knowledge of the genre - and of filmmaking in general - cannot be denied. In Wendigo, a father tells his son about Robert Frost, the poet who took the road less traveled and it's made all the difference. That, right there, perfectly sums up the career of Larry Fessenden. (Plus he has really cool hair!) 

INNOCENT BLOOD (1992)

I don’t think John Landis is capable of making an out-and-out horror film free of black humor or whimsy. And that’s not to disparage the filmmaker at all, but when you look back over his career, it’s amusing to see he’s first known as a horror director, even though he’s only made a handful in the genre, and all of them are horror/comedy hybrids. Considering he’s the mastermind behind comedy classics like National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blues Brothers (a top-five title for me), it’s not surprising to see Landis can’t help himself but look for the absurdity in the concepts behind his horror titles and magnify them to stand head and shoulders with the terror.

Even though it has its “official” and incredibly shitty sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, Innocent Blood feels more like the real spiritual sequel to Landis’ trademark An American Werewolf in London. Playing out like A French Vampire in Pittsburgh, Landis’ vampire romp hits similar beats: a lead character in a strange land dealing with supernatural powers and unexpectedly falling in love. (And along the way, people are viciously killed.) Gender is swapped this time out and vampire Marie is played as just a tad more villainous (she only eats bad guys, you see), but otherwise An American Werewolf in London and Innocent Blood are kismet.  

Despite Anne Parillaud’s shaky performance as Marie (the actor struggles to convey the right emotional beats through her heavy accent), she’s well cast as the vampire seductress because of how unassuming and atypically beautiful she is. Anthony LaPaglia as Joe does a serviceable job as the half-cop/half-mobster, but really, Innocent Blood is all about the bad guys, boasting mafia-film fans’ wet dream of a cast. Lead baddie Sal “The Shark” Macelli is played by none other than Robert Loggia (Psycho 2), who appears to be having more fun playing a bastard vampire than he did dancing with Tom Hanks on a giant keyboard. Joining him is the inimitable Chazz Palminteri and pretty much half the character actor cast of The Sopranos.

Innocent Blood is violent as hell — the scene with a recently-vampirized Don Rickles in his hospital room is still impressive all these years later, rivaling the infamous transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London. But despite the bloodletting and violence, Innocent Blood is often very funny — from the vaudevillian reactions to the ironic soundtrack to the most terrorized wife in all of cinema (played by Elaine Hagan). And of course it’s very funny…it’s a John Landis film.

Innocent Blood is one of Landis’ least heralded films, but it doesn’t deserve that whatsoever. Far better than some of the director’s other works (Beverly Hills Cop 3: yeesh…), it’s worthy of a reevaluation by horror fans and Landis fans alike. 

TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: BORDELLO OF BLOOD (1996)

Bordello of Blood is bad bad bad. There's no getting around it.

The anthological nature of HBO's Tales from the Crypt series allowed a rare leg-up over its television show colleagues: besides maintaining a basic skeleton design for the show (and I don't mean the Cryptkeeper! heeee haaaa haaa haaa haaa haaa!!), every episode was allowed to start from the ground up, building a brand new story with a brand new cast every week, while also inviting different writers and directors with different sensibilities to make the show as varied as possible. Looking to EC Comics' 1950s run for inspiration, the stories were either faithfully or loosely adapted, but all maintained the tongue-in-cheek nature, the macabre set-pieces, and the ironic but predictable twist. Because of this, some episodes of the show turned out much, much better than others. 

And that's okay! The show was designed to appeal to as wide of a horror-loving audience as possible, and just like any other audience types, they all have their preferences. Some prefer an approach of the horrific, others more cheeky and campy, while sometimes it's a combination of both. Tying it together, always, was a touch of seedy erotica and a nasty/funny conclusion that usually saw the main hero/heroine (aka the villain) receive their just desserts, either poetically or literally. Much like the comic books that preceded it, the television series were morality tales. Sometimes the heroes escaped unscathed and sometimes they didn't; meanwhile, the villainous almost always suffered, and that was part of the joy. If someone were flat-out unlikable, it was only a matter of time before they were taxidermied and mounted on a wall, or cut exactly in half with a chainsaw.

Which brings us to the abysmal failure that is Bordello of Blood - one of those "bad episodes" of Tales from the Crypt - and not because the story's design wasn't fully in line with the Tales from the Crypt aesthetic. It did, after all, feature unscrupulous characters, sexiness, bodily explosions, monsters, and cheeky humor. No, it fails because there are very few likable people in the cast. Let's start with Dennis Miller, who apparently rewrote all of his dialogue (which made several scenes incomprehensible, considering that the other actors against whom he was acting were forced to recite their dialogue as originally written), and who tries to make every single thing that spews out of his mouth funny or sarcastic in some way. And not just in-general, every-day funny, but Dennis-Miller funny, which equates to overbearing, exhausting, and not at all funny. 

