B Plus Movies

Roger Ebert, undoubtedly one of the most influential movie critics of my lifetime, was ragged on for reviewing a movie of which he watched only 8 minutes. Now while it’s said one never has a second chance to make a first impression, seeing less than 10% doesn’t usually constitute a proper basis to judge its merits, even if you have seen every movie since the invention of celluloid. Ebert went back, watched the film and apologized for cheating on his first try, basically I think to maintain his cred as a reliable critic.

This is why I usually don’t review movies I’ve not sat entirely through… until today. This friday’s blog gets you a three for one sale, the length of each review corresponding to about how much time I spent watching it.

First up is Strangeland, a film made by Dee Snider, former lead of the band Twisted Sister and hair metal DJ of 2009. I’d been interested in seeing this film, but only caught the last half. The story centers around a sadistic madman calling himself Captain Howdy who likes to play BDSM games with people but isn’t necessarily big on getting their consent first. According to the media I saw about it before hand, it starts with a young girl (the daughter of a cop) meeting the Captain online and getting sucked into his world.

Where I picked it up Howdy had gotten caught, incarcerated, determined to be insane and then released after he forgoes the Captain Howdy persona for his more mild mannered real name. The normal folk of the town can’t stand the thought of leaving him alone which inadvertently brings Howdy back to the surface and starts another string of violence, peircing and seeking after the teen girl from the half of the movie I didn’t see. Her father, the police officer, must once again leap to action and save his little girl from the tattooed and pierced monster that is Captain Howdy.

Dee Snider plays the  villian of Strangeland and does it well. Captain Howdy is genuinely creepy, threatening and believably threatening with just a touch of visionary madman, enough to make you think he’s kinda cool if he wasn’t raping girls and poking people with long needles. On the other hand, the movie makes use two contradictory cliches, marring its edgy, avante garde nature, namely that 1)People into bondage and peircings are always bad and 2)the freaks are always persecuted by the rednecky straights. Both cliches are presented in such a blatant, over the top fashion that you take them for granted (partially due to the excellent talents of Robert Englund) and it’s only until later that your preconceptions have been prayed up.

Strangeland, despite its flaws, gets a B+ from me. Go Dee Snider. Next.

The Devil’s Rejects is the sequel to the 70’s horror homage House of 1000 Corpses. Rockstar/Producer/Director Rob Zombie put this retro, ready-for-grindhouse movie onto screens at a time when I was already becoming bored with torture porn like Saw and Hostel, not because they’d lost their bite, but because watching people be savaged for two hours just seemed less enjoyable than other things people might do on film.

Picking up where it’s predecessor left off, The Devil’s Recjects starts with a family we met in House of 1000 Corpses of sadistic rednecks who have killed enough hapless teenagers to finally bring down upon them a fanatical cop who wants to see them dead more than he wants to see them arrested. Many of the family are caught or killed in the first few minutes of the film, leaving three to hit the road and go on the run.

Featuring Sid Haig (B movie god), Bill Mosely (also of B+ Movie Repo: The Genetic Opera) and Sheri Moon-Zombie (Rob’s wife), The Devil’s Rejects has some intense and believable performances. It also has just enough gore to remind you of the first movie and enough gun play to distinguish itself from it’s origins. The movie attempts to blur the line between the heroes and the villians of the piece, but when one of your main characters has a thing for cutting off people’s faces and wearing them, such lines are less likely to be blurry and much more likely to simply denote the people in the movie we despise from the people we simply dislike.

I only saw the first half, up until the point where the audience is supposed to start relating to the murderous trio and while I’m told the finale is kind of touching, I don’t think I’ll be missing out by not going back for the rest of it.

Rob Zombie did succeed though, in making the grade of movie he wanted. This is one reason the half watched The Devil’s Rejects earns a B from me.

And finally…

I caught about fifteen minutes of Never Cry Werewolf on the Sci-Fi channel one night. It was enough to make me convinced that whoever green-lit a remake of Fright Night with Kevin Sorbo as the most notable actor and a werewolf instead of a vampire as the villian might not have been completely in the wrong, but whoever then let them take this concept and make a poorly acted, poorly shot and poorly scripted monster movie afterwords should be tied up with leg warmers and pelted with Rubik’s cubes for assaulting one of my teenage favorites.

