Starring: Trevor Lissauer, Johnny Venocur, Carmen Electra and Adam West
Director: Luis Esteban
Writers: Rollin Jarrett
Genre: Horror
Year: 1997
My rating:
I had high hopes for his film given its genre and cast. It looked like a fun cheesy horror film. A stereotypical teen-slasher film with vampires and lots of blood. Seeing both Carmen Electra and Adam West on the DVD package, I was filled with the hope that perhaps I had stumbled upon an often dreamed of, but elusive to capture treasure: the "so bad it's good" film.
But the cheesy horror film genre is deceptively difficult to succeed in. You'd think it would be easy to create a dumb, silly, but entertaining film. Yet this one fails where others have failed before. It's greatest crime is that for the much of the proceedings it is utterly and completely dull.
Every bad teen movie cliché is present, from the soft rock "inspirational" soundtrack (follow your dreams, kids!) to the coming-of-age theme to the "is your girlfriend giving it up yet?" conversation to the moral lesson ending (the moral of the story is apparently not to allow Adam West to do your killing for you).
Getting to the story, the film begins with Frankie's (Trevor Lissauer) obnoxiously rich parents departing for a summer-long vacation, leaving their teenage son behind to take care of the house by himself (something which only parents in silly teen movies do). Frankie has a big dumb friend named Bogie (Danny Hitt, who presumably changed his name from Danny Hitt-Me-Baby-One-More-Time) who is obviously supposed to be the obligatory Bad Influence. Bogie encourages Frankie to do all kinds of wild things, such as bringing an entire six-pack of beer to the beach (amusingly, the beer is obviously Heineken, but the filmmakers obscure the logo with black electrical tape).
Once at the beach, the wild pair meet "Moondoggie" (Johnny Venokur) who appears right after a bat attacks Bogie which obviously makes Moondoggie the film's main vampire. Bogie -- not knowing that he's in a vampire movie -- ignores the bat-attack (he brushes it off as an angry fish... flying through the air at his neck) and invites Moondoggie over to Frankie's house. Moondoggie arrives the next day and moves into the house with a bevy of gothy weirdos (one of whom is Carmen Electra). At this point, the movie gets stuck in a plotless holding pattern where nothing happens. The gang of vampires won't leave the house and Bruno the Vampire won't stop eating the neighborhood's pets. Wash, rinse, repeat.
To give you some idea of the movie's missteps, I'm now going to detail the contribution to the film made by TV's silliest Batman, Adam West. For any filmmaker looking to create a goofy, silly, cult horror film, landing Adam West is like having the movie gods throw free publicity at you. Adam West is the King of Camp, and having him in any movie raises it from something that's merely of interest to something that is a must see.
And I have to say the filmmakers got most of this part right. They hire Adam West. They give him a pony-tail. They make him a beach-bumming, vampire-hunting surfer-guy. They make his character a descendant of van Helsing. They give him a delightfully silly nickname like "The Big Kahuna" (a sick sad part of me would like to believe that West was given this nickname shortly after he was first seen in his Batman tights) . They make his first line a long, exaggerated: "Duuuuuude."
How could they possibly screw this up after getting so much right?
Here's how. They only put Adam West in two scenes.
Madness! I honestly don't know what they were thinking. Adam West is by far the most entertaining thing about this film. He's a campy treat every time the camera is on him. So, why on Earth did they give him such a small role? Every scene that he's not in has a huge Adam West-shaped hole.
As for the other celebrity (although she was unknown at the time), Carmen Electra's role of the vampire named Sulka is fairly small (at least smaller than one would presume given that the DVD cover is a giant closeup of her head encased in vampire makeup which she doesn't actually wear in this movie). But it says something about the other actors that Electra's performance is the most restrained of this movie.
The filmmakers do make some attempt to stay true to classic vampire lore. Unfortunately, they're slightly inconsistent. Take, for example, the fact that vampires cannot be exposed to sunlight. The film asserts this in later scenes, but forgets about an earlier sequence where Moondoggie stands and rants right in front of a giant window, bathed in direct sunlight with no apparent ill-effects. There is also some other confusion and I'm not sure if I missed something or the filmmakers were conflating werewolves and vampires. Moondoggie's name is not the only reference; there are multiple scenes with dogs howling at the moon in the background. They don't actually state that the vampires are also werewolves, but these moments completely baffled me.
I think the writer was confused at whether he was writing a straight horror film or a parody of bad horror films. A movie like SCREAM works because it hilariously satirized the conventions of the genre, but still managed to be scary. AMERICAN VAMPIRE doesn't work because it isn't scary, and for the most part it isn't funny. The "jokes" are awful. They aren't even worthy of a groan. It's obvious one-liner followed by obvious one-liner. (On the other hand, I don't care if Adam West kicking in a door and bellowing, "Stop that sucking!" is a Signal From Fred. It's the best moment of the film.)
Also, there are two pointless musical group cameos. The first is Dick Dale and his Del-Tones, a mere three years after PULP FICTION turned on a new generation to their style. The second is a random ska group called Out Of Order, who didn't function well enough to have much of a career after this movie. Both bands are reduced to playing on a sad looking beach to a handful of extras.
At least a portion of my initial hope was fulfilled. At one point Carmen Electra attempts seducing Adam West. But it's not enough to rescue this film. The movie is less than a decade old, so Digiview Productions' version has excellent picture and sound quality. But you won't be buying this for the extreme digital experience. In fact, you shouldn't be buying this at all. Stay away, except for you Adam West or Carmen Electra fans -- but only those fans who have the ability to fast-forward to just their scenes.
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