Cast:
James Woods (Jack Crow), Daniel Baldwin (Tony Montoya), Sheryl Lee (Katrina), Tim Guinee (Father Adam Guiteau), Thomas Ian Griffith (Jan Valek), Maximilian Schell (Cardinal Alba), Mark Boone Junior (Catlin), Gregory Sierra (Father Giovanni), and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (David Deyo) Directed by John Carpenter (#068 - Halloween (1978), #634 - Escape from New York, #712 - The Thing (1982), #732 - Escape from L.A., #1221 - Dark Star, #1298 - They Live, #1479 - Big Trouble in Little China, #1605 - Starman, #1874 - Assault on Precinct 13)
Review:
"I got into this business to make Westerns. I didn't get into it to make horror movies. I got typecast. But once I got over that, I realized it's like John Wayne. I wrote one script for him back in the '70s. He always wanted to play heavies. He was tired of playing the good guy, but he said, 'Oh, they like me that way.' I'm like a good whore; I go where I'm pushed."
On October 30, 1998, John Carpenter's Vampires was released to the general public. The film is based on the novel Vampire$, as written by John Steakley in 1990. Years had been spent in development by Largo Development, who recruited Russell Mulcahy (most notably the director of the first two Highlander films) to try and develop it as director with apparent ideas to have Dolph Lungren serve as the star. This did not come to pass, and Carpenter was approached to do the film right as he was on the idea of retiring after production of Escape from L.A. (1996) had been less than fun to make. The writing credit for the film is lent to Don Jakoby, although there were clear re-writes by Carpenter, who had been approached of the idea to do the film to look over two screenplays - one by Jakoby and one by Dan Mazur (evidently one script involved a part set in France with a church battleground and the other involved a mall with teenagers turning into vampires). Carpenter apparently liked both and thus utilized select elements from each to go with parts from the book before having to modify it again when the budget was suddenly slashed from $80 million to $20 million at the last minute. 25 years later, it probably seems apt to look back on what Carpenter was saying when it came to being asked about the film back then, and one quote certainly could stick with you. He mused that films nowadays (read: 1998), particularly with horror films starting with stuff such as Scream (1996) seemed to have a "postmodern style" when it came to winking at the audience and that his film tried to do the opposite. In case you were wondering, Blade (1998), a film also dealing with a vampire hunter dealing having to stop some sort of ritual from being done by an evildoer vampire, was released just a few months earlier in August (to be technical, Vampires was really released a bit earlier than October in France, but do you really care about France?). As one might expect, Carpenter also composed the music for the film. Two direct-to-video sequels followed in the next couple of years, but they had no involvement from Carpenter, so nope.
Carpenter obviously thought his vampires were savage enough to seem different from those ones that seemed to brood at times. The strange thing isn't so much that Woods is the lead actor here as it is the fact that Carpenter went through a row of names and somehow thought about R. Lee Ermey (the studio felt he lacked the star power and declined the idea). Oh hell, I was fine with the film, what can I say? Granted, it obviously isn't one of Carpenter's best films (of the five features he did in the 1990s, this was apparently his only successful one with audiences, but there are folks who will tell you about giving In the Mouth of Madness (1994) or the aforementioned Escape a second look). But I like Carpenter (thank goodness we live in an age where people remember The Thing as being great rather than the rubes that hated it back then), and I like his ideas in trying to do a Western with vampires that seems more familiar with Sam Peckinpah than his general influence in Howard Hawks. In the 108-minute runtime, you might say the best way to judge the film is how one rides with the opening action sequence, because it is the one big moment with the entire cast before basically doing a rendition of The Wild Bunch. Of course, this bunch involves vampire hunters sanctioned by the Catholic Church (they are pretty good at dragging folks into the sun, so they get leeway for drinking and screwing around at night) that deal with the general rules of vampires: stakes and the sun are the one to deal with vampires that don't care for crosses or turning into bats. Where else would vampires be around but in New Mexico? At the helm is Woods, who is actually pretty amusing in overblown macho-ness. His flippant energy is entertaining to me for that element of curiosity of just who would be more dangerous, the vampire beast or being in the same room with him. Carpenter apparently let him ad-lib for a take before doing one that adhered to the script and evidently the off-color stuff was left in at times. Sure, it isn't the timeliest of off-color stuff (oh hey, never check out an actor's Twitter account), but, well, his crudity suits the film like a glove rather than coming off as schtick (if it was really schtick, he wouldn't be wearing blue jeans the whole time). His intensity is fun, what can I say? Baldwin and Lee don't exactly have as much to do in deference to the hunt besides an attempt at chemistry that is shaky (particularly since the only reason the latter is there is because of a temporary psychic link formed to the villain...by a bite on the inside thigh). Griffith doesn't have as much to say as the general threat, but he makes a fair ferocious threat in feral desires, one who sees the night every time but with the lust for more that is, well, accurate (at least to a night owl like me, anyway). Schell may have the most inevitable of all paths for the film next to Guinee, but they both do fine in varying tones against Woods in "Catholic patience". In general, the film is a road film, one that dwells a bit in conversation of where to go in weary doggedness that can only be done the same way one has seen in a Western where a man brings his folks along for the ride to possible certain death because damn it, it's their ride (of course, there is the horror stuff one thinks they will see such as a handful of vampiric terror like severed limbs, so...). It even ends on a variation, because who else could tell doomed folks to go with God before giving them a head start on an inevitable chase to death? I think, at the end, I ended up liking the film a bit more when I processed it, even if I can acknowledge that it won't be everyone's cup of tea of weary Western-soaked vampire guns-in-the-sun. If you respect Carpenter as that director of human nature in worthy entertainment, well, the film (now 25 years old) will be just right up one's alley.
Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.
Next up: Cronenberg-mania.
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