Never Cry Werewolf gets a D from me, not sinking any lower because I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt that the majority of the movie that I didn’t see contains something of redeeming value.

Any of these you think would have gotten a better rating if I’d watched the whole thing? Feel free to comment below.

Not every movie is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Not every part is Achilles from
Troy. And not every actor is Brad Pitt.

But would Brad Pitt still be a good actor without the amazing roles he’s been offered?Let’s take a look at 1989’s Cutting Class to answer that, shall we? 

One of Pitt’s first starring roles, Cutting Class is a slasher flick centered around a high school, a small (ever decreasing) circle of friends and their teachers. We start with Paula, a young girl who follows all the rules including the one about the heroine in a horror movie being a virgin if she wants to live. We have her slutty gal pal (who practically has “stab me” embroidered on her cheerleader uniform), a lascivious principal (played by Roddy McDowell), a lascivious gym teacher, a lascivious art teacher and Paula’s hot-but-dickish boyfriend, played by the young Mr. Pitt. Also, we have Brian, a dark and mysterious lad who was just released from a mental institution after spending 5 years there for killing his father.

Paula’s dad (played by comedian Martin Mull of Roseanne) goes off for a week for a duck hunt. Before we’ve hit five minutes from the opening credits, dad finds himself face down in the water with an arrow in his chest. He spends the rest of the movie walking this off and outside of a couple of attempts at comic relief turns out to be mostly irrelevant to the picture. Well, except that he’s the DA that put our patricidal mystery man in the nuthouse. Pitt’s character is a jerk, a troubled jock who has a problem with Brian flirting with Paula from afar, (an accpeptable behaviour in the 80’s that we now call stalking). Pitt’s character also has a problem with all of his teachers. For that matter, so does mystery man Brian. When they start dying in varied and painful ways, the question comes; is Pitt’s pretty boy secretly a maniac or is the mystery man really the nutjob they say he is? Which one is a killer and which one is just tragically misunderstood?

The skeleton of this movie is made up entirely of cliché’s. Pitt’s character drives a red convertible. The mystery man wears all black.  The school janitor is creepy. Every man in town seems to lie awake at night lusting after the female lead, not her busty and willing friend. (I guess virgins are a commodity in this town or it may be that they know that the wages of sin in horror movies are death before the middle of the flick.)

Cutting Class sucked in ways that other movies can only aspire to. It had erratic pacing, ridiculous characters and seemed always just on the edge of looking at the camera and laughing at the viewer for letting themselves continue watching. I’ve seen parking meters counting down that were more suspenseful and frames of bowling that were more shocking. Most of the acting sucks out loud, which is why the only three names I’ve mentioned specifically were the actors that we already knew were good. Out of those three, Pitt manages to distinguish himself despite this framework of garbage and poor choices.

His character has a few moments of sympathy and regret to break up the monotony of him being a complete douchebag. In those moments, you can see the threads that would eventually come together in the tapestry of his career. Those glimmers are subtle and fleeting and I’m imagining if you had seen this on opening night, you’d have likely missed them. Having now watched the man’s talent come to maturity, the adolescent bits are far more obvious.

The creepy janitor says at one point “Where there’s Art, there’s Dirt.” I don’t think the writers were really trying to be deep and reflective, but they proved their point by putting this wheelbarrow of refuse on the screen. That said, it’s lowly, dirty charcoal that eventually turns into diamonds and Pitt was that diamond. If you wanted to watch Cutting Class for Pitt’s performance, I say go for it. Just get this one off of cable, do not actually pay money to see it and keep the remote at hand for fast forwarding through the copious lame bits.

Because not even the presence of the man who would later sleep with Angelina Jolie raises this movie any higher than a D . Class dimissed.

Edgar Allen Poe is undoubtedly one of the best writers ever to come out of the United States. His tales are haunting and creepy, even read by the jaded eyes of 21st century readers. With a few words, Poe managed to evoke senses of loneliness, suspense, horror, revulsion and terror that have echoed throughout the years even unto this very day.

Though for now, I’d like to talk about a particular echo that occured in 1991, The Pit and the Pendulum.

