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Dracula Rising
New Concorde // R // June 25, 2002
List Price: $9.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
One hundred six years have passed since prolific French director Georges Méliès lensed Le Manior du Diable, the oldest vampire film on record, produced even before the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. Of all the classic monsters, none have been captured on celluloid with the frequency of the vampire. Perhaps this is because of the creatures' seductive power or the sexual metaphor of fangs sinking into flesh...or in all too many cases because a dental cast and a cape are awfully inexpensive. Roger Corman's New Concorde has the market cornered on "cheap", and the company dipped into their back catalog to bring a number of their vampire movies to DVD on June 25th. Blood Ties, Club Vampire, Dracula Rising, Night Hunter, To Sleep With A Vampire, and Vampirella will each carry a price tag of $9.98 and are available for almost half that at certain online retailers. I've been assigned the task of tackling three of those. Given the similarities between these titles and general laziness, the reviews for these DVDs are going to bear a remarkable resemblance to one another.
The narration in 1997's Club Vampire mentions that the venue so vaguely suggested in the film's title is an underground club, though I would think any location described as "underground" would have a less conspicuous entrance than a monstrous stereotypical vampire head. Appropriate enough given her name, Starr Andreeff is the star here, portraying the fast life of a single mother who finds herself with fangs after a steamy lesbian encounter gets out of control at the club. Corri is taken under the wing of 'vegetarian' vamp Zero (John Savage), whose fellow undead don't appreciate having this unintended member added to their flock. As they plot Corri's demise, she attempts to deal with vampirism while admirably taking care of her teenage son like some sort of bloodsucking Murphy Brown.
I've skimmed through several reviews of Club Vampire, which without exception were intensely negative. As is not terribly uncommon, I'm more than happy to provide a lone dissenting vote. It's far too cartoonish to be intended as a serious look at vampirism. This is a movie whose title, after all, is that of an underground club with the giant vampire head as an entrance mentioned earlier. The acting in Club Vampire is so hysterically over the top that it makes actresses in Mexican soap operas look restrained by comparison. 3'7" Kiddo (Michael J. Anderson from Twin Peaks) sports Kool-Aid dyed green hair and a spider tattoo on his forehead, and his impish and cable-access-special-effect disappearances are accompanied by some stock sound from the Hanna-Barbera library. From Kiddo and Zero freestylin' about vampirism to Zero's recital of Bela Lugosi's most famous lines from Dracula to Corri feasting on her son's pet hamster, I found Club Vampire's oddball sense of humor to frequently be very funny. It admittedly took me a few minutes to recognize that the laughs were wholly intentional and effectively intermingled with some graphic imagery. Using Joe Bob Briggs' "Blood, Beasts, and Breasts" criteria, Club Vampire is a resounding success. The first half of the movie or so unflinchingly follows a pattern of plot, lengthy footage of nude and scantily clad women writhing around in the S&M club, Corri in a very Oedipal chat with her son, more assorted nekkidness at the club, a dash more plot... Presumably this edition of Club Vampire is an extended cut, though there's no indication of that on the packaging. All of the VHS reviews I've stumbled upon have listed a running time between 76 and 77 minutes, but the DVD runs just over and an hour and a half with credits. As a completely random aside, Club Vampire was helmed by first-time director Andy Ruben, who had previously written and produced the trashy Poison Ivy and both Stripped to Kill movies, as well as putting in a guest spot on the Knight Rider episode "Hey KITT, Don't Have a Fit".
In 1993's Dracula Rising, struggling painter Theresa (Stacey Travis) encounters the mysterious Vlad (Christopher Atkins) at a shindig thrown by her Eurotrash employer. A Polaroid taken at the party clues Theresa into the fact that Vlad's a vampire, something she should have realized several scenes earlier based on his name alone. Theresa is the reincarnation of a gal with whom Vlad was infatuated five centuries earlier, and his vampire buddy Alec (whose goofy accent would be much better suited to a character named "Vlad") wants Vlad to turn her in the apparent hope that it'll dig his pal out of a half-millennium funk. Vlad refuses to subject Theresa to their decidedly unpleasant alternative lifestyle, which really cheeses Alec off. This gripping tale is intercut with flashbacks to Vlad and Pre-Theresa in centuries past, including a half-assed reference to Bram Stoker's Dracula in the form of a minor character named Mina. That's about it, really.
