Blood and Donuts

Boya, ethical vampire, crawled into a bag in a cellar on the night man first landed on the moon. As our story begins, he is awakened by a golf ball someone hits through the cellar window. Making his way out into the world again is frightening for our shy, undead protagonist, but he soon makes friends with a squirrelly cab driver named Earl. Boya also finds a new love interest in Molly, the waitress at an all night donut shop. Unfortunately, Boya is pursed by his girlfriend from the sixties, a beautician who is pissed off that she got old and Boya didn’t. Earl has his own troubles in the form of a couple of low life gangsters who feel entitled to use his cab for nefarious purposes, as well as their boss, a creepy guy played by David Cronenberg. Molly has it the easiest of all the characters, seeing as how her only concern is not letting people get close to her, that is, until she acquires a vampire for a potential boyfriend.

I loved Blood and Donuts when I saw it on VHS in the 90s, and I was worried that it wouldn’t hold up well. Luckily for me, I still enjoy it just as much. The life of a night-dwelling misfit appeals to me, and although I have been forced to more or less take on normal people hours since I became a parent, I’m sure I’ll go back to working second shift and hitting late night coffee shops someday. It’s just how some people’s biorhythms are. Blood and Donuts gives me the same calm feeling I had when I lived the life the characters live, and also reminds me of how I feel when I see the painting Nighthawks; I have read that Nighthawks is meant to convey a sense of loneliness, but I feel very comforted by the emptier world of nighttime, and its wary inhabitants. Blood and Donuts may be on the surface about lonely people finding each other, but they’re lonely because they’re cautious, which is a a positive thing in small amounts.

Besides my vicarious nighthawking, I enjoy Blood and Donuts for the fact that much of the story is told through body language and facial expressions rather than dialogue. When Boya awakens, we see, rather than being told, the effect his re-emergence has on his former girlfriend. The same technique is used for a dream sequence sex scene between Molly and Boya, and also for the conclusion of the film, when Boya decides how to ultimately take his next step in life.

Interestingly, we get more dialogue between Earl and Boya than between Molly and Boya, with Boya laying out more of an explanation for his condition than he does with anyone else. These Boya/Earl scenes have led some viewers to a reading of Boya as bisexual, and also to a comparison between vampirism and heroin addiction. Personally, I’m not sure about the bisexuality, as Boya’s body language and choice of words could be left over from an earlier era when men were not as concerned with appearing as if they did not care for one another as friends. Heroin addiction and vampirism is an obvious comparison, but is put to much better use in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction. In this case I think the vampirism is more of a device used to symbolize the conflicting principles we all have and the compromises we have to make in order to balance our needs with the needs of others. Boya’s struggle in life comes specifically from being a vampire, but it’s not given more screen time than Earl’s troubles, and the vampire traits have both positive and negative effects. Plus, it looks cool when Boya vamps out.

The character we get the most explanation from is Cronenberg’s mob boss, who holds forth to his underlings in the bowling alley where he conducts business. I know that I am biased against Mr. Cronenberg because I have seen inside his mind in the form of his films, which are some of the most disturbing works in horror history, but I would like to think that he also is an effective actor without the viewer having had that insight. I both hoped and feared that he would become a vampire, but it was not to be.

With almost any other film, the ending we get here in Blood and Donuts would seem to be lacking in resolution. We get a chance meeting between some supporting characters that might go somewhere, a bit of business that seems unfinished, and a surprising death. But to tie everything up neatly when so much time has been spent allowing us to draw our own conclusions would be out of character for this film. It works the way it is, and seems as much like real life between real humans as possible in a world where vampires and auto shop surgery are real. Blood and Donuts gives us a slice of life, and induces a wistful but not unwelcome mood. I recommend this one to fans of the vampire comedy subgenre, fans of quirky romances, night owls, and donut nuts.

Friday Fangs: Night Hunter

I still have not learned my lesson when it comes to Don “The Dragon” Wilson movies, apparently, because tonight’s Friday Fangs movie has him fighting vampires in the 1996 action horror Night Hunter. Hell, Night Hunter isn’t even the first Wilson movie I watched this week, the other being Terminal Rush, but at least for that one I have the excuse that Rowdy Roddy Piper is in it. Night Hunter I watched just for the blog content. I found Night Hunter on VHS in a box behind my couch this afternoon, and I was going to blame my movie hoarding husband, but he says we actually have two copies of this sucker. So that probably means I’m the one responsible, since I tend to go into a frenzy when I start grabbing cheap VHS off the shelf at the secondhand store. Just yesterday I accidentally bought two copies of the same Michael Dudikoff movie. So I have no one to blame for owning Night Hunter but myself, but let’s go ahead and blame “The Dragon” as well, since he was one of the producers on this crap.

