Vampire Cop

I had known about "Vampire Cop" for along time and its director Donald Farmer a notorious low budget director from Kansas who has made over 30 mostly homemade films starting with 1986's "Demon Queen", and is still going strong today, but, I never could get a copy of it or even find a full version online, all there was was a 13 minute video showing clips from the movie on youtube. However I finally got to see it recently, and yes it is a bad movie from acting to directing to about everything, but, there's some charm to be had here. The three main things to take away from this film is the opening theme song, which is horribly great, Tim Ritter who I heard was a friend of Farmer's here as an associate producer, and the fact they got Mel Arnold from "Blood Feast" to appear in this. Overall if bad movies don't bother you and you can find this then give it a shot.

So it's not a great movie. What do you expect with a title used as a joke on "Just Shoot Me"? Exactly. And don't worry, the title isn't something cryptic or deep and metaphorical, this is just a movie about a vampire cop, who kills vampires and fools around with foxy reporter Melissa Moore, semi-famous scream queen of the 90's. Sorry, there's really not much to tell. It's not a good film, but it's not unwatchable. In fact, it might be a good date movie. Picture this: you've got a hot date, but not much money, so you suggest renting a movie. She coerces you into a romantic comedy, you get her to go for the horror opus, namely "Vampire Cop." After finishing the chick flick, you start watching VC and she's all like "This is a horrible movie!" and you're like "You're a horrible movie!" and she says "You are!", and bada-bing, you start making out. So maybe Vampire Cop isn't so bad after all, huh?

This film begins with a woman named "Traci" (Morrow Faye) walking along the side of a road and being offered a ride by a young man she doesn't know. He subsequently takes her to the outskirts of the city and attempts to rape her. It's at this time that another man shows up, overpowers the rapist, and then bites him on the neck while Traci runs away in complete terror. As it turns out, the man who rescued Traci goes by the name of "William Lucas" (Ed Cannon) and he is not only a vampire but also works as a detective for the local police department. To that effect, when his partner is killed not long afterward in a shootout, Detective Lucas makes it his mission in life to hunt down those responsible and feed his insatiable appetite while at it. Meanwhile, a young television reporter named "Melanie Roberts" (Melissa Moore) becomes intrigued with the rising body count and sets out to uncover all of the details. Now rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I was initially intrigued by the synopsis and thought I would give it a try. However, after the excruciating opening sequence--replete with dreadful music lasting over 5 minutes--everything pretty much went downhill from there with one particularly bad scene (showcasing an extremely cheap-looking set of fangs) being repeated over and over again. I mean, it's one thing to replay a scene that has some merit--but it doesn't make sense to focus on the most ridiculous aspect of the film. Throw in some awful acting on the part of the main character and the end result was something that was nothing short of being laughably bad. That said, although I considered giving this film the lowest rating possible, there was a scene or two involving Melissa Moore which wasn't too bad and for that reason I gave this movie the benefit of the doubt and rated it just a notch higher.

This movie would have gotten a 10 out of 10 from my crew and I if the sound effects and soundtrack were not so sparse and in alot of cases non existent. There are a lot of slow motion scenes in this movie and the lack of any sound during them is very.........strange. However that being said the exploits of the Vampire Cop left us wanting more, the Arch Villian was especially great.

Whenever I see a bad film, I always wonder to myself, "did the director actually watch the film and say, 'hey, we got something here?'" because after watching Vampire Cop, I found absolutely nothing redeeming about it. The acting was a joke, which is forgivable in an B horror film, but what is not forgivable is horrendous editing. You can take 10 years if you want to edit a film properly, it's just as important as anything else.

Cinematography was embarrassing.

All this maybe due to the fact of time constraints, low budget and other things which we are not aware of, but does it really make sense narratively to have a scene on a clear summer night, then cut to a scene which is taking place at the exact same time in the exact same city, and have it teeming down with rain?

Wow, one must see this film to comprehend. Just very bad.