In Miller's defense, so little about Bordello of Blood works that he's just one more body adding to the huge pile of not-working. Corey Feldman is on screen long enough for you to dislike his human version, and then flat-out abhor his vampire version, which is so over the top and stupid that I'm mystified he's mystified he couldn't find work for five years following Bordello of Blood's release. Erika Eleniak gets by with a marginally acceptable performance, but at times her disdain for the material definitely shows through. Angie Everhart, who gave what's become a legendarily terrible performance in her first acting role, does seem to be trying, but ooh boy, so little of what she does actually translates well to the screen. Tales from the Crypt often relied on hot and handsome actors and Bordello of Blood is no different, but sometimes those hot and handsome actors could act. Everhart could not, and maybe she still can't. (Apparently she was really, really nice on set, and that's all that matters.) 

The only one in the cast doing anything worth watching is Chris Sarandon, slumming in what would be one of his final theatrical film appearances. The enthusiasm and energy he injects into his Reverend Current is utterly wasted, and deserving of a much better film. The sequence during which he kills a room full of vampire prostitutes with a holy water super-soaker, causing them to explode into guts, bones, and fire, also deserves to be in something far more deserving. The fact that it's Chris Sarandon doing it makes it ten times as awesome.

Likely due to the production's necessary reshoots, the editing of Bordello of Blood is extremely awkward at times, suggesting the film were being stapled together rather than fluidly designed. Not helping this theory is the unsubtle distinction between Eleniak's real hair and the obvious wig she's forced to use during certain sequences. For a film born out of mistreatment of the Tales from the Crypt brand (story writer Robert Zemeckis basically blackmailed Universal into buying this script), it's no surprise that the final product is a chore to sit through.

Universal Studios had originally intended on creating a Tales from the Crypt-based film trilogy, beginning with the very successful Demon Knight (almost continuing with the Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn before Tarantino asked for too much money), and ultimately concluding one film early with Bordello of Blood, a film that even its star, Dennis Miller, ordered his audience to avoid while it was in theaters. That it was a box office bomb assured further tales spun by the Cryptkeeper would be relegated back to television screens, which is a shame, because the brand has carried a lot of weight since the comic book's introduction back in the 1950s and has been sitting dormant way too long.

And it's all your fault, Bordello of Blood. Thanks for nothing.

Bordello of Blood is atrocious. Even those who like the film have to admit it ain't at all that good. Fun and gory violence and a story that really does smack of that ol' EC Comics aesthetic aside, so little of it works that it's almost amazing it ever saw the light of day - and from a major studio, no less.   

VAMPIRES (1998)

  

John Carpenter grew up watching westerns. 

One of his very first short films, The Resurrection of Billy Bronco, was inspired by them. And although known as a horror director, he’s really been making westerns since the very beginning: Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, Escape from New York/L.A., Ghosts of Mars and there are even more. But when it comes to the weary and embattled few taking on many in the dusty, sandy landscapes of the Midwest, complemented by the appropriate acoustic-guitar-driven musical score, it’s Vampires that claims the top spot as the western Carpenter always wanted to make. Sure, the enemy might be sunlight-avoiding bloodsuckers, but they spring up from everywhere – from behind buildings, or elevator shafts – and it’s up to Woods’ Malcolm Crow and his desperadoes to mow them down with a glorious collection of weaponry. The only thing scarier than facing your certain death in the OK Corral at sundown is being out there in the New Mexico desert at all once the sun begins to set, allowing the legion of vampires beneath the sandy surface to rise, looking for necks to suck on.

Vampires is a hell of a lot of fun – the type of fun of which only Carpenter is capable – the type of fun that is completely without pretension, and which only wants to entertain, emboldened by that “to hell with mainstream audiences” mentality that Carpenter has been rocking since The Fog. It’s never spoken of fondly among cinephiles, but for the ardent Carpenter fan, it’s generally regarded as the last great feature from the filmmaker. It opened # 1 at the box office its debut weekend and enjoyed a laudable collection of favorable reviews – again, and sadly, it may be the last time of Carpenter’s career. To follow would be the box-office and critical bomb Ghosts of Mars, followed by the little-seen The Ward, and then endless speculation of just what projects Carpenter might tackle next, should the necessary funding come together (which seems more and more like a red herring as time goes on).

Carpenter films contain a certain energy and swagger that’s not commonly seen in other films of the genre. There’s something about the way he crafts the story and develops the lead that feels different – that establish their own identity. His siege-like tales always center around that one strong lead fighting back against adversity; heroes either anti or reluctant leading a small squad of people against the threat coming down hard upon them; heroes taking on the establishment with little hope for success.