Despite an uplifting title (terrible and incorrectly used pun intended), Dracula Rising sinks to inconceivably low depths, lacking any entertainment value whatsoever. Its runtime is a brief 80 minutes, but nearly every last second can be categorized as "wholly uninteresting dialogue" or "long awkward stretches of silence". This is a particular disappointment as the screenplay was co-written by Rodman Flender, the director of Idle Hands, my favorite guilty pleasure of 1999. Dracula Rising was Flender's last stab at writing before delving into directing full-time, and if this God-awful movie is any indication, his talents are much better put to use elsewhere. What little humor is present, such as the "Blood Lite" gag, seems to have been lifted verbatim from labels of Laffy Taffy. The acting from leads Christopher Atkins and Stacey Travis is somewhere along the lines of a high school production of Dracula, and as inexperienced as they seem in Dracula Rising, their filmographies are rather extensive. Kit Atkins appears to be under the mistaken impression that stilted pauses included between every couple of words somehow equate to "drama". He also looks coked out of his mind at times, but maybe that's a method acting thing. Atkins gets the opportunity to return to The Blue Lagoon in a from-the-neck-down underwater love sequence whose brief glimpses of male genitalia are more terrifying than any of the vampiric shenanigans. So, from all this ranting and the plot synopsis rattled off earlier, you're probably guessing that the movie ends with a still-human Theresa sobbing as she mourns the prolonged death of her beloved Vlad, and you would obviously be right. But before that inevitable moment, Theresa thinks she's escaped from her pursuers on a train. Not so, as Alec, decked out as a ticket taker, mumbles, "I see you have a ticket to Hell!", which I myself had apparently redeemed some seventy minutes earlier. The climax literally does take place in a low-budget Hell, complete with a purple sky and numerous stray lightning bolts. Apparently the "evil dimension" of which Alec speaks brings out the best in vampires, as he and Vlad duke it out in a twenty-second mystical light show, exhibiting powers not seen or even hinted at in any other portion of the movie. Dracula Rising has little camp value, and it doesn't even fall under the "so bad, it's good" banner. As Stacey Travis had a supporting role in Ghost World, quoting Enid might be appropriate: Dracula Rising is "so bad, it's gone past good and back to bad again." Not recommended for even the most masochistic schlock seekers.
The final stop on my vampire marathon was Blood Ties, a TV movie that premiered in May 1991. Produced by Richard and Esther Shapiro, the executive producers of long-running prime time soap Dynasty, Blood Ties was presumably a pilot for a series that Fox opted not to pick up. Just as Italians in movies and television are invariably monsters, Carpathians in Blood Ties are synonymous with vampires, though d-d-don't say the "v" word around 'em. These vamps do bite their prey and gorge on their blood, but there are no elongated fangs, no turning victims into the walking undead, no bursting into flames with the rise of the sun, and no mystical powers over their victims. Carpathians are just a little stronger, heal a little faster, and age a little more slowly than everyone else. Blood Ties kicks off in a sleepy Texas town where a group of religious zealots slay an older couple as they lay in bed. The grisly double murder is quickly discovered by their son, who is shot repeatedly with a crossbow and left for dead. Cody claws his way to California to visit an old family friend only to learn that he is part of a large family of vampi...errr...Carpathians. The nutjobs who mercilessly killed his family are closing in, and Cody's newfound extended family are more than happy to help him exact revenge. Newspaper reporter and protagonist-du-jour Harry Martin (Harley Venton) opposes this old-world style of retaliation, but he is as unable to convince his bloodthirsty relatives of the error of their ways as his family is to accept his white bread district attorney girlfriend Amy (Kim Johnston Ulrich). Despite his best efforts, a conflict between the feuding sects is unvoidable, especially after the kidnapping of Harry's frequent lover, Celia (Michelle Johnson).
That summary is most assuredly the abridged version. Like the setup of most drama series, a more detailed synopsis would be far too convoluted for the sake of a review. Blood Ties clearly has horror elements, but some relatively bloodless feral attacks aside, it's essentially a drama with some mythology behind it. I found the movie to be strictly "okay", and if the series had been picked up, I rather doubt I'd go out of my way to watch it. As is often the case with pilots, Blood Ties invests most of its time building the universe, establishing its rules, and introducing the characters. There is a clear beginning, middle, and end, but there's far too much setup for this to have been intended as a one-time deal. Taken on its own, that leaves Blood Ties feeling somewhat empty afterwards, despite everything that's been crammed into its fairly brief runtime. Aside from some brief nudity tacked on at the end, I'd imagine this version of Blood Ties isn't terribly different from the one that debuted on Fox eleven years ago. Gore and blood are kept to a minimum, and the hot 'n heavy love scenes are just tame enough to slip by network Standards and Practices. Up until the climax, the battle sequences are short and sparse, and the showdown at the construction site is unengaging and poorly choreographed. The acting is generally decent enough, with the exception of Jason London and some of the elder Carpathians. Female leads Kim Johnston Ulrich and (especially) Michelle Johnson are smolderingly hot and perfectly cast in their respective roles. The Internet Movie Database lists the lovely Robia LaMorte as a member of the young Carpathian biker gang a full six years before she would turn up as Jenny Calendar on the TV incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't notice her name in the opening or closing credits, though I think I did spot her lurking in the background of the scene where Cody is informed of his heritage. Other cast members who later found work in vampire movies include Bo Hopkins (From Dusk Till Dawn 2; not that anyone cares, but he also hails from my current stomping grounds of Greenville, SC) and Jason London (Dracula II: The Ascension).