A direct-to-video release, The Pit and The Pendulum was done by Full Moon Pictures, a studio dedicated to making low budget horror movies that didn’t look low budget. Other productions by them include the Trancers sequels, the Puppet Master series (the one about living dolls, not aliens), Dangerous Toys, Subspecies and more recently the tongue and cheek horror movies Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man.  The studio’s productions always were slick and disturbing, made with an eye towards a very particular, very twisted audience.

The story of The Pit and the Pendulum is very loosely based on Poe’s short story of the same name. It pads the setting a tad as, well, the original takes place entirely in one room. In this telling we meet a baker, Antonio and his wife, Maria who run afoul of the Inquisition in 1492. Maria is accused of witchcraft and much worse, comes to the attentions of the sadistic head of the Inquisition, Torquemada (played by Lance Henriksen, more on that in a moment). Antonio attempts to free his beloved wife and in the process becomes imprisoned himself. Torquemada decides to try a new torture toy out on the man, and that’s where the title pit and pendulum come into play.

The villain in this piece, Torquemada, was a part originally offered to Peter O’Toole, who turned it down. Lance Henriksen was at that time offered the role of Torquemada’s torturer (not the the guy who tortured for him, but applied torture to him). Henriksen turned down his role also, but said that if the lead nasty became available, he was ready to don robe and tonsure to do it. Eventually he got the part.

At a convention in 2008, Henriksen said that he got into the role by imagining how Torquemada experienced the world: walking barefoot along cold stone castle floors and being able to detect the presence of a woman by scent. He immersed himself in the character, bringing depth to what could have been a very one-dimensional character. It’s his passionate, fanatical performance that brings this movie alive. You have little choice but to hate Torquemada and root for Antonio and Maria’s reunion, complete with the triumph of compassion and justice over fear and blind adherence to bad rules.

While as I’ve described it here, this movie could have easily been a drama, rest assured that it’s a horror flick through and through. The tortured victims of Torquemada’s Inquisition are pictured in graphic, sometimes over the top detail. This movie has people being burned at the stake, flogged, crucified and choked to death. It even has an exploding witch.

Yeah, you read that right. An exploding witch.

While not the feel good hit of the year, The Pit and the Penulum are well worth a horror fans time, even seventeen years after it’s release. It’s a film that was taken seriously by those involved and that never spilled over into camp or absurdity, working with it’s gross and graphic elements to produce an engaging, shocking and chilling piece. It’s got a B+ from me and if Edgar Allen Poe were alive today, I’d say he’d probably approve.

Well, right after he asked “Where are my royalties?” and screamed “Get me out of this casket!”.

Some of my best movie experiences have come from being up at 3am, flipping channels and just happening to land on the first few minutes of a movie not deemed worthy of a prime time spot. Abandoning all hope of a reasonable amount of sleep, I surrender myself to serenidpity and curiosity and let myself sink into the mind of a b movie director. Often, this has resulted in me looking at my friends the next day, my eyes red and held open by force of will, explaning how they simply had to track down the story that was worth sacrificing rest.

On the other hand, some experiences don’t result in the same enthusasim. With that in mind, I’d like to talk about 2006’s Gangs of the Dead.

Gangs of the Dead (known as Last Rites before its DVD Release) falls somewhere between Dawn of the Dead and Resivoir Dogs in its storyline: Two groups of LA gang members show up at the same time to buy drugs from the same guy. This deal also happens to be a sting operation, with law enforcement listening in and preparing to make some arrests. Alas, nothing is to go as planned.

You see, the movie opens with a group of homeless people listening to a street preacher. Bible in hand, the street preacher talks about a metor shower the world is to witness that night (calling it God’s feces) and prays for a miricle to show his people that all the wrongs in the world are going to be set right. The miricle comes in the form of a preview of the metor shower which streaks through the sky, lands on the homeless people and turns them into infectious, cannibalistic zombies.

So when the word is given to make the bust, the cops are confronted with rotting hordes of the undead and have to join their would-be perpetrators in an effort not to get eaten. Tensions rise as racial barriers, gang barriers and plain old stupidity begin to lower the life expectancy of everyone involved. Along the way, we are introduced to the literally named Dick Weatherman (who is both a weatherman and a complete… well you get the idea) and a few of the gang bangers family. We also are invited to wonder (for the three seconds it takes us to figure it out) who narc is that brought the cops to the apocalypse in the first place.