Malcolm Crow is among them, and he is brought to boisterous, cigar-chomping, scenery-chewing life by James Woods, not only enjoying a rare lead performance, but enjoying one in which he gets to play the hero. And man is he shooting for the rafters. Woods’ performance exudes a kind of energy rarely seen in a genre project within the confines of a major studio release. (Watching him stake vampires while screaming, “Motherfucker, die! Die!” over and over is the stuff of dreams.) This wasn’t just a relatively unknown Kurt Russell taking on Snake Plissken, free of the constraints of having achieved mainstream success and straddling that line between risk-taking and reputation-maintaining. This was James Woods, a twice Oscar-nominated actor (the second nomination having been the year prior for Ghosts of Mississippi); who had, in the few years leading up to Vampires‘ release, worked with Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Robert Zemeckis; who, in the following year, would work with Clint Eastwood. Not to belabor the point, but this was an actor who had a lot to lose, creatively, by taking on a project of such potential embarrassment. But he threw caution to the wind, likely so he could let back his proverbial hair and just have fun.

And man, that’s what Vampires is. It’s fun.

As for the supporting cast, Daniel Baldwin (the most underrated Baldwin, for serious) as Montoya doesn’t get enough credit for his abilities as an actor. His contributions to the film are to offer a believable and somewhat restrained counterpart to Crow’s eccentric and bigger-than-life persona. That he begins to slowly fall for Katrina (Sheryl Lee), a prostitute bitten by the film’s main baddie, only adds to his likability. He’s written as the loyal and dependable partner – the ideal person to have in your corner when you’re up against it – and you completely buy the rapport he shares with his fellow vamp-killer. 

Thomas Ian Griffith also does a fine job retreading very old and established ground with his take on Valek, likely the fifth hundred vampire to hit the screen since the film medium began. With one foot each in the sexual-being and the monstrous-killer camps, his Valek is an interesting addition to the vampire sub-genre, which, by now, is in desperate need of rejuvenation following too many years of so many pretty bloodsucking boys. (Also look for brief appearances by Mark Boone Junior of Sons of Anarchy and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, a.k.a. Shang Tsung of Mortal Kombat.)

To suggest that Vampires is within throwing distance of Carpenter’s top films wouldn’t be accurate, but it’s deserving of so much more respect than it receives – not just from the genre community, but audiences in general. Allegedly, Carpenter, at this point in his career, had become burned out by the filmmaking process; however, it would be his experience making Vampires that would cause him to reassess his feelings and decided to stick with it. Only when Ghosts of Mars came along three years later would the director lapse into a half-retirement/hiatus for nine years before returning to feature filmmaking with The Ward.

Spoiler.

With each passing day, as Carpenter prefers to focus on graphic novels, video games, and his beloved Lakers, it seems more and more to be the case that he could very well be done with the film business for good. While it would be terrible for The Ward to serve as his swan song, perhaps it would offer the opportunity for the ’90s portion of his career – one not nearly as celebrated as his two previous decades – to enjoy the same kind of rightful adoration. Second only to In the Mouth of Madness in terms of ’90s era-Carpenter, Vampires is deserving of that kind of adoration.

If, for whatever reason, you may have dismissed Vampires after a one-time viewing, or perhaps none at all, it's time for you to consider a reevaluation. A manic performance from James Woods, a healthy dose of violence and blood-covered grue, and a full-on embracing of western aesthetics makes Vampires an underrated addition to Carpenter’s filmography and one of the more unique contributions to the vampire genre.

[Reprinted and excerpted from Daily Grindhouse.]

UNSUNG HORRORS: STAKE LAND

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre. 

 So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time.

Dir. Jim Mickle
2010
Dark Sky Films / Glass Eye Pix
United States

"Months passed in a blur of days and nights. We traveled east and west, but always north. Away from death. We avoided the cities. Mister said they were the worst, hit the hardest in the beginning. As people flocked together for safety, the plague marched through their locked gates and they became death traps. When Washington fell, it was over for America as we knew her. As government blew away, our great leaders ran for it. And hope was abandoned. We were on our own now."

Vampires!

No, don't run. Seriously. I know, I know – plagiarist Mormon authors and NBC have turned our vampires into dapper-dressed James Bond supervillains. These new vamps woo, smolder, sparkle, and play baseball. They go to their classes even though they're dead and are therefore (mostly) incapable of achieving the American dream. If you've got a brain in that there skull of yours, I don't have to tell you vampires were fucking scary once. They were ratlike skeletal albinos with ten-inch fingers. There are parts of the world that still believe in them – that still bury their dead beneath wrought-iron cages to prevent them from coming out of the ground for a midnight snack. Thankfully there are people out there who know this and make their fanged nemeses nasty, vicious, and hideous. These monsters don't imprint on babies – they suck the blood from them and toss them onto the ground before they're onto their next pulsing target.

