Empress Vampire

I rate movies based on how much I enjoy them, not on their quality; or importance. This movie was unique, clever, and very sexy. It is not an example of greatness - quite the opposite. For example, there was a Christian movie on YouTube, about a high school football player. Since I myself claim to be Christian, then I should have loved the football story, and have been disgusted by this vampire movie. But the football movie was aggressively boring; and this vampire movie was nonstop, total fun. Seen on Tubi, the free streaming site, which now has live TV; and even the World Cup! But wait, this review needs "600 characters"! Or maybe 10,000 maniacs.

Wow, this movie was bad. Very bad!

First of all, you should know that this movie is what appears to be a very ambitious home-movie project. It feels like something you could very well shoot with your very own DV camera if you only had enough friends to make an appearance as one or more characters in the movie.

The entertainment value of "Aleta: Vampire Mistress" (aka "Empress Vampire") is almost non-existing. I managed to endure a prolonged 27 minutes of the movie, which actually felt like way more. With very little of any worth or interest happening, I just gave up. And the fact that the characters were bland and pointless didn't help much either, nor the fact that the acting performances were not impressive either.

For a vampire movie, this was a swing and a miss. It felt like director Phil Condit had an idea, scribbled it down on paper along with co-writer Ange Maya and turned it into a movie. And in the process also assigning the lead role to his co-writer as well. While she is an attractive woman, she is not that much of an accomplished actress - sorry to say.

The dialogue in the movie was atrocious, and most of it was delivered with such a lack of performance that you just yawn your way through it and your attention will quickly wander elsewhere than on the movie.

The acting in the movie was amateurish. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing. But it just was a bit forced in this movie and it didn't really feel natural.

I am rating this movie a mere two out of ten stars. It was an ambitious project for sure, but it didn't deliver where it mattered.

I had an hour left of the movie, and I have absolutely zero interest in returning to finish the movie at any time in the future.

This is what happens when you have a adult movie cast trying to do a movie with a plot. You can tell who was paid extra to go topless and who wasn't. So there's this immortal vampire Empress of China who leads a cult of subordinate vampires. The Secretary of Defense wants to recruit her as a secret agent, but trying to stop him is a Von Helsing (not a Van Helsing, because that would have required someone to do research) and a psychic.

The problem is the lead actress... you can barely understand what she is saying and her voice is kind of goofy... But she was willing to do nude scenes, which is what I suspect the director had in mind.

OH, yes. And musical numbers. It has musical numbers. Need I say more. Fake CGI Blood spurts. Cars driving against green screen backgrounds. The beginning of the movie looks like it was competently made, but then the later parts got cheap and kind of silly. You know, like they ran out of money halfway through.

This is the kind of film that will likely go viral at some point for it's campiness and nerds will be hanging pictures of the empress on their mom's basement walls.

If you like B-movies this one is for you, it's got everything you'd expect from a low budget horror-comedy. Boobs, butts and bad lines. I'm guessing it was produced to be dubbed in Chinese, as there were a few scenes where the lips didn't sync up. I wonder if they enjoyed it in China as much as I did here!

Kudos to Ange Maya, it's a shame she passed away, she might have ran this into a series. With a bigger budget it likely could have gone further but it was definitely worth the watch as is.

The people complaining about special effects are clearly missing the point, I laughed out loud at some of the kill scenes, they're hilariously terrible which added to the appeal. Horror-comedys aren't supposed to have cutting edge realism. I also enjoyed some of the music, which was actually pretty good but stayed true to the shoe string budget theme.

I'm always digging for b-horror movies, it's one of the great things on the world wide web. That said, the filmmakers on the set of "Aleta: Empress Vampire" seemed to have low expectations in the audience they would attract. 10 minutes into this simple yet over explained plot, I felt like an idiot for hitting 'play'. I just thought the idea of mixing some Chinese history into the cliche vampire story could be interesting and if all else failed at least there were boobs ( the boobs were the sole reason I gave it 2 stars instead of 1, judge me if you want but look where you are, why are you reading this?). Writing wise, there was only one moment in the movie, during Aleta's backstory, where I thought 'interesting', the rest I just felt disrespected as an audience member. Here's my list of technical issues I found too distracting to stay focused; the camera man has clearly never watched a movie or tv (nor the director for that matter), most of the special effects were obviously added in post, there were no sound effects just whatever the mic picked up, the fake accents were really bad and completely unnecessary, the acting is pretty much what you would expect...I could go on but I wouldn't want to spoil all the "fun". The things the director seemed to care about didn't make any sense and the things the director should have cared about he didn't at all because the audience will probably be too dumb to notice. I guess the issue is on my side of the screen because I know how the laces in my shoes work and I don't drool when I talk. If they tried to make this funny it could have worked, there were some unintentionally funny moments that made me wish the "filmmakers" didn't take themselves so seriously. I find it hard to believe that everybody behind the camera was proud of this one.

That's my honest opinion, I'm not going to tell you what to do.

Watched on tubiTV, 2019.