Gangs of the Dead has the seeds of an interesting film, hinting that it might be able to tie in a message about the self destructive nature of gang life and bigotry. It also hints at being suspenseful. The sad fact is that it fails to do any of this.

The pacing of the movie drags after about the first twenty minutes. The characters are inexcusibly dumb, forgetting where people are and what resources they have such that their deaths seem inevitable. The script makes an attempt to get us interested in one or two of the characters only to, in the end, kill them all off and focus on the snitch (you’ll know) and one of the side characters who is introduced as a street tough teen but becomes more and more infantile as the story goes on.

The best I can say is that the movie could have made more mistakes than it did. There is humor mixed included that doesn’t turn it all into a farce. The initial set up of the film sets a creepy and tense tone, even if that’s latter killed by the movie dragging on. The gore is used to good effect, though it is concentrated in two or three scenes and at one point it’s obvious that the entrails one zombie is chewing on are ramen noodles. And I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge actors Noel G. (who played in Bruce Almighty) and Reggie Bannister (veteran of the Phantasm series) who did very respectable jobs.

But in the end, this movie took the seeds of brilliance in it’s concept and fertelized them with salt. You get the feel that more could have been done with this movie but that somewhere, someone either didn’t have the clarity of vision to see it through or that they ran out of money and just used everything they shot to make the film.

The invention of the DVR has removed the need to stay up and watch one of those chance cinematic gems I started talking about. And I’m glad, because if I’d actually stayed up to see this one to the end, I’d have wanted to sue the studio for my lost z’s. A set of poor choices dotted with occasional gems of good horror, Gangs of the Dead, aka Last Rites gets a very round D from B+ Movies.

On the one hand, it’s the day before Valentine’s Day and I’d like to review a love story for it. It’s also Friday the 13th which pushes me towards reviewing a horror film. What’s a movie geek to do?

The answer is review both. If you have already read the title, then you know the movie that covers both genres is Bride of Re-Animator.

To understand this movie, though, I must say a few words about the Lovecraft inspired, classic 1985 horror film Re-Animator. The movie revolves around Herbert West, a brilliant doctor who constantly seems to teeter on the edge of genius, threatening to pitch himself headlong into villiany. West has developed a glowing green fluid which, injected into dead bodies, brings them back to life. The problem is that they don’t always come back as reasonable as they were alive.

Also we meet Dan Cain who discovers West’s side project and agrees to help him. Their efforts go terribly wrong, however, leading to a bloody and twisted chain of events that grow more horrible with each turn.

While I won’t go into the end of Re-Animator, the fact that both main characters manage to survive must be revealed or else it would be impossible to speak of the sequel. In Bride of the Re-Animator, we find Cain and West working in Peru, using a civil war as a way to collect new bodies and new body parts to continue their experiments. Eventually, the two return to the states, where West begins collecting pieces to attempt something new: A composite being, a woman made of various bits of other human beings including the heart of Cain’s slain girlfriend.

Cain sees this as a chance to be reunited with his true love. West sees it as a way to further his experiments. Of course, it’s gets complicated and bloody.

The heart and soul of these films is the performance of Jeffery Combs, the actor who brings Dr. Herbert West to life. He plays this character so well that you at times find yourself rooting for him, at others hating him and in some ways feeling sorry for him. He’s an obsessed man, single minded in taking his science and pushing it to its logical conclusion. Because of his blindness to everything not immediately important to his work and his willingness to do everything it requires to see his work to it’s fruition, you can’t help but want him to succeed, even when he does the horrible or the unethical to meet his goals. The horror that erupts around him seems to be not just an accident or even a consequence of his actions but a visible representation of the twisted vision ever present in the character’s mind.

The other actors do well. Re-Animator is a classic for a reason and even being a low budget horror film from the 80’s, it met with critical acclaim upon release and is still one that horror movie fanatics seek out today. Its first sequel was by no means a lesser film, preserving the creepy, gory feel of the first movie while telling its own distinct tale.

These movies are not for the faint of heart or easily offended, pushing the bounds of good taste in places and being outright gross in others. That warning aside, I can recommend these movies to those who appreciate the weird and disturbing and give both Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator the coveted B+.

