Vegas Vampires

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.

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.

Working on the Las Vegas beat, police officers assigned to a missing person's investigation run into several others all inadvertently crossing paths with a group of vampires using the strip as a hideout and decide to band together to defeat the common enemy.

This one was a lot better than expected. One of the better points is that this one decides to really throw the seriousness out the window and just have fun with the topic, and there's so many random scenes in here that are included just for that reason. Among the best at this is the opening in the night-club, from the stumbling-across-the-ceremony section that features some really freaky images to the alleyway confrontation and the finale with the flying vampire being really great, and the all-out fun of the motel-confrontation in the middle of the desert all provide a lot more disturbing images than expected and really put some fine action scenes in here as well. Even the opening to the limo attack is really fun, with the build-up to the attack even though the inevitable is about to occur, and the sheer fun of the battle with the vampires in front of the casino is one of the best scenes due to the sheer outrageousness of it all to mix it up with a couple of really nice chases inner-cut alongside a pretty decent fight. There's also the films' last half-hour, which is just an all-out action-packed assault which has a lot to like. Starting with the confrontation in the police headquarters, which has several great parts including the interrogation room sequence, a tense and creepy scene where an officer investigates a strange mist in a hallway leading to a bullet-laced frenzy, a pretty new spin on the reveal-the-creatures-as-vampires conversation and the big gunfight-laden finale, all the way to the escape and eventual showdown later on with all the good guys in here going into a room full of creatures with guns blazing and just mowing the vampires down in a hail of bullets and wooden arrows as well as the exposure of some to sunlight, manages to stay exciting the whole time. The last big plus is the blood and gore, which is really nice and messy which works for the film against the mildly irritating flaw as the only thing wrong with it. The fact that the film goes almost out of its way to include a headache- inducing plot is the real problem here, as this one has about five different stories going on in here. First off is the investigation of the missing person's case that leads to the discovery of the vampires requiring outside forces coming in, then switches to the friends coming back for some fun and then the honeymooning couple all thrown in together just manages to be nearly all-out confusing at times, especially when it builds something up with one of the stories and then it cuts away to something else in order to focus on that one. It's great that it manages to throw all the elements together, but way too many characters are here resulting in a start-stop feel to the film that is very irritating because of the requirements needed for the stories and it just didn't need to. Fixing this one flaw would pretty much make this one a lot better, and is really the only thing sticking out as wrong about the film.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Nudity and a mild sex scene.

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.

The hands down worst movie I have ever had the misfortune of watching. I can't believe I actually watched the whole movie and feel dumber as a result. This is truly a case of the train wreck syndrome and I simply could not stop watching because it was so awful. I kept thinking that it had to get better and was always amazed at how it progressively got worse. From the acting to the script to the editing to the photography, absolutely terrible. I can't believe that somebody actually made this movie and thought "wow, this is great piece of cinema!" If I could give it a lower rating than 1 star I would. I highly recommend this movie for all film students as an excellent example of what should never be done in cinema.