Vegas Vampires

Vegas Vampires (2003) is a low budget film directed and co-starring Fred Williamson. A vampire is running around Las Vegas creating problems for the local police, especially two of them (Tiny Lister and Glenn Plummer). During this time, a P.I. and his buddy (Fred Williamson and Richard Roundtree) decide to have some fun in Vegas. An outbreak of vampires starts to slowly spread about the city and our heroes and a lot of innocent people are about to get caught up in a vampire holocaust. Entertaining and funny, it was great to see Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson kicking arse and taking names.

Two problems I had with this movie, one was blurring of name brand t-shirts and jerseys. That was a big problem, it was such an eye sore. The second one was the lead role given to Tiny Lister. He's good as a secondary character, but the man's not a lead actor. He wasn't that good. Otehr wise I enjoyed the movie. It was a big shock. I would rather watch this than have to suffer through another viewing of UNderworld.

cheers,

Overall, a rather bad movie with a few redeeming qualities. Vampires in Las Vegas run amok and are hunted by a variety of police officers, who eventually defeat the vampires with the help of a sexy nun. Naturally. There are a number of flaws in the movies: day turns to night and night to day in the middle of scenes; characters' appearances change between cut away scenes, only two vampires combusted when exposed to daylight while many others walked around during the day without problems. The number of gaffes in the film provide the viewer ample opportunity to play "find the error." The main premise of the movie seems adequate (hunting down a 300 year old vampire who has returned to seek a new wife), but there are too many sub-plots floating around that provide tenuous links to the main premise.

Three characters stand out for their contributions to this film. Eric Etenari does an excellent job as the main vampire's henchman, a smooth talking, lady's man who provides the boss with his victims. Comic relief is provided by two legendary stars of the 1970s, Fred Williamson (who also directed the movie) and Richard Roundtree (best known for his role as Shaft). In some sense, Vegas Vampires seemed to be an effort, though largely deficient, to remember the days of the blaxploitation films in which Roundtree and Williamson starred in the 1970s.

This film appears to be scraps from an editing room floor that were very, very poorly spliced together into a completely incoherent and ridiculous mess. I can enjoy a really bad horror film, but this one is so bad, there isn't even one redeeming quality to be found. I rented this because Tommy Lister is in it and the premise looked amusing. Unfortunately Tommy's part was dull and one dimensional, and not even one of the scattered plots managed to be redeeming.

The fact that I rented this is proof that there is far too little to do in the town I live in, and that I will, in fact, rent absolutely anything. I have to say "hats off" to anyone that got paid for any portion of this film. Hopefully it was some kid's film school project, and said kid has subsequently decided to find a more suitable career.

As someone who loves blaxploitation movies and modern vampire movies (i.e Lost Boys, Interview with a Vampire, and Underworld ) and paranormal TV shows (i.e. Super Natural, True Blood), I can say this is hands down the worse vampire film I have seen that was made in the past 20 years. It was the kind of movie you watch because it is so bad you can't stop but watching it to see if it gets worse, and you know, it does get worse. I really wonder if the actors knew the movie was as bad as it was while they were making it. The only reason I gave it a 2 out of 10 is because there were a few fine chicks in it and it showed a little booty. Otherwise, this is garbage!

VEGAS VAMPIRES (also marketed as VEGAS VAMPS) has all the markings of a "project"; that some veteran (i.e., over the hill) Afro-American movie stars got together to give their own careers one last battery charge and, while they were at it, give some young Afro-American film and acting students a chance to do their thing. Evidently everything was spent on this film - except (1) time and (2) money.

Although this film is supposed to attract us by being located in Las Vegas, a city of glamour and round-the-clock action, we see none of that, apart from about 30 seconds of stock footage of the casino strip. No scenes inside casinos or nightclubs or fabulous mansions. One scene that's supposed to be in a swank neighborhood is actually in an alleyway behind the backyard walls. A scene that supposed to take place in a classy restaurant looks more like the corner of a utility room with a movable bar and a shower curtain hung from the ceiling. There are some stock glimpses of ambulances running in the light of day, but when we have a close-up scene (as we do with supposedly different ambulances on 3 different occasions) suddenly it's nighttime and then we see the ambulances drive off, again in daylight.

Young women in Las Vegas are being killed, and their bodies are found drained of blood, and the LV Police Dept officially suspects that a vampire is really on the loose. Well that's a change of pace! Another change of pace is that a majority of the LV PD, including its upper command, is black; if you lived in LV you'd realize that would be a change like the sun rising in the west. Daniel Baldwin, who may have owed someone a favor, does a one-minute walk-on as a stubborn white cop who doesn't believe in vampires. Thrown into this mix two Afro-American former LV PD cops who are now private eyes in Los Angeles who just happen to drive up to Las Vegas on a lark and take an interest in this string of killings. At the same time, for no particular reason, there's a hip-hop singing contest among Afro-American 20-somethings in Southern California and a couple of fellows win it singing as badly as I do, and immediately decide to take their girlfriends along for a celebratory trip in an RV to LV.

For reasons unknown, this RV has some sort of temporary engine trouble in the middle of the desert, and looking at it from the outside, they're in a sandy wilderness. Then they're filmed from inside the RV and we can see through the windshield that they're parked on grass alongside an active highway. The wardrobe department also went cheap and told these fellows to wear their own clothes - and then the producers got antsy about something printed on their t-shirts because the images were processed to blur the image on the shirts, giving them a shimmer as if you had walked into a 3-D movie without the special glasses.

The vampires in this movie are very selectively sensitive to sunlight. One of them manages, for no particular reason, to stumble out into the middle of what appears to be an open air farmers market at high noon before settling down and bursting into flame. Others, inside the living room of the house used by the king vampire, are disco-ing in mid-day with just flimsy lace curtains on the windows to protect them from the noonday sunlight. The king vampire, as you might have guessed, is a white dude and you don't need me to tell you he's no actor; in fact, he is a very accomplished musical director for movies and he may have been recruited for this role because they had embarrassing photos of him or were keeping his kid hostage or some motivation like that. Anyway, we never actually see him kill a victim because first he has to do this very prolonged arthritic dancing around her unconscious body; no explanation for why he plays with his food.

In the end the vampire is not done in by the police, nor the private eyes, nor the hip-hip singers, but by a nun (also of African descent but since she's sent by the Vatican I don't know if I can call her American) who first appears in the full veil and wimple penguin outfit we haven't seen since Loretta Young, and then she slips into a leather bustier which I suppose is now standard Vatican issue for nun downtime.

This movie is 89 minutes of your life that you will never get back. I consider it one of the worst movies ever made ... and that's against very strong competition.