Though, of a note, if you use either one of these as a Valentine’s Day date movie, I cannot be held responsible for the ass kicking likely to follow. You have been warned.

Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, mostly revolving around the idea of society reacting to technologies coming at us so fast that we’re unable to comprehend their impact fully before we have to become proficient in their use. Generally, cyberpunk drew upon dystopian visions of the future along with the symbolism of replacing body parts, either with bionic or artificial organic parts, representing man’s descent into inhumanity when confronted with the pressures of living in the modern world. Cyberpunk was also declared dead by one it’s finest authors, Neal Stephenson.

I have to wonder what he thinks of Repo: The Genetic Opera.

The world of Repo: The Genetic Opera is one in which organ failure is a common and ubiquitous problem, the same as bad vision or wisdom teeth might be today. Necessity being the mother of invention, a company is born which produces designer organs which first are a medical miracle but soon become a fashion statement. The problem is that organs are expensive and most have to buy them on credit. If you default on too many payments, they do more than wreck your credit rating: they send the Repo Man to come collect their property.

Enter Shilo (played by Alexa Vega of the Spy Kids trilogy), a young girl who has grown up to the age of 17 constantly hampered by a blood disease, inherited from her mother. She is guarded by her father day and night (played by Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). As a parent and doctor, he provides as safe world as he can for Shilo, but cannot tell her that he has another occupation. He is a Repo Man, the one the company calls directly when important organs must be taken from important people.

Adding to this melodramatic tragedy in the making is the family who runs the organ making company, GeneCo. They are composed of the cruel family head, the rage filled eldest son, the face-stealing younger son and the scandalous, wannabe singer daughter (played by Paris Hilton… what a stretch). There’s also a grave robber who gets drugs out of the brains of corpses, an opera singer (played by Sarah Brightman) who has effectively sold herself to GeneCo and a whole parade of scarred, gun toting figures to fill out this violently surreal setting.

Did I mention it’s a musical?

With its Wagnerian scope, Shakespearean themes and George Romero-esque imagery,  Repo: The Genetic Opera was either going to be awful or awesome. I prepared myself for awful. Which may be why I got awesome.

From the first moments actors start taking the screen, I couldn’t look away. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t believe what they were showing me. Sometimes it was because I couldn’t wait to see what was next. But scene after scene, the movie kept throwing visuals at me that stunned and amazed backed by music that flowed with the story and didn’t, as it does in so many musicals, seem tacked on.

The highlights for me were Blind Meg/Sarah Brightman, who played her role flawlessly as well as the Grave Robber, who serves as the story’s narrator in addition to being a playful yet morbid in-story purveyor of recycled drugs.

This is a movie bound to produce strong reactions, the sort of film that must have the right sort of gallows humor to enjoy or at least have a strong stomach to experience. There were some choices that the director made that might lose those not attracted by the imagery: the pace of the movie is a little off in the first third of the film, for instance. Part of the story is also told with flashbacks and drawings where one might expect a movie with “opera” in the title to tell these plot points in song. The movie is not flawless, sorry to say.

But I wasn’t hoping for flawless. I was hoping for B+.

Repo: The Genetic Opera may not revive cyberpunk as a genre, but it certainly does suggest that it lives on in the sick imaginations of at least two screenwriters. If the movie gains the cult status that it truly deserves, those imaginations have suggested the possibility of a prequel and a sequel. I hope this movie gets the attention required for those projects and that, like this one, they hit that perfect balance of bizarre and watchable that so many would-be cult films fail to achieve.

To make a long commentary one question and answer longer, is Repo: The Genetic Opera B+? You bet your mortgaged liver it is.

A common misconception regarding Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is that it that “Frankenstein” is the name of the monster. The monster’s name is actually Adam, Frankenstein being his creator. This has not stopped people from adding “Franken-” to the beginning words to evoke the imagery of neck bolts, assembled body parts and things that should not be.

Examples include Frankenberry, Frankenweenie and today’s movie review subject: Frankenhooker.

Frankenhooker was made by the same minds that brought the cult horror films Basket Case and Brain Damage.  In the same over the top, stomach unsettling fashion, we are entertained with a tale of a young inventor who loses his girlfriend to a horrible accident involving a remote control lawnmower of his own design. In order to fix this, our mad scientist protagonist decides he will resurrect his love by the means of an estrogen based reanimation fluid and parts from the bodies of a collection of hookers.