Enter Stake Land, the second collaboration from film-making partners Nick Damici (actor/co-writer) and Jim Mickle (co-writer/director), following their second equally great and equally unheralded Mulberry Street. Theirs is a film that played the festival circuit for a year or so before being quietly released onto video in 2010. A cast of familiar faces and not-so-familiar faces works well alongside the assured, pensive, bloody, and melancholic direction. It is a pastiche of the post-apocalyptic wasteland made mainstream by the Mad Max trilogy, combined with sensibilities of the western's lone-rider. and lastly, the good, old fashioned vampire.

Martin (Connor Paolo, Mystic River), while his family packs to hit the road in hopes of avoiding this new strange outbreak plaguing the country (or world?), watches as all of them are suddenly and viciously attacked by vampires. His own number is nearly up before a stranger called only Mister (Nick Damici, World Trade Center) springs up out of nowhere and saves Martin's life. Now with no one to look out for him, Mister takes Martin out on the road with him, preparing him for a life of fending off not only vampires, but "The Brotherhood" – a group of nutty humans who believe that the vampires are God's way of bringing about end times, and therefore want the vamps to succeed. (You mean humans are worse than the monsters? Romero would be proud.) Along the way, Martin and Mister meet other lost souls looking to make sense of this new world they had no idea they were inheriting. Among them are Sister (Kelly McGillis, Top Gun), a nun attacked and possibly raped by the cannibals; Belle, (Danielle Harris, the Halloween series), a very pregnant bar maid who seems more lost than any of them; and Willie (Sean Nelson, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3), a former Marine. These five homeless and nearly hopeless individuals come together to form the closest idea of a family that can be formed here in this new world called Stake Land and attempt to forge ahead and make it the alleged last safe zone in the country called New Eden.

Stake Land will feel very familiar if you have seen the 2009 film adaptation of The Road, but that's not to say Stake Land is unoriginal or disingenuous. No, tales of the apocalypse have been explored in every medium for as long as existence of the realization that our time here on earth is limited, and as such these tales are bound to share common themes and tropes. Stake Land presents you with dirty bands of people in ragged clothing foraging for food and consumables to help them on the road; two groups of people - the good and the bad, one trying to survive, and the other trying to make it so no one can; and most importantly, the underlying message that even the most hopeless should never give up hope. Though Stake Land shares this last bit with The Road strictly thematically, it also shares John Hillcoat's pretty and philosophical direction. Though Stake Land is an ugly story about living in an ugly world, director Jim Mickle never fails to make it picturesque. Sweeping shots of untouched naturescape and close-ups of wheat billowing in the breeze reinforces this idea that it's not the world which makes humanity ugly, but the human race – that we like to think we're merely an unfortunate byproduct of our environment, but that we're actually a product of our own deep-seated selfishness and evil. (More on that in a bit.)

Mickle and Co. have a assembled a hell of a cast here. Nick Damici's Mister is the true Clint Eastwood/Man-With-No-Name archetype (hence his "name" being Mister). His history is vague, almost non-existent; there is a darkness to him, but also a light when he thinks no one might be looking. I always like seeing the dark and brooding hero/heroine enjoy a private moment to surrender to human goodness and smile or laugh. Mister isn't a barrel of laughs, but there is a certain kindness to him somewhere underneath that filthy and silent hero. He's not optimistic about the future, but it's not in him to steal that optimism from anyone else.

Conor Paolo as Martin has the task of not only experiencing these strange events and reacting realistically to them, but because he is also the narrator, it's his job to catch up the audience on the past and present. It's not a personal diary so much as it is a relay of information. His thoughts are stripped of any kind of emotion, as that is saved strictly for the on-screen action.

Our supporting cast is wonderful. Kelly McGillis' career seems to be enjoying a second life, working with some pretty exciting names in the world of independent horror. Along with this, she has appeared in Ti West's excellent The Innkeepers, and appears in Mickle's upcoming remake of the Spanish film We Are What We Are. Her first appearance is as a frantic woman dressed in torn and bloody nun robes, fleeing from a group of maniacal men. After Mister saves her, she becomes mother to both him and Martin. Their relationship is enforced only by the audience's desire to see them all overcome the horrid shit going on around them and allow them to find each other, and for them to desire each other's love and comfort as much as we want them to obtain it. She's the glue that holds all this together and makes it possible.

With Danielle Harris' turn as the pregnant Belle, she holds her own against her counterparts, all with a prosthetic baby belly shoved inside her wardrobe. Her performance benefits from the fact that the horror community already loves her – we've been watching her run for her life since her debut as Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers – although she would have been just as fine without it. She's endearing and lovable, and the quasi puppy dog crush Martin has on her makes us care about both of them just a little bit more. (And c'mon...who wouldn't fall in love with Danielle Harris?)