Video: All of the movies are presented full-frame, and despite New Concorde's tendency to give even their theatrical releases that sort of treatment on DVD, 1.33:1 would appear to be the intended aspect ratio in these three cases. Dracula Rising and Blood Ties are similar in appearance and seem to rehash older, low-resolution video masters. Both are somewhat soft and pasty in appearance, virtually indistinguishable from an airing on analog cable or a pre-recorded VHS. There's a fair amount of grain throughout, and colors lack much of any vibrancy. My initial instinct was to compare Blood Ties and Dracula Rising to a decade-old episode of In the Heat of the Night on WGS, if that's any indication. Blood Ties also has some very nasty artifacting, most noticeably around the 36:05 and 1:12:11 marks. Club Vampire, the most recent of the bunch, fares the best. It looks like a made-for-cable movie, though at times clarity and detail exceeds what HBO is piping into my set by a fair margin. The movie is only a few years old, and the clean presentation reflects that, free of any damage and marred only by a handful of specks.
Audio: The three titles also have stereo surround soundtracks in common. Club Vampire makes decent use of the matrixed surrounds, and the music scattered throughout sounds surprisingly rich and full for such a low-budget production. I was particularly impressed with its bass response, and the music, fist fights, and various sound effects frequently had my subwoofer rumbling loudly. Club Vampire generally sounds pretty nice, though a couple of the audio blips such as the one around the 38:25 mark are thoroughly unpleasant. Dracula Rising follows much along these lines. Conversations in the dialogue-driven film are easily understood, and surrounds and subwoofer activity are passable. Blood Ties began its life as TV movie and sounds just as bland as one would expect.
Supplements: Just oodles of trailers and cast/crew bios.
Conclusion: Each of the titles reviewed here can be ordered from Deep Discount DVD for $5.97 a pop, and that paltry sum includes shipping. The movies and their presentations on DVD aren't particularly wonderful, but vampire enthusiasts may find them worth the meager price of entry. The only one I'd recommend with anything approximating enthusiasm would be the campy Club Vampire, but given the marginal difference between the cost of a rental and an outright purchase, buying these movies sight-unseen isn't an expensive gamble.
The narration in 1997's Club Vampire mentions that the venue so vaguely suggested in the film's title is an underground club, though I would think any location described as "underground" would have a less conspicuous entrance than a monstrous stereotypical vampire head. Appropriate enough given her name, Starr Andreeff is the star here, portraying the fast life of a single mother who finds herself with fangs after a steamy lesbian encounter gets out of control at the club. Corri is taken under the wing of 'vegetarian' vamp Zero (John Savage), whose fellow undead don't appreciate having this unintended member added to their flock. As they plot Corri's demise, she attempts to deal with vampirism while admirably taking care of her teenage son like some sort of bloodsucking Murphy Brown.
I've skimmed through several reviews of Club Vampire, which without exception were intensely negative. As is not terribly uncommon, I'm more than happy to provide a lone dissenting vote. It's far too cartoonish to be intended as a serious look at vampirism. This is a movie whose title, after all, is that of an underground club with the giant vampire head as an entrance mentioned earlier. The acting in Club Vampire is so hysterically over the top that it makes actresses in Mexican soap operas look restrained by comparison. 3'7" Kiddo (Michael J. Anderson from Twin Peaks) sports Kool-Aid dyed green hair and a spider tattoo on his forehead, and his impish and cable-access-special-effect disappearances are accompanied by some stock sound from the Hanna-Barbera library. From Kiddo and Zero freestylin' about vampirism to Zero's recital of Bela Lugosi's most famous lines from Dracula to Corri feasting on her son's pet hamster, I found Club Vampire's oddball sense of humor to frequently be very funny. It admittedly took me a few minutes to recognize that the laughs were wholly intentional and effectively intermingled with some graphic imagery. Using Joe Bob Briggs' "Blood, Beasts, and Breasts" criteria, Club Vampire is a resounding success. The first half of the movie or so unflinchingly follows a pattern of plot, lengthy footage of nude and scantily clad women writhing around in the S&M club, Corri in a very Oedipal chat with her son, more assorted nekkidness at the club, a dash more plot... Presumably this edition of Club Vampire is an extended cut, though there's no indication of that on the packaging. All of the VHS reviews I've stumbled upon have listed a running time between 76 and 77 minutes, but the DVD runs just over and an hour and a half with credits. As a completely random aside, Club Vampire was helmed by first-time director Andy Ruben, who had previously written and produced the trashy Poison Ivy and both Stripped to Kill movies, as well as putting in a guest spot on the Knight Rider episode "Hey KITT, Don't Have a Fit".
