Oh, bloody Vamps!

In this terrifying vampire tale that leans more towards Anne Rice than to Bram Stoker.

Director Richard Elfman wants to convince us that vampires live among us. The movie’s main point of interest (for me anyways) was the answer to this question: "How would vampires live, it they ruled L.A.?" They would all be rich, file their teeth, go to swanky vampire clubs, be very open sexually, feed on us mortals like appetizers and shop till they dropped. Watching the vampires’ lifestyle fascinated me and kept me interested. The film doesn’t hold back on the graphically sexual-violent world they live in either and that made way for a few very weird, erotic and sometimes funny situations.

The creatures sit around listening to Mozart while sipping literal Bloody Marys or enjoying quiet moments of intravenous feedings from their bound and dazed victims. Elfman and writer Matthew Bright (Freeway) inject the proceedings with more gore than any reasonable viewer could want, as much as you’ll see in any horror film: Stakes driven through hearts, throats torn open, entrails splattering, decapitations, burnings alive, and so on. The disc’s keep case warns, "Not recommended for the weak of hearts." I assume this caution applies to the film’s excessive carnage as well as to its sex, nudity, and nonstop profanity.

Written by Matthew Bright, (the writer/director of the intelligent post-modern twist on Little Red Riding Hood called Freeway, and screenwriter of the Drew Barrymore cable hit, Guncrazy) Vamps, is a story of modern vampires in a promising bit of genre-bending. LA is an underground of vampire activity dominated, in fact almost exclusively populated, by old world Euro-types. Americans are tolerated at best and Prince of Vamp Dallas is the quintessential young blood, a James Dean in the land of kinky Bela-Lugosi types: rugged, daring, a bloodsucking rebel without a pedigree who blows into town on a mission in a fast car and a fun-loving, fanged smile on his face. Nica is another American vamp and an even more insidious threat to the well-organized undead empire, a feral girl living in the slums who has earned the nickname the "Hollywood Slasher" for her risky killings and lone-wolf lifestyle. The real power of the vampire, of course, is that no one really believes in them. No one, that is, except the famous Doctor Van Helsing played by Academy Award Winner Rod Steiger chewing his way through an outrageous sauerkraut accent and a holier-than-thou, mission-from-God attitude. He’s shadowed Dallas to LA to settle a personal score and has hit the jackpot with the cream of the Euro-vamp royalty thriving in LA, led by the controlling Count Dracula (Robert Postorelli). (Aside: with silky Udo Kier in the cast why make Pastorellie the Count?)

Bright’s busy screenplay tosses dozens of characters into the fray of criss-crossing conflicts. Dallas is out to save Nica from The Count, who carefully regulates emigration to the undead world; he doesn’t want his court in exile overtaken by Americans. The bad blood between them simmers to a boil when Dallas and his friends (including Sex And The City’s Kim Cattrall going for broke, with a Zsa-Zsa-Gabor flourish) adopt Nica and try to civilize her. Meanwhile, Van Helsing puts out an ad for an assistant and earns himself a well-meaning gang —banger fresh out of prison ("You’re telling me you don’t believe in vampires, yet you’re willing to drive a stake through someone’s heart?" "I really need this job"). Soon Van Helsing is puttering around LA in a VW van full of boys from the hood, blasting their rap as Van Helsing screams for peace and quiet, hysterical scenes directed with all the grace of a drunk water buffalo.

The script is promising if a little rough but Elfman’s clumsy handling only points up the deficiencies without celebrating the virtues. Apart from Van Helsing and all street thug gang, the only humans in the story are screaming victims. When snarky salesgirl keeps up a barrage of insults aimed at the fashion disaster Nica, her cultured guardians smile with bemused resignation and set her loose: "Go ahead, rip her throat out." Kinky basement vampire watering-holes are stocked with naked chained humans taunted, tortured, and noshed on with sadistic delight. Elfman has no love for The Count and his preening emigrant acolytes, but he has even less use for the humans and seems to enjoy the brutality perpetrated on them: a sick twist on supernatural Darwinism. Even Van Helsing is a tarnished hero, accused of being a WWII concentration camp experimenter ("I only experimented on vampires!") whose crusade of undead decimation is less a holy crusade than a mission of revenge and racial intolerance–all interesting elements that Elfman plays as broad slapstick rather than insidious irony.

Vamps is certainly a more interesting premise than such attempts at genre transfusions like from Dusk Till Dawn to Blade.