This recent movement – this living painting approach to film-making – may not be new in its execution, but it perhaps has never been as beautiful. By this I mean the aforementioned The Road, or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or pretty much all of Terrence Malick's filmography, who is thankfully back in a big way. Lesser known filmmakers with lower budgets are starting to take notice. Between John Geddes' Exit Humanity, Gareth Edwards' Monsters, and now Stake Land, I'm delighted to see this approach taking root in the horror genre. Because horror, despite all the dripping and the wounds and the blood, can be gorgeous. Your characters are allowed to be pensive, and to wonder or philosophize. They're allowed to be more than just the end result of their nightmarish world. These filmmakers allow their cameras to settle on some piece of oft ignored iconography, complemented by either their off-screen narrators or musical score.

Speaking of music, it was wise to bring aboard composer Jeff Grace, who takes after his fearless leader and fashions his score around those created by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis for the two films earlier mentioned. The Road and Assassination had many scenes of introspection where the silent images onscreen did the only talking, and so the music had to be more than just background. Likewise, in Stake Land, the music knows when to heighten the vampire carnage, or when to be the driving force and propel the imagery of mountains and sky into your head and heart.

While Stake Land contains some pretty heavy sociopolitical themes, it seems to be even less happy with religion – or at least what we as people have let religion become. As one character commits suicide before a crucified scarecrow (calling it Father) begging for forgiveness, or one particular mutant vampire discloses that it prayed for salvation but instead became a monster, Stake Land isn't so much as condemning religion as it is as warning you to use it to complement your life – not let it rule who you are. Religion as a whole has been bastardized. Once originally looked upon to unite communities, it instead has made us perfect strangers – foolish for believing in a higher power, or heartless and doomed for not. We have our beliefs and our faith – some of us hold onto it, and so it remains intimate – but some of us believe our beliefs and faith are right and definitive, and those who do not share those same are damned, and will bring damnation to others.

Stake Land doesn't want to just give you a cheap thrill with monstrous vampire faces and shooting blood. An exaggerated future, yes, but the whole humans-unable-to-coexist-with-other-humans thing? That's not exactly something out of the realm of possibility. We can't elect government officials without slinging death threats and constructing racial epithets on our lawns. We can't drive by a lawn adorned with the nativity at Christmas time without making a wry comment or joking about stealing the Jesus. Comedians ridicule certain religions while TV pundits sweepingly label others as evil. We have become ugly. We haven't yet sprouted fangs, but we drain the life from each other all the time. Fox News goes for jugular, as does MSNBC. The only hope for salvation we have are ourselves. Therefore, there is no hope.

Have a nice day!

JUST IN CASE...

REAL VAMPIRES

In Rhode Island in the late 1700s lived a 19-year-old girl named Sarah Tillinghast. Sarah was a dreamy girl, spending her days wandering small graveyards where Revolutionary soldiers lay. She was known to bring a book of poetry to these places and seat herself on a grave slab and read for hours on end. One day as she returned home from one of her visits she professed herself ill and took to her bed. Soon after she had a horrible fever and within weeks she was dead. 

The Tillinghast family was still grieving some weeks later when Sarah’s brother, James, came down to breakfast looking pale, shivering and complaining of a weight on his chest. He claimed that Sarah had come to him and sat on his bed. Sarah and James’ parents thought it was nothing but his grief playing tricks with his mind. 

The next day James was even paler and could barely breathe. Soon after, James was also dead. 

But Sarah and James were just the beginning - shortly after their deaths two more Tillinghast children died, both saying beforehand that Sarah had visited them. These claims were quite frightening for the Tillinghast parents, for it meant that Sarah was returning from the dead to draw the life from remaining family members. The rumors spread through the town, all saying one word - Vampire! 

Not before too long there were more deaths, and all of the victims claimed that it was Sarah that they saw right before the sickness took hold.  Then finally Honour Tillinghast, the mother of all the dead children, too became sick. Honour lay in her death bed swearing that her lost children were calling out to her. 

This was when Snuffy Tillinghast, the father, finally took a stand. With the help of his farmhand, Caleb, he went out early morning to the cemetery where Sarah was buried. He took with him a long hunting knife and a container of lamp oil. 

The two men reached Sarah’s grave and together dug up her casket and opened its creaking lid. Even though she had been put to rest 18 months ago Sarah looked as if she were asleep, there was no decomposition. Her eyes were open, according to one account, fixed in a stare, and fresh blood was found in her heart and veins.  After seeing his daughter’s face flushed as if with blood he took his knife and cut out her bleeding heart. It is said her body gushed with blood. Snuffy Tillinghast then set his daughter’s heart on fire and burned it to ashes.

After the heart was burned the deathly ill Honour Tillinghast recovered fully and there were no more strange deaths or Sarah sightings in the Rhode Island town again.

REVIEW: THE CARETAKER

"The fruit and the feather fall at the same rate.

One is crushed, and one is tickled by its fate."

The world of fiction is currently saturated with vampires. I know it and you know it. And we can blame all that Twilight nonsense, which took our undead, blood-sucking creatures of the night and made them play baseball and willingly go to high school for some reason, even though they're technically corpses and can't do much with a diploma. 