In 1993's Dracula Rising, struggling painter Theresa (Stacey Travis) encounters the mysterious Vlad (Christopher Atkins) at a shindig thrown by her Eurotrash employer. A Polaroid taken at the party clues Theresa into the fact that Vlad's a vampire, something she should have realized several scenes earlier based on his name alone. Theresa is the reincarnation of a gal with whom Vlad was infatuated five centuries earlier, and his vampire buddy Alec (whose goofy accent would be much better suited to a character named "Vlad") wants Vlad to turn her in the apparent hope that it'll dig his pal out of a half-millennium funk. Vlad refuses to subject Theresa to their decidedly unpleasant alternative lifestyle, which really cheeses Alec off. This gripping tale is intercut with flashbacks to Vlad and Pre-Theresa in centuries past, including a half-assed reference to Bram Stoker's Dracula in the form of a minor character named Mina. That's about it, really.
Despite an uplifting title (terrible and incorrectly used pun intended), Dracula Rising sinks to inconceivably low depths, lacking any entertainment value whatsoever. Its runtime is a brief 80 minutes, but nearly every last second can be categorized as "wholly uninteresting dialogue" or "long awkward stretches of silence". This is a particular disappointment as the screenplay was co-written by Rodman Flender, the director of Idle Hands, my favorite guilty pleasure of 1999. Dracula Rising was Flender's last stab at writing before delving into directing full-time, and if this God-awful movie is any indication, his talents are much better put to use elsewhere. What little humor is present, such as the "Blood Lite" gag, seems to have been lifted verbatim from labels of Laffy Taffy. The acting from leads Christopher Atkins and Stacey Travis is somewhere along the lines of a high school production of Dracula, and as inexperienced as they seem in Dracula Rising, their filmographies are rather extensive. Kit Atkins appears to be under the mistaken impression that stilted pauses included between every couple of words somehow equate to "drama". He also looks coked out of his mind at times, but maybe that's a method acting thing. Atkins gets the opportunity to return to The Blue Lagoon in a from-the-neck-down underwater love sequence whose brief glimpses of male genitalia are more terrifying than any of the vampiric shenanigans. So, from all this ranting and the plot synopsis rattled off earlier, you're probably guessing that the movie ends with a still-human Theresa sobbing as she mourns the prolonged death of her beloved Vlad, and you would obviously be right. But before that inevitable moment, Theresa thinks she's escaped from her pursuers on a train. Not so, as Alec, decked out as a ticket taker, mumbles, "I see you have a ticket to Hell!", which I myself had apparently redeemed some seventy minutes earlier. The climax literally does take place in a low-budget Hell, complete with a purple sky and numerous stray lightning bolts. Apparently the "evil dimension" of which Alec speaks brings out the best in vampires, as he and Vlad duke it out in a twenty-second mystical light show, exhibiting powers not seen or even hinted at in any other portion of the movie. Dracula Rising has little camp value, and it doesn't even fall under the "so bad, it's good" banner. As Stacey Travis had a supporting role in Ghost World, quoting Enid might be appropriate: Dracula Rising is "so bad, it's gone past good and back to bad again." Not recommended for even the most masochistic schlock seekers.
The final stop on my vampire marathon was Blood Ties, a TV movie that premiered in May 1991. Produced by Richard and Esther Shapiro, the executive producers of long-running prime time soap Dynasty, Blood Ties was presumably a pilot for a series that Fox opted not to pick up. Just as Italians in movies and television are invariably monsters, Carpathians in Blood Ties are synonymous with vampires, though d-d-don't say the "v" word around 'em. These vamps do bite their prey and gorge on their blood, but there are no elongated fangs, no turning victims into the walking undead, no bursting into flames with the rise of the sun, and no mystical powers over their victims. Carpathians are just a little stronger, heal a little faster, and age a little more slowly than everyone else. Blood Ties kicks off in a sleepy Texas town where a group of religious zealots slay an older couple as they lay in bed. The grisly double murder is quickly discovered by their son, who is shot repeatedly with a crossbow and left for dead. Cody claws his way to California to visit an old family friend only to learn that he is part of a large family of vampi...errr...Carpathians. The nutjobs who mercilessly killed his family are closing in, and Cody's newfound extended family are more than happy to help him exact revenge. Newspaper reporter and protagonist-du-jour Harry Martin (Harley Venton) opposes this old-world style of retaliation, but he is as unable to convince his bloodthirsty relatives of the error of their ways as his family is to accept his white bread district attorney girlfriend Amy (Kim Johnston Ulrich). Despite his best efforts, a conflict between the feuding sects is unvoidable, especially after the kidnapping of Harry's frequent lover, Celia (Michelle Johnson).
