MOVIE: Byzantium

Another vampire movie to appear recently on Netflix is BYZANTIUM.  In theory this film should be bowed down by he weight of its tired old tropes of first love, coming of age, mother/daughter strife and braided present-and-past storylines.  Yet somehow the quality of the screenplay and acting, and downbeat but atmospheric look of the movie carry it through.

It may help that vampirism gives both the length of time and the stakes to make melodramatic behavior of the leads believable motivations.  Mother vampire seeks a quiet life of transient prostitution to conceal her daughter from an ancient threat she has never fully explained to the girls. Daughter seeks a more refined and respectable lifestyle and yearns to tell someone, perhaps her new quasi-boyfriend, the truth about who she really is.

Both backstory and current conflict come to a crux on a dark pier, where both heroines will be either destroyed or transformed.

See also

IMDB

Rotten Tomatoes

Wikipedia

MOVIE The Unwanted (2014)

I started watching this movie on Netflix without having any idea what I was about, and I suspect that is the best way to watch it.  Then the vampire twist part way through, while somewhat foreshadowed, is still rather surprising and pleasantly shocking.

Hannah Fierman is the stand out performer as Laura, the young woman fascinated by the drifter Carmilla (Kristen Orr in an understated performance). William Kat is the least convincing, chewing the scenery as Laura's semi-psychotic father.

The movie works in its own right as a modern gothic, ad is also a retelling (rather loosely) of Carmilla that vampire aficionados will appreciate.  The movie starts rather slow but the narrative and cinematography built towards an evocative and visually compelling ending.

Highly recommended.

Trailer

Links: IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes.

Leech Women and Monkey Glands

In this 1960 movie a woman discover how to rejuvenate herself by killing men to extract material from their pineal glands.

The idea that dramatic rejuvenation was possible using simple extracts had been quite popular in the 1920s, and this movie represents its last gasp.

A French physician named Serge Voronoff felt that testicles could be transplanted to return youth to men. His experiments included both human and animal subjects. He claimed that grafting young testicles onto older donors not only increased vigor but could combat dementia. The practice of having "monkey glands" implanted in various ways became wildly, if briefly, popular amongst wealthy men.

These efforts were eventually ridiculed and any benefits attributed to the placebo effect. And Voronoff accelerated his downfall by undertaking in creasingly bizarre experiemtns such as trying to ineminte a monkey with human sperm. However, his work did pave the way for more productive transplant surgery and the discovery of testosterone--and he certainly inspired a great deal of speculative fiction.

"The Leech Woman" plays on Voronoffs masculinist focus in a strange way in that the female "leech" must have male donors and meets her downfall when extracting the material she needs from a woman.


See also:

• Internet Movie Database
• Wikipedia

FILM: The First Vampire

I downloaded this short film from iTunes to watch on a flight.  Set in 4th century Sweden The First Vampire (2004, IMDb) has a dark, sepia-toned feel a bit like a Breugel painting. 

The movie is 24-minutes long and opens with a man riding at night encountering a mysterious figure carrying a child who is near death.  He rescues the unconscious child but soon other people are sickened by attacks from 'the vampire'.  A doctor is summoned and soon questions the supernatural explanations of the disease, but can he solve the problem before the people's fears drive them to rash actions?

The first half of the film is rather muddled, dark and confusing--but it is worth hanging in there to see the rather interesting conclusion.

Movie: Bloodsuckers

Bloodsuckers a.k.a. Vampire-Wars_Battle-for-the-Universe is a low budget 2005 TV movie.  It starts of just plain bad and manages to finish with a certain (small) amount of kitchy charm. 

Basically, in a future where humans have gone into space and found it full of vampires, an earnest hero joins a team of semi-official vampire killers.  The team is, like the hero, pretty much a collection of cliches from central casting--reckless captain, vampire ninja babe, cowboy grunt and sassy sarcasticc chick.

The acting is not great, the sets are not great, the action sequences are not great and the special effects are terrible--but the plot gets a little more sophisticated as it goes on, from 'kill the vampires!' to 'be loyal to your friends and kill the vampires!' 

This would have been a semi-promising TV series pilot, but as a movie it is pretty lacklustre.  But if it is on sale or on TV, Bloodsuckler is and okay movie for someone who has some free time and is prepared to kick back and descend to its level.

• IMDb

FILM: Let Me In

ilmThere is a vampire movie remake in the works. Let Me In [IMDb] is a remake of Let the Right One [Wikipedia], a Swedish vampire movie (2008). Both movies are based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, in which a young boy learns how to stand up to bullies after meeting a mysterious (vampire) girl. Release is scheduled for October 1.  Dark Horse Comics will be producing a tie in graphic novel.

Official site
 

DVD: Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet is a 1998 British series of six one-hour television episodes focused on a small paramilitary unit that deals with a vampire threat (Not to be mistaken for the 2006 movie of the same name). A police Sergeant, Michael Colefield, is the main protagonist, recruited by this unit after his best friend becomes a vampire (referred to in this mythos a 'leeches').  The team is rounded out by their leader, an ex-Catholic priest, a female doctor who lost her husband and daughter to the disease, and a ruthless ex-army operative.

The show and is characters had considerable potential, but this rather low key show never really hit its stride.  Often it seemed to me, that the acting and cinematography didn't really match the quality of the writing.  The stories raised great issues of what to do in situation of moral ambiguity, and in the absence of truly scary monsters (the vampires seemed rather under-powered) the sub-plot of a hero trying to balance his secret life with real world concerns had great potential. Ultraviolet is worth watching more as an exercise in what might have been, rather than what is actually achieved in six scant episodes.

3/5

Other reviews:
ULTRAVIOLET - 1999: [3/5] "This is a cool show and it's done in a fairly "realistic", police procedural way. There's a lot of interesting conflict as the brooding Michael tries to balance his life and his relationship with his friends...."

Links: Official website,  Wikipedia

[DVD] NICK NIGHT

NICK NIGHT (1989; IMDb) is a movie pilot that predates the long running television series FOREVER KNIGHT.  It is not a prequel because the first episodes of the TV series reprise all of the events of this movie.  However it is interesting to see a slightly different and early take on the same story.

Rick Springfield is a more conventional attractive lead, but lack some of the edge that Geraint Wyn Davies later bought to the part.  The filming of this fail pilot was also looser and sometimes introduced serious flaws. 

For example there a pivotal scene where Knight must choose whether to save the girl or save the ancient cup that might allow him mortal again.  In both version the villain holds the cup and the girl on a high walkway.  In this version the cup is dropped and hits the ground before Knight acts, essentially making nonsense of the dilemma.  In the Forever Knight version the villain drops the cup and Knight saves the girl before it hits the ground and shatters--making it clear that he had time to rescue one or the other.

There were really only two elements that I feel are more successful in NICK KNIGHT than in FOREVER KNIGHT.  One is the gimmick of Knight rigging up camera so her could watch the sun rise on dozens of televisions.  This seemed to sum up Knight's obsession with regaining mortality, on which the series hangs.  The pother is that the sidekick Det. Don Schanke (played by John Kapelos in both versions) has more of a threatening side to him that is lost in the buffoonish character he became in the series (perhaps necessary to have a long running character who never works out that his partner is a vampire).

On the whole this is a movie for FOREVER KNIGHT enthusiasts only, it completes the collection but adds relatively little to it.