Seriously, this is plot.

This movie is kind of a horror movie in-joke, the sort of thing you’d laugh at if you weren’t up to watching ReAnimator or From Beyond for the fourteenth time.  It’s humor rolls towards the macabre, occasionally taking a detour into the disturbing yet silly. The movie manages to take decapitations, crack cocaine, prostitution and a guy who relaxes by drilling holes in his head and make it all into a kind of slapstick nightmare.

Unearthed Films , a  distributor that specializes in obscure and over the top films (such as B+ Movie Rock and Rule ), released this on DVD in 2006. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but I find it interesting that there’s enough of an audience for it that someone decided to carry this on into the 21st century.

But how do I grade it… sadly, I give it a C. The movie is a niche picture for a sub-category of fans, not something that really touches a wider audience. This isn’t to say it is without charm, just without remorse and maybe without taste. If you walk into it eyes open, knowing that you’re going to be smirking at the screen one moment and then kind of ill the next, it’s worth checking out.

Me,  I rented this twice in 1990. The imagery was enough to stay with me 18 years later and disturbing enough that I think I’m probably not going to need to watch it ever again.

Today being All Hallows Eve, it was really tempting to review The Power Rangers Movie or Pokemon: MewTwo Strikes Back. It would satisfy my perverse sense of irony and contrast. But no, on this day of the year, horror is king and shall be given it’s proper due. And still satisfy my perverse sense of irony and contrast.I’d like to discuss Ginger Snaps.

Ginger Snaps is, without a doubt, the best coming of age/goth girl/werewolf movie in existence. Admittedly, I think it’s the only one, but even the theatres were glutted with films like this one, Ginger Snaps would stand out. The werewolf movie has always been kind of the rude, awkward brother of the vampire film. Whereas vampires can be evil, murderous and still look cool, werewolves look like werewolves. The sub-genre is about the fear of what one is becoming, the beast within and sudden changes that cause you to lash out at the world.

Much like puberty.

Ginger Snaps starts with a pair of sisters, Bridgette and Ginger, who are strange and fixated on death. They meet up with something furry and violent in the night that bites Ginger. From here, standard werewolf movie things start happening, but in very non-standard ways. The focus of the movie is about the relationship of the sisters as much as it is about Ginger going all Lon Chaney. Lycanthropy is used as a metaphor for the separation and angst that can happen within family when interests and perspectives begin to change. While this is still a horror movie and there is still blood and violence, the picture evokes pathos more often than startled jumps in your seat. There are moments between Bridgette and the furrier side of Ginger that are, frankly, touching.

If the film has any points against it, they come at the end. The film’s conclusion felt like it lacked something, perhaps something that was to be found in the sequels. It spawned two, and while I can’t speak for their quality, I can point them out as a testament to how much this movie is liked. Part of that may be because it doesn’t feel familiar, even though it’s following a well trod cinematic pattern thorough the suburbia we all know and shop in. The performances by Katharine Isabelle (Ginger) and Emily Perkins (Bridgette) feel very genuine. We get to see a couple of kids we instantly recognize but barely know, trying to understand them as they try to grasp their situation

Ginger Snaps is a solid B+. It’s strange and wonderful, surprising and tender with heart rending scenes woven with moments of hearts actually being rent. And most importantly, it’s unexpected, pushing the bounds of what we usually associate with this kind of flick.

If you’re playing movies in the background as you dole out Snickers to the neighborhood goblins, I recommend including this one in the queue. Just make sure that when they get to the scene where Ginger is half transformed and half naked, you’ve got the door at least half closed.

I don’t mean to keep leading off the week with a vampire movie, but there are so many to choose from. Vampires are an easy McGuffin to do in a low budget film. Find your actor. Put some fangs on him, instant villain. Or hero. Or tortured soul who wants to be a hero but must still hunt the night. Or whatever.

It’s always good to see when someone made an effort to put a twist on the vampire movie genre, though. And that leads into today’s review, Razor Blade Smile.

I picked up this film based entirely on the cover. Ample cleavage, huge gun, tantalizing tagline; the potential seemed enormous. Then I pressed play.