That summary is most assuredly the abridged version. Like the setup of most drama series, a more detailed synopsis would be far too convoluted for the sake of a review. Blood Ties clearly has horror elements, but some relatively bloodless feral attacks aside, it's essentially a drama with some mythology behind it. I found the movie to be strictly "okay", and if the series had been picked up, I rather doubt I'd go out of my way to watch it. As is often the case with pilots, Blood Ties invests most of its time building the universe, establishing its rules, and introducing the characters. There is a clear beginning, middle, and end, but there's far too much setup for this to have been intended as a one-time deal. Taken on its own, that leaves Blood Ties feeling somewhat empty afterwards, despite everything that's been crammed into its fairly brief runtime. Aside from some brief nudity tacked on at the end, I'd imagine this version of Blood Ties isn't terribly different from the one that debuted on Fox eleven years ago. Gore and blood are kept to a minimum, and the hot 'n heavy love scenes are just tame enough to slip by network Standards and Practices. Up until the climax, the battle sequences are short and sparse, and the showdown at the construction site is unengaging and poorly choreographed. The acting is generally decent enough, with the exception of Jason London and some of the elder Carpathians. Female leads Kim Johnston Ulrich and (especially) Michelle Johnson are smolderingly hot and perfectly cast in their respective roles. The Internet Movie Database lists the lovely Robia LaMorte as a member of the young Carpathian biker gang a full six years before she would turn up as Jenny Calendar on the TV incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't notice her name in the opening or closing credits, though I think I did spot her lurking in the background of the scene where Cody is informed of his heritage. Other cast members who later found work in vampire movies include Bo Hopkins (From Dusk Till Dawn 2; not that anyone cares, but he also hails from my current stomping grounds of Greenville, SC) and Jason London (Dracula II: The Ascension).
Video: All of the movies are presented full-frame, and despite New Concorde's tendency to give even their theatrical releases that sort of treatment on DVD, 1.33:1 would appear to be the intended aspect ratio in these three cases. Dracula Rising and Blood Ties are similar in appearance and seem to rehash older, low-resolution video masters. Both are somewhat soft and pasty in appearance, virtually indistinguishable from an airing on analog cable or a pre-recorded VHS. There's a fair amount of grain throughout, and colors lack much of any vibrancy. My initial instinct was to compare Blood Ties and Dracula Rising to a decade-old episode of In the Heat of the Night on WGS, if that's any indication. Blood Ties also has some very nasty artifacting, most noticeably around the 36:05 and 1:12:11 marks. Club Vampire, the most recent of the bunch, fares the best. It looks like a made-for-cable movie, though at times clarity and detail exceeds what HBO is piping into my set by a fair margin. The movie is only a few years old, and the clean presentation reflects that, free of any damage and marred only by a handful of specks.
Audio: The three titles also have stereo surround soundtracks in common. Club Vampire makes decent use of the matrixed surrounds, and the music scattered throughout sounds surprisingly rich and full for such a low-budget production. I was particularly impressed with its bass response, and the music, fist fights, and various sound effects frequently had my subwoofer rumbling loudly. Club Vampire generally sounds pretty nice, though a couple of the audio blips such as the one around the 38:25 mark are thoroughly unpleasant. Dracula Rising follows much along these lines. Conversations in the dialogue-driven film are easily understood, and surrounds and subwoofer activity are passable. Blood Ties began its life as TV movie and sounds just as bland as one would expect.
Supplements: Just oodles of trailers and cast/crew bios.
Conclusion: Each of the titles reviewed here can be ordered from Deep Discount DVD for $5.97 a pop, and that paltry sum includes shipping. The movies and their presentations on DVD aren't particularly wonderful, but vampire enthusiasts may find them worth the meager price of entry. The only one I'd recommend with anything approximating enthusiasm would be the campy Club Vampire, but given the marginal difference between the cost of a rental and an outright purchase, buying these movies sight-unseen isn't an expensive gamble.
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