Anjo da Noite

This is something as unusual as a Danish vampire movie. What can I say? It is not the best vampire movie I've ever seen, but absolutely the funniest. The film makers has used some elements from the role-playing game "Vampire: The Masquerade" and the effects of this is quite amusing, if you happen to play it, like I do. Nonetheless, the movie is definitely worth seeing if you're a fan of vampire movies.

The film is made over 2 years. original it was meant to be a short film school movie, first they shoot 20 min. and got some money and shoot the rest over some years. It was so funny and to do, i won i price for best special Fx in Denmark when it came out many years ago. A lot of the things is done almost whit out any money in a simple way but i think that a lot of the scenes in the film is working so fine. I have been working on Shaky Gonzales other movies and we are having so much fun on the set doing these films. Shaky Gonzales Direktor on the movies is so good to worked with, he loves to blow things up, shoot outs, breakaway windows to jump through, bullet hits, stunts and so on, i love it to. So i can wait for the next movie to work on whit him

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.

After inheriting a mansion in a remote part of Denmark, an attractive young woman by the name of "Rebecca" (Maria Stokholm) invites her boyfriend "Mads" (Tomas Villum Jensen) and her best-friend "Charlotte" (Mette Louis Holland) to come with her to check it out. Once they get there, she explains that her grandmother was a historian who spent a great deal of her time researching vampires. Not long afterward, Charlotte takes them down into the basement where there find some extremely old books on the shelf. As it so happens, one book in particular catches her eye and, since it involves the history of her ancestors, she begins to read it out loud to her friends. The scene then shifts to 100 years earlier with a priest named "Rikard" (Christian Gronvall) being bitten by a vampire. He subsequently assumes the name "Rico Mortiz" (now played by Erik Holmey) and goes on a murderous rampage which is outlined in the book and takes us up to the present. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I was extremely disappointed with this film for a number of reasons. For starters, this film is billed as both a comedy and a horror. But the problem is that there really isn't much humor here so I'm not sure why anyone would think it was a comedy. The second problem concerns the fact that the director (Shaky Gonzalez) apparently chose to focus on action scenes instead of tried-and-true elements like suspense to liven up the horror. And that was a big mistake, in my opinion, as these action scenes were quite unimaginative. To further compound the problem is the fact that he kept repeating the same action formula again and again. To that effect, what the viewer is left with is a good-looking cast and a lot of inane action scenes which go absolutely nowhere. In short, I was not at all impressed with this film and I have rated it accordingly.

~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.