Nattens engel

One should never expect too much of a movie directed by a guy called Shaky, but this vampire tale from Denmark is at least only mediocre rather than offensively bad. It's a neotraditionalist affair that would have been very different had it been made before the pop cultural impact of Anne Rice and BUFFY. A girl inherits the classic, dusty old family mansion in the middle of nowhere. She goes there with her boyfriend (a guy with a very short attention span) and a sleazy over-sexed gal-pal. The trio finds an old book about her great-grandfather, a cloaked vampire with the unforgivably silly name of Rico Mortiz. (Feel free to go ahead and take a moment to groan here.) Of course the heroine discovers something rotten in Denmark, namely old Rico's remains (a huge mutant bat skeleton) and manages to spill a few drops of blood thereupon. Rico is up and at 'em again briefly for the climax but most of the movie is devoted to the flashbacks about his original reign of terror. Considering they're supposed to be her great-grandmother's memoirs, it seems odd that some of the vignettes appear to be taking place in the 1980s. The movie's raison d'etre is its special effects, which consist of too much gunplay, several gruesome vampire bites, and a very impressive giant hairy bat monster with huge fangs. The monster FX and the fangs look great but some of the action is a bit much. There's even one of those ridiculous shots of a guy repeatedly firing two guns while jumping sideways and flying across the screen in slow motion. Credibility is further compromised by trendy footage of the vampire's evil minions in their long overcoats walking toward the camera in pretentious backlit slo-mo. Rico's vampire looks older and curiously different from his original "human" self, and when he gets really mad his forehead turns into what looks like one of STAR TREK's Klingon prosthetics. A scene in which a vampire suddenly transforms himself into a rat looks great. ANGEL OF THE NIGHT really has nothing on its mind and brings nothing new to the vampire genre, but I found it consistently watchable and reasonably entertaining. If you like bloodsucker movies then you're probably seen far worse ones.

I saw this film at the "Dead By Dawn" festival, half way through an all-nighter. I was expecting to watch 10 mins and then sleep through the rest. How wrong I was! If you can look past the influence from "From Dusk Till Dawn", there lies a absolutely great film - funny, gory and highly intelligent. It's a crime that a film of such high quality will unlikely see a proper UK theatrical release, and will probably not see a DVD or video release either.

I picked this up as a rental one weekend. I didn't have any expectations, as all I knew about it was what the back of the box had to say. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed. Some of the scenes in the movie really worked well. Unfortunately other scenes played more like a music video. The story wasn't new or strong, but other movies have overcome weak plots. The acting was surprisingly good, but most of the story unfolds in flashbacks fed to the viewer in small, disjointed chunks. The English dubbing started off badly but quickly improved. The director drew heavily on John Woo style action, not always a bad thing, but I think the diving across a room firing two handguns at once thing was a little overdone. I also can't help wonder where everyone kept coming up with the sawed-off shotguns. In a nutshell, this probably won't become a classic, but I don't think it's a waste of time either. I think once the director discovers his own style, we will be in for some excellent movies.

~Spoiler~

If Robert Rodriguez made a vampire flick it would be...From Dusk Till Dawn. If someone who obviously admired Robert Rodriguez made a vampire flick, it would be Angel of the Night. From the get-go of this Fangoria release the bad dubbing stirs a lot of laughter but by the second act everyone is usually into it. There are a hundred flaws like this, but I'm going to forgive most of them because the movie wasn't unwatchable. It borrows heavily from many other films, such as From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado, Kindred: The Embraced, and even Demon Knight. The action is very stylized and the gunfights are straight out of the John Woo/Robert Rodriguez handbook. At one point a Spanish character with long hair is even called Banderas. That same scene is the one to watch for: the hallway shootout. It's nicely done. I absolutely love the part when the vampire morphs into the mouse and then gets blown away by the sawed off, double barrel (which is used in practically every scene). Angel of the Night is an excellent, although very corny, low-budgeter. I wasn't expecting too much when I watched it, but I got a little more than I bargained for. That's what usually makes for the best movies.

Shaky González' "Nattens Engel" aka "Angel Of The Night" of 1998 is a bearable, but disappointing vampire flick, that was obviously intended to be kind of a Danish "From Dusk Till Dawn", but it seems more like a Danish "Texas Blood Money" to me.

When Rebecca (Maria Stokholm), her boyfriend Mads (Tomas Villum Jensen) and her best friend Charlotte (Mette Louise Holland) come to a Gothic mansion, which Rebecca has inherited, they find an old book which tells the tale of a powerful vampire. As they read it, they find out that the vampire described in the book is actually Rebecca's great-grandfather, a priest who was turned into a vampire 100 years ago when fighting a maiden-ripping monster.

Most of the performances in "Nattens Engel" are not even that bad, and the supporting cast contains three well-known Danish actors, Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Michelsen and Thomas Bo Larsen in small roles. But the director Shaky González just seems to try too hard to resemble movies like "From Dusk Till Dawn" and doesn't manage to mix vampire horror, with lots of gun-play and action and some martial-arts-style fighting sequences in an appropriate way. Over all, the script is simply pretty bad and the plot has huge holes. In some parts the movie is shot in fairly cool camera angles, which look OK but in no way original or imaginative.

"Nattens Engel" is a rather disappointing film with a weak plot, but it's not one of those films that have to be avoided at all costs. Some of the women are lovely to look at and there is a fair amount of gore. As a big fan of B-Horror and exploitation, I personally found it bearable, though disappointing. I wouldn't recommend "Angel Of The Night", but if you want to watch it, make sure you have enough beer at home. 3/10