So when someone goes out and makes a low budget vampire movie, I groan. How can I not groan? How can I maintain enthusiasm when someone thinks they can bring something new to the formula? How about you just go make a spoof version of Paranormal Activity with a really punchliney title? I'll wait here. 

But The Caretaker proves there's still blood to be sucked out of the old sub-genre yet. It is a clever, bleak, and even thoughtful film about the ties that bind us - and how we're better off trusting a mortal enemy than our own neighbor.

It is the very beginning of a sudden outbreak of vampirism occurring across Australia. What's believed to be the flu turns out to be something much more vicious and deadly. Soon, a group of strangers find themselves fleeing to the countryside in an effort to leave the madness of the city behind. At an isolated house in a distant rural area, a wine salesman, his ailing mother, and her doctor are already hunkering down, trying to make sense of what they are hearing about the outbreak. Our fleeing humans are surprised to find out, however, that the good doctor is actually inflicted with the vampire disease. Though the humans don't have much of a choice, the agreement is forged: the doctor will protect the humans from other vampires by night, if they will protect him from revenge-seeking humans by day.

You should have known it was all going to end very badly. 

The Caretaker effectively presents what George A. Romero has been saying in his zombie films for years: us humans are worse. Because we are selfish, and greedy, and willing to do anything to survive. At first all seems as well as it could be. Certain characters are dicks and bitches, but besides being irritating, no one seems up to anything nefarious. But that doesn't last. 

For a low budget, the ensemble cast are frighteningly good. Special mention must be made of Lee Mason, who I swear I've seen in something else, but whose filmography says otherwise. This doppelganger of C. Thomas Howell proves himself to be a domineering and strong figure - he assumes the role of leader without even trying. 

The direction by Tom Conyers is also confident. His handling of the powers vampires possess are unnatural enough to be unsettling, but never becomes cartoonish as they would have in a multi-million dollar film. The make-up effects are basic, but effective - again, just what's required is utilized. The most striking aspect of The Caretaker is Conyers' insistence that the concept be taken seriously. This is a surprisingly introspective film, filled with characters struggling with their own mortality, and with their own ruminations on what kind of life they lived leading up to this moment in time. An especially nice scene in which one of these characters unhappy with the person they have become plays a simple melody on the piano, and as each character hears her playing, they are all connected - however briefly. Perhaps because its a singular moment of peace in otherwise non-stop chaos, where people aren't to be trusted, and new bonds destroy and replace old ones.

Unfortunately, the musical score can be intrusive and even exhausting at times, as there doesn't seem to be one frame without a theme or a sting. And it doesn't help that the mournful strings you're hearing are clearly the result of a synthesizer, either. It does the film a disservice at times, reminding the viewer just how cheaply made it was. I'm always of the mind that if you're making a low budget feature, use music sparingly, unless you have access to a musician with a wealth of resources and willing to work cheap as a favor. I should stress that the score itself isn't bad...there's just too much of it, and after a while, you can't help but hear the flaws.

I also have to point my finger at its ending. Without giving anything away, let's just say it more than liberally borrows from the ending of another vampire film with a gimmick from the last decade. But, a good ending is a good ending, so I'll allow it.

Overall, I dug this undead flick. Similar thematically to Jim Mickle's Stakeland (but not nearly the same scope), it is an interesting character piece - a realistic observational experiment on what would happen in such an event, and how humanity would react. Sadly (and depressingly), The Caretaker might just be spot on.

Once again, my jaded and cynical self has been proven wrong by a film from which I expected little to nothing. It's so easy to look at a shoddy poster or video artwork and make a snap judgment, and if you did that in the case of The Caretaker, you'd be missing out like I almost did.

UNSUNG HORRORS: THE NIGHT FLIER

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre.

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time.

Dir. Mark Pavia

1997

New Line Cinema

United States

Stephen King is perhaps the most prolific author who has ever lived. Interesting that his home base is the horror genre—something often derided for its offensive, controversial, or corny subject matter. There’s no arguing the man has given one generation after another unending nightmares about clowns hiding in sewers, corpses in hotel room bathtubs, and recently resurrected childhood pets. He’s written tales of utter fear married with genuine quality, and he, like many of his colleagues, hands his work to filmmakers on a silver platter, hoping they will achieve a same result. Unfortunately, that is hardly the case. In general, nine times out of ten the book will always be better than the movie it inspired, but with King, it sometimes seems as if there is some cosmic force out there willing to do anything to prove it, for the chances of a successful King novel to screen transition is generally 50/50. Famous filmmakers with various levels of prestige have tackled King over the years: Stanley Kubrick, John Carpenter, Rob Reiner…the list is truly endless—yet despite the director’s pedigree, it didn’t always work out. Lawrence Kasdan, for instance – the man who brought you The Big Chill and Wyatt Earp – couldn’t quite turn Dreamcatcher into anything more but a bloated Hollywood A-list joke (although the source material did not reflect the best of King’s work). Tom Holland, who had previously contributed the horror classics Child’s Play and Fright Night (as well as the script for the quite-good Psycho 2), couldn’t pull off Thinner. Even George Romero, who hit one homerun with Creepshow, couldn’t quite make The Dark Half work. Lastly, let’s not forget poor Mick Garris, who just keeps trying.

