Vegas Vampires

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.

Tommy Lister is on hand as a police detective looking for the missing daughter of an affluent man, and runs into the vampire clan that have kidnapped her. A second plot has the detective's step-son going to Vegas to get hitched and running afoul of the same vampire clan. Yet a third plot has blacksploitation greats Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson as ex-cops who go to Vegas for the hell of it and run afoul of, yup you guessed it. Other the vampire connection none of those three plots feel connected to one another in the least until the end when they had to be tied together somehow. It's done in a pretty convoluted way sadly. And it still felt like the writers had no clue what each other were doing. Plots are dismissed, and new ones take their place willy nilly. It definitely didn't help having 5 writers pen it. (too many cooks and all that). The thing that got me to rent this is the fact that Williamson (who also directed) and Roundtree were starring, both of which I respect and enjoy seeing a lot. But they have basically the shortest screen time of all the major characters and are a bit insubstantial. Still when they DO have scenes they're OK. Tommy Lister is the real star of the movie and he does the best job that he could have done with such ridiculousness. The one thing that REALLY got on my nerves bad (I mean besides the vampires dancing like zombies half the time), was the fact that logos on shirts were blurred out, and since a good deal of the cast wears a jersey during the first half of the film, this became extremely distracting and almost made the film unwatchable. The ending leaves room for a sequel, but I can quickly exclaim 'fangs, but no fangs' to that prospect. Oh and you might have noticed I didn't mention Baldwin in my review, this is simply because he's only on-screen a whopping two minutes or so of the film and is a glorified cameo. On a side note, the DVD is as bare-bones as can be with absolute zilch for extras. The movie and chapter stops is all you get.

Eye Candy: there's a gratuitous 5 girl topless dancing scene in the middle

My Grade: D

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.

Well, I would've given this a half-point, if I'd been able; one is being generous. This makes John Carpenter's 'Vampires' look like fine film, and 'From Dusk Till Dawn' look like an academy award winner. Barely a plot, dialogue, uh... did anyone go to school?, special effects imported from a bad video game, vampire teeth that were 100 for 99 cents, characters that were such low-life losers that I was hoping the vamps would get them, just to put me out of my misery.

Someone should keep Daniel Baldwin away from the buffets, and let's hope the producers of this mess never get it into their heads again that they should make a movie. It wasn't even bad enough to be funny. Best line in the film? "Don't let him bite you!"

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!