Today’s film is another recommendation from Rumine and this time we’ve moved away from werewolves (Werewolf of London was last week) to vampires, specifically John Carpenter’s 1998 film Vampires starring James Woods.
Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already to get the full posts or show your support by buying me a movie ticket.
The internet lists this as a “horror-action” film, but honestly, I found this much more in the comedy zone for me. Carpenter is obviously a huge name in horror ever since he hit it big with Halloween back in the 70s, but I was a little surprised to see that he has only directed two films after this one and none since 2010. And perhaps this film was a sign of things to come.
With a film like this, you have to suspend disbelief from the opening frame to the last. Nothing on the screen is to be taken seriously in the least, and that’s why I feel like it lands in the realm of comedy. Yes there is action, like the opening sequence where John "Jack" Crow (Woods), Tony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) and their crew of vampire slayers storm a remote house in the desert somewhere to flush out and kill a band of vampires by shooting metal spikes into them and then dragging them out into the sun with the winch on the front of a Jeep.
Surely there has to be a more effective way of clearing a house of vampires in the middle of the day, but then this is an action movie, so we need action. Yet, there was an action movie that came out around two months prior to this with a vampire hunting character dressed in black with sunglasses that has withstood the test of time.
That’s right, Blade and Vampires came out just two months apart in 1998 with the latter releasing the day before Halloween.