And that’s just when it comes to novels.

When it comes to King’s short stories and novellas…oh boy. For every decent story-to-film transition (1408, Apt Pupil), there are dozens of inexorably poor attempts (Lawnmower Man, The Mangler, eight – count ‘em – eight Children of the Corn movies) whose odor of excrement still waft across the land. Many filmmakers have tried; most have failed. It would seem that only Frank Darabont possesses that rare ability to repeatedly turn King’s shorter works into amazing films. Most folks point to The Shawshank Redemption as that shining example, but The Mist is an underrated and nasty little tale of monster mayhem and the ugliness of humanity (even if the ending is a bit too mean-spirited for my taste).

With that said, when I tell you that a filmmaker with very little previous credits to his name adapted one particular King tale about a vampire pilot, and it stars the angry guy from Project: ALF, I’d expect you to be suspicious, if not downright cynical.

How horribly wrong you would be. In fact, next to Shawshank and Stand By Me, The Night Flier is perhaps one of the best adaptations of a King short to date.

Miguel Ferrer is Richard Dees, an unscrupulous reporter for a tabloid called Inside View. He has no qualms with hiding in morgues all night, or doing…certain things…with morgue attendants to ensure he obtains the perfect photographs to accompany his stories. And he isn't on-screen for more than ten seconds before he snatches a galley proof out of someone's hand and demands to know where his "god damned dead baby" picture is. It's quite an introduction to a character, and right away lets you know just what kind of "protagonist" with whom you'll be spending your time.

Dees has made a decent living writing slime (which includes loving homage to other King works, such as Thinner and Needful Things), so it’s much to his chagrin that his equally slimy editor, Merton Morrison (Dan Monahan of the Porky’s films), forces upon him a newbie reporter named Katherine (Julie Entwisle) to be his partner. Dees is not terribly excited at this prospect and does nothing to camouflage his disdain for her.

In a smoky bar one evening, Dees tells Katherine how the job and the sick things she’ll eventually see will crawl inside her like a cancer and fester until she either kills herself or goes mad—citing his former co-worker named Dottie (whom Katherine is replacing) as the example. Dees lives by the coda “Never believe what you publish, and never publish what you believe.” He also lives an isolated life – one primarily spent on the open road – and he genuinely seems to prefer it that way. There’s not a single scene that takes place in Dee’s home—bars, yes; the office, yes; dingy motel rooms, the open road, his own private airplane; all yes. But the man, sadly, has no real home of his own, and that speaks volumes about the kind of person he is. Though he preaches never to believe what he publishes, the job clearly encompasses his whole life. He’s not the most balanced person you’ll meet, and his temper flares with little prodding.

At the editor’s insistence, Dees begins following the trail of Dwight Renfield, a so-called vampire pilot who lands his black Cessna airplane in isolated airstrips and helps himself to the hapless victims unfortunate enough to dwell close by. Before feasting, however, Renfield bestows upon them some kind of trancelike state, leaving his victims lucid and almost high. The victims tend to be elderly (meaning, unable to put up any kind of fight), but those friends and witnesses claim that in the days leading to their death, they never looked better—bright skin and eyes brimming with life; an interesting effect of being preyed upon by a vampiric creature.

There are some creepy and ghastly sights along the way: Someone’s head ripped off their neck and staring, upside down, with their dead eyes; a woman, whose blood was cleanly drained from her body, lying peacefully on her bed; even an utterly demonic looking dog that leaps from the top of a trailer and chases Dees to his car…but then suddenly reappears on top of the trailer again, sitting calmly and stoically, before vanishing altogether. (Scenes like this make me wish the currently out-of-print DVD contained a director’s commentary, because I’d love to know how they made the dog that insane looking.)

During the investigation, Dees cock-teases Morrison by telling him he’s covered excellent ground, but refuses to spill because he can feel the story is about to get bigger and weirder. Morrison, refusing to wait for Dees’ version of the story, instead sics newbie Katherine on the trail, as well—not just in an effort to get the story on the shelves as soon as possible, but also because he gets his rocks off on playing his seasoned reporter and his brand new hire against each other. (In fact, his last scene in the film ends with him maniacally laughing in the dark solitude of his office, knowing the two at-odds reporters are both heading toward an inevitable and ugly confrontation.)

