Slayer

Slayer is a mindless vampire movie with a few twists on an ancient plot. Special ops team is sent into south America to hunt down blood sucking natives. Their leader is a real old man who has aged well. There's an environmental twist as the vampires are attacking villages because their rain forest and old diet of wild animals is disappearing because of the greedy corporations and farmers. Lost of fighting and so much blood they just never bothered to wash off the cast for the whole film. It looks like they slept in the bloody clothes and caked on blood. While each member of the cast brought their own talents, it really didn't all click as a film. The effects were OK, except for the vampires dangling from the buildings on wires. If you're looking for lots of blood and violence, this is for you.

I like vampire movies, I like B-movies, I love B vampire movies. But this one has nearly nothing going for it. Some of the acting is horrible, especially by 3 of the male leads. The story is not particular interesting. At a relative short 88 minutes it still seems too long and you'll find yourself fast-forwarding quite a bit. There are an awful lot of kung-fu vampire attacks. Sound cool? It isn't when it's done on a low budget. It gets repetitive very quickly. There is some minor blood and gore, nothing to get excited about. There some good wire work where you can see the wires. It has some good landscapes being filmed in Puerto Rico.

Not worth the rental

There's a limit to what you expect from a Sci-Fi channel film given the budgets they have to work with. That said, this film kept me happily entertained from start to finish. The casting for the most part was excellent as was the locales where this was shot. Kevin Grevioux (Grieves) deserves special mention for an outstanding performance. His low pitched voice, size, and natural acting ability were well suited to this role. Ditto for Joyce Giraud (Estrella) although she had a much smaller / limiting part. Look, it's a vampire film. You've got to suspend your sense of disbelief a bit even to want to watch the thing. Once you've done that however, this film rocks!

Kevin Van Hook has been pretty busy lately, with several titles released this year. Generally although he has yet to direct a great film, at the very least his films have had interesting casts', and solid effects work. Slayer has a lot of silly macho military type dialog, and humor that drew some groans from me, but overall I enjoyed it. The action was well choreographed, the characters' likable and easy to root for, and it had some bloody scenes, even though it was more of an action film. If your looking for something more serious, don't look here, everything has a kind of kiddie comic book style feel, is never actually scary, and if it weren't for a few bloody bits, this could really be a pg-13 movie. All in all the cast seemed to be having fun making Slayer, and the action never let up. If your a Lynda Carter fan, you'll get a nice feeling of nostalgia watching this clever new spin on Vampire lore.

It would be easy to list those ways in which we are warned, well before watching, that this is surely going to be a lackluster mess. It would be easy because there are a great many of them. Instead of focusing on that, let's just cut to the chase, and talk about things like the glaring CGI of muzzle flashes from the soldiers' firearms, or the script that quickly comes off as dubious, halfhearted, and no more than perfunctory. There's Kevin VanHook's middling direction, and action sequences that are, shall we say, variable in their strength (though some aren't half bad!). There are some recognizable names and faces appearing in this TV movie, but neither they nor any others on hand are specifically being required to act - though at least they're having a good time? Ludek Drizhal's music is the most purposefully bland pablum I've heard in a film in quite a while, and that some cues play to the light humor that's peppered throughout is A Choice. Practical effects and special makeup look great; on a reported total production budget of $2 million, the same won't necessarily be said of instances of digital effects. But we knew all this before we ever pressed play on 'Slayer,' so if we don't like the viewing experience, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Dialogue is generally painfully blunt and exact, and often simply bad; with exceptions in both directions, the scene writing is mostly only rudimentarily serviceable. We do at least have a complete, cohesive story on our hands; how compelling it is constitutes another matter. In fairness, there are actually some genuinely good ideas scattered around; then again, some ideas are not so great. But hey, it's not like anyone involved had any illusions about what they were making - schlock this mediocre doesn't happen by accident. That does beg the question of who might actually enjoy this, what merit this held in the eyes of those who participated, and how the Sci Fi Channel could have ever seen fit to greenlight it in the first place. It's not significantly fun or thrilling; what gap could a consciously low-grade production possibly fill? I don't have the answers to these questions. I just know that the picture offers little more than the most baseline level of diversion that any conglomeration of light and sound does. VanHook and his cast and crew succeeded in making an almost perfectly tiresome, dull, unexciting feature. But to what end? If someone does manage to extract meaningful entertainment here then I'm glad for them; I just don't know how they do it. Watch 'Slayer' if you want, but I just can't offer a major reason why you should.