The film begins with a flashback, like all good ones do. In 1968 Jack Cutter was a mere child living in the middle of nowhere with his parents, who are vampire hunters. Night is coming, and so are the vampires. Mom and Dad ask their little partner to hide in the cabinet and hold onto an old book they own. The book is essentially a vampire yellow pages directory, with a list of all the vampire families on earth. Cutter had two things to do in this opening sequence: stay in the cabinet, and hold onto the vampire phone book. But just to prove that he can fuck things up, he does neither of those things, although Dad does manage to get the book back and send it out of the house, along with a gun, in the hands of his feeble son. His father’s last words to him: “Never Trust Anyone.” As the child escapes through a window only to stand awkwardly behind a mound of dirt in the front yard, the vicious vampires don’t even bother to go after him….

And suddenly, it’s the 90s! The same vampires who killed Cutter’s parents are having dinner in a human restaurant, the kind where someone walks around with a Polaroid camera selling pictures. So when Cutter comes in and shoots them all, the photographer manages to get his picture for the cops. I know what you’re thinking: you can’t kill a vampire with a gun! Hold on. In the universe where Night Hunter exists, you can slow them down with a shotgun blast, and then kill them by breaking their necks or backs. Of course, when the cops get there, they’re confused too, because there’s blood everywhere, but the gunshot wounds all appear to be about a month old because vampires heal so fast. Regardless, they have the picture, and the “people” are dead. So now the cops and the king of the world of the vampires, Christopher Guest’s better looking but less talented brother Nicholas, are after Cutter’s ass. Can Cutter kill all the vampires and avoid all the cops with the help of a beautiful tabloid reporter? I don’t know, because I fell asleep halfway through the movie!

I get tired of having to explain the B movie handicap, because if you’re reading an article that was published on a less-than-popular niche blog, written about a Don “The Dragon” Wilson movie, you know that there are these movies in the world that are cheap but have otherworldly qualities that make them more entertaining than ten Arnie movies kicking the asses of ten Steven Segal movies in a roadhouse in Bulgaria. Except that Night Hunter isn’t entertaining, it’s just cheap.

Night Hunter did have potential. It just fucked it up as badly as that kid fucked up hiding in a cabinet holding a book. The Dragon’s no actor, but damn, that sonofabitch can fight. So let’s have him do as little of that as possible. The idea of having the cops find a bunch of bodies with blood all over them and mysterious healed up woulds could have been intriguing as hell, if not for the fact that the movie was already weighed down by the stupid prologue. These vampires use their fangs mostly for chewing the scenery, and alas, poor viewer, they do that well. We didn’t need the dumb Vlad the Impaler as Gary Oldman as Nicholas Guest reincarnation subplot. Also, this was produced by Roger Corman’s New Horizons company. If anyone can make trash interesting, it’s that man. Unfortunately, Night Hunter fails on all counts other than that there are some good looking actresses.  I would say that you should never trust Don “The Dragon” Wilson, but Bloodfist is awesome. So although I’m on a quest to see every horror movie of the 90s, starting with the vampire movies, I’ll probably watch Bloodfist and even Bloodfist 2 several more times before I ever finish this piece of hemoglobin.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula – 1992 Coppola edition