As Dees falls deeper down Renfield’s rabbit hole, he clings desperately to his credo of publishing and believing he has so often followed. Things become increasingly real for Dees, however, until he can no longer help but become entangled in the morbid investigation. The idea of regaining his top dog position at Inside View (which pathetically, at the end of the day, is really not an enviable position at all) becomes too enticing for Dees to pass up. That’s a decision he will ultimately come to regret.

Begin Spoilers.

On the surface, The Night Flier is just your fun and bloody vampire tale, but underneath, there's quite a bit thematically going on. Great pains (though subtle) are made to show that Dees and Renfield are kindred spirits. The first and most obvious would be the fact that they both own planes…a similarity purposely made obvious to lead you to see the less obvious similarities on your own. To start, they both live an isolated life, existing not in a home, but in the skies above. Perhaps most ironically, they are both bloodsuckers, preying on their unsuspecting victims in different ways. Dees has spent his entire life chasing death, while Renfield has spent most of his afterlife spreading it; the actions of both have brought nothing but pain and misery to all of their victims.

The Night Flier is about transition. When Dees speaks of his former co-worker, Dottie, in the beginning of the film, there's a brief flashback of him standing at her bathroom doorway, staring at her lifeless body in the tub. Before you can even begin to wonder why he is there, he raises his camera and takes a picture. At that point, she becomes to him nothing more than headline fodder. At the film's end, Katherine, too, assumes the "role" of Dees and publishes a story outing him as "The Night Flier," also effectively killing the trail of the true killer. There's a strange kind of hope for her character—the film ends with a close-up of her face, hardened by all that she has experienced, but she truly has learned from Dees his one commandment: Never believe what you publish, and never publish what you believe. Having seen Renfield take off into the stormy night, she decides then and there not to pursue. She has seen what chasing the truth has done to a person, and so she shifts the blame to Dees...who all along was just another side of Renfield, anyway. While the true Night Flier is not the one whose face becomes splashed on the front page of Inside View, Dees deserves to be just as vilified.

Speaking of transition, how much credence should I lend to the fact that the film's finale takes place in a car rental agency called Triangle Budget Rental? After all, Katherine becomes Dees; Dees becomes "The Night Flier;" and "The Night Flier" becomes a story that will never be published because Katherine sees the truth of it, and hence believes...which is the only ideal Dees ever really lived by.

End Spoilers.

Dees is truly despicable in almost every sense – he has not one positive trait – yet he becomes a character you root for, even sympathize with, as the story progresses towards its shocking conclusion. It’s the strength of Miguel Ferrer’s performance that enables this conflicted support, as he brings a lot of weight to his role. Ferrer has spent the majority of the last decade working in television, his last meaty film role being in Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. He is one of those many character actors that do not receive nearly as much attention as they deserve.

Really, for a low budget affair, the entire supporting cast does a great job. Monahan as Morrison oozes with that special kind of slime you can't help but secretly adore, and Phoebe Cates-lookalike Entwisle as Katherine contributes a believable performance in her first (and only?) film role. Special mention must be made of John Bennes as airplane maintenance man Ezra Hannon. His very brief moment of screen time comes across as probably the most genuine performance in the film. With his engine grease-covered hands and face, and his filthy jumpsuit, he looks every bit the part. Before checking out his career on the ol’ IMDB, I was convinced he was a real New England native who managed to find his way into the movie. It’s little things like this that give The Night Flier its power. Actual effort went into the movie, and it shows. Low budgets can be a hindrance, but talent and passion can and will always make up for it—so long as you’ve got the right people in front of and behind the camera.

The red stuff flies fast and furiously—the legendary KNB FX boys do not hold back. And the last ten minutes contains some of the scariest, most fucked up (without going overboard), and expert execution I’ve ever seen in the horror genre. I love watching this film with people who have never seen it, because this ending sequence always leaves them shifting uncomfortably on the couch.

Composer Brian Keane turns in a nice little score, filling it with sad melancholy and subtle horror. He has spent the majority of his career scoring documentaries for television, and his style of small, under-the-surface music serves the film quite well.

As an aside, The Night Flier is a movie that plays quite beautifully in black and white. The natural noir aspects of the film play well against the stripping of color, and it makes you look at the film in a new way. I definitely recommend turning off the color the next time you watch.

Writer/director Mark Pavia enhanced the original story quite a bit to turn it into a feature length script. The character of Katherine Blair was entirely created, but her inclusion in the story is so appropriate and perfect to the events unfolding, as well as her serving as a perfect foil to Dees, that it never feels forced or long-winded. The ending sequence I spoke of earlier, too, is a creation on Pavia's part. Much of the dialogue remains the same, however, as well as the tense relationships—although it would seem Pavia's Dees comes across as a bit more sympathetic than King's.

Word on the street is Pavia has a new King project in the works…something about an anthology. After the last five years of tepid, King-inspired films, this is something to be truly excited about.