I can’t say Razor Blade Smile disappointed. I was expecting a film about a vampire who made her money and kept her self in blood by being a hitwoman. The movie delivers this, straight up. (She even grades the taste of her victim’s blood.)

What I wasn’t expecting was the subplot about the Illuminati, the love story, the subplot concerning the heroine and a goth club, or the dozen other little touches that this movie adds to distinguish itself from the other dozen vampire films that inhabit the direct to video rack at your favorite movie store on any given day.

The film is not without it’s flaws. The acting in places feels a little overdone. The film’s pace drags a little bit in the middle.  The lighting in the movie kind of sucks, but that’s mostly due to the film’s low budget. (Incidentally, the film won an award I’d never heard of, the British “For the Film Making the Most of Resources Within a Limited Budget” award.)

But if nothing else, this movie is worth watching for the costumes. The PVC bodysuits and leather corsets are supporting actors in this pic and were worth the price of rental alone. The dialogue is also top notch, having some of my favorite lines ever delivered in a vampire film. (No I’m not telling you any. Go watch it. And pay attention to the heroine’s opinion of Bram Stoker.)

I don’t have any issue recommending this movie to vampire film fans, horror movie mans or even just people who like fetish wear. If you check this one out, make sure to watch until after the credits. It’s worth it.

Razor Blade Smile has won four B movie awards, but here I’m giving it a C. They did a good job, but it feels like with just a few tweaks it could have been better. That said, it’s definitely deserving of the following it has and it’s recent re-release on DVD. It’s got a permanent place in my collection, no doubt.

There are very few tricks that any recent vampire flick hasn’t ripped off from another film about the beautiful and damned. When film makers try for something original, it usually either produces truly worthy cinema or it collapes into a dark red Caro syrupy mess. This also counts when you try to shuffle together ideas from other movies, hoping that the resulting mosaic will come across as a new and distinct idea unto itself.

Example, and today’s review: The Thirst.

I picked this movie up for something like $2 at a movie store’s going-out-of-business sale. The Thirst intrigued me because it was comparing itself to B+ Movie Near Dark . It played on my loyalty to Joss Whedon by casting three Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel actors: Adam Baldwin, Clare Kramer plus Tom Lenk. Plus, for crying out loud, it was $2.

As the opening credits rolled, I was a little skeptical I’d find any entertainment in this movie. But within the first seven minutes of the movie, we get to see two nude scenes, a profanity filled Narcotics Anonymous meeting, a hooker get killed with a lamp, and are reminded that the body contains about 15 gallons of blood, all of which is stored at high pressure. These details were enough to convince me to give the rest of the movie a chance.

By the end, I at least didn’t feel overcharged. Borrowing bits from both vampire flicks and drug movies, it kept showing me moments that just interesting enough that I’d hope they were going somewhere. Unfortunately, they alternated this with scenes full of people I didn’t care about that were paced so my finger would be hovering over the fast forward button just before they’d interest me again.

The plot revolves around two ex-junkies who end up tangled with a family of blood-sucking fiends. About half-way through the movie, the pair decide they want out and try to deal with the need for blood like a drug addiction. In the end, they have to decide if they are going to go along with the murderous crew (who feeds by taking out whole nightclubs of people at a time) or try to save themselves and maybe just a few others.

The film has the seeds of an interesting story which get choked in a pot of bad acting and inexplicable plot holes. The whole film feels rushed, such that the actors are mostly stereotypes rather than fleshed out characters. The head bad guy, a vampire named Darius and played by Law and Order actor Jeremy Sisto, switches between a bad Eastern European accent and a bad Southern accent for no apparent reason. The hero of the film comes across first as whiny, then as a jerk and only in the last third of the film seems to have much of any depth or any quality which makes you want to relate to him. The heroine of the picture is an enjoyable character and is portrayed well, but we get so little of her that we never really make a connection. We’re dealing with vampires that are supposed be hundreds of years old who get pretty soundly messed up by people who’ve been vampires for two days.

Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare or even The Lost Boys out of this movie and with that in mind it was watchable. The Thirst comes across as a project in which someone was trying to make a good picture, but not always the same person in every scene. I don’t regret watching it, but it’s not high on my “must recommend” or “watch again lists”.

The Thirst gets a D from me. Though if I were giving extra points for boob shots, it’d probably get at least a C.