Keanu Reeves gets an invite from some weird guy to go to Transylvania to sell real estate in England, and doesn’t think anything is strange about that. The weird guy asks Keanu to stay a while, but it isn’t really a request as much as a demand, as Keanu soon finds out after he’s imprisoned in a sex dungeon with a bunch of bloodsucking freaks. Whoa. Then the weird guy turns into Gary Oldman and goes back to England to hit on Keanu’s girlfriend Winona Ryder, while banging her hot to trot friend on the side. In a fursuit. Can her friend’s three suitors and Hannibal Lecter stop a guy who already impaled everyone in Romania? This sounds much more exciting than it actually is when I put it that way, doesn’t it? Oh, I’m sure this version of Dracula has its rabid fans, but I saw it in 1992 and didn’t see it again until last week, and the only thing I remembered from my first viewing was Sadie Frost writhing around on a bed all horny like. I mean, sure, that’s memorable and all, but when you consider that I also remember who I saw this with and the conversation we had while standing in line to get the tickets, and I remember the conversation better than I do the movie, that doesn’t make for a good recommendation. Although, to be fair to Dracula, in 1992 I was still well within my phase of thinking horror movies were supposed to be scary, and this is not really even meant to be scary. Are vampire movies ever really scary? I will admit that if I came face to face with a vampire I would pee in my pants, but on screen, they’re more stylish at best. Sadie Frost crawling out of her coffin was the only moment that was impressively horrific. Gary Oldman’s shadow moving independently of him was cool, though, and Eiko Ishioka definitely deserved the Oscar for costume design. Hell, if they could’ve given her two just for this film I’d approve. Anthony Hopkins was hilarious as the blurting Van Helsing; can you imagine Peter Cushing saying “I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart,” and playing it for buffoonish laughs? Let’s not even mention Keanu’s English accent, though, because it’s not worth complaining about. Overall, I appreciate Dracula more than I did the first time I saw it, but I was ready for it to be over by the end. Maybe I’ll give in another shot in twenty years or so. My main hangup, even more now at age 39 than at 17, is that Coppola can do better than this. Yes, Dracula looks great in a candy-colored sort of way, it’s somewhat erotic, but it’s one of those movies that’s more like a ride at the Universal Studios theme park than an adaptation of a novel so amazing it’s never gone out of print. Plus, it’s about thirty minutes too long. And how many versions of Oldman as Dracula did we need? We had the guy in the Slim Goodbody armor, the old guy, the hip young Victorian guy, the wolf, and something that looked like Nosferatu. Give me a break. Honestly, the film looks like Coppola saw a couple of Tim Burton movies, got jealous of this new filmmaker, and decided to make one just like that. Too bad he didn’t cast Johnny Depp as Harker. See, we know Coppola can tell a good story, dammit. I am not as huge a fan of the Godfather movies as everyone else but I acknowledge them as classics, and The Conversation is one of my favorite movies of all time. But in a few weeks, I’ll have forgotten all about Dracula again, except to wonder why Sadie Frost and Richard E. Grant haven’t become bigger stars. Dracula: it’s beautiful at first glance, but ultimately shallow, sort of like Winona Ryder’s career.

Vampire Cop

In a city that looks like Atlanta, but talks like Pensacola, there exists a police detective who works the night shift. Through confusing camcorder footage which resembles a slower and dumber version of what we might call a movie, this detective stalks the drug dealers, rapists, pimps, and prostitutes which make up the population of this strange city, and he also walks through the nightly dreams of a news reporter from some crappy TV station with plants sitting behind the news desk like you see on a cable access show or a commercial for Heartland Music. Fortunately for the viewer, the news reporter is Melissa Moore, one of those B movie scream queens who always takes her top off.

Does that sounds like a good movie to you? If so, take your right fist in your left hand and PUNCH YOURSELF IN THE FACE, because you just contemplated watching Donald Farmer’s shot on video abomination known as Vampire Cop, the film where the titular cop turns the bad guys into vampires instead of arresting them, where a guy who went to the Merritt Butrick school of acting reigns over the bad folks in the town, where a man lives in a bathtub for no good reason, and even a chainsaw killing can be boring.

That is not to say that camcorder movies don’t have their place in the world, or even on my TV screen. It was camcorder movies that kept the video stores afloat, because you know you accidentally rented a few based on the box art. They were cheap for the store owners to stock, and they made their money back. And it is their descendants, the backyard productions shot on digital video, that make up the filler for today’s streaming services, allowing us to pay $7.99 per month for an all-you-can-watch buffet of people you never heard of running through abandoned insane asylums holding cheap cameras.

Our movie history is filled with notable good/bad camcorder horror movies, including Boardinghouse and Blood Cult. But sometimes bad is just bad, not so-bad-it’s-good, no matter how much the filmmaker pays homage to films such as The Howling and Horror of Dracula. Vampire Cop is one of these bad bad films. If you think you’ve seen all the vampire movies, and you’re curious about this one, go re-watch something else, and be sure to have extra garlic butter sauce to dip your pizza crust into if this cop comes a knocking at your door.

I think I’m going to try to cover a vampire movie here every Friday until I run out of 90s vampire movies to watch, and call the series Friday Fangs. The good news about Vampire Cop being the first in the series is that the movies I post about will all be better than this one! I hope….