If you want to catch up with every sad nerd who always carried 12 sided dice or spent their allowance on greasepaint at the the Hot Topic every week, this is the documentary you've been pining for. The premise is the narrator stumbled into the vampire underworld of New York City and then came back to document it with poor camera-work, ugly lighting and the most attention-hungry pack of the unscariest RPG-casualty vampires ever.
Bouncing from such exciting locations as "sad vampire apartment" to "tattoo parlor" to "costume shop" and "cheesy dance club," the Narrator interviews these creatures of the night, who come in the full splendor of their fake contacts, pvc, chains and cosmetic fangs to gladly share the "reality" of being a "vampire." They all talk about why they wear fangs, and surprisingly all offer up the same boring explanation, which translates to: I'm scared of the world, I hope by spending a few hundred dollars on costumery, they will fear me. Let me pop that bubble, they won't, they'll be too busy laughing. And talk about condescending. Every "vampire" boasts about how they're superior to the rest of us "mundanes" who are content not looking like Marilyn Manson or performing rituals in parking lots to the spooky glow of klieg lights. But they're so BORING. They wander around in shambolic packs, they hang out in lousy dance clubs playing generic music and, for a society whose greatest gift is people not believing in them, they looove to talk about themselves and vampires and how they embrace "the darkness." Vampyres blows the lid off the myth of vampires being interesting at all. Just watch the scene with the guy growling like a dog who explains where the word 'Lycan' comes from. Close your eyes and you'll swear you're at the San Diego Comicon.
The narrator doesn't seem to understand the presence of commas and periods indicate pauses and starts, and at one point claims Anne Rice's 'Interview with a Vampire' "turned literature around" and that vampires gave birth to black metal. And he talks about vampires like they're real, but he couldn't sound more bored about his subjects, even droning on as the credits start rolling. I question the veracity of this movie, mostly because it makes me a bit ashamed to claim the same species. But if you enjoy bad piercings, clumsy bondage scenes, people with severe parental issues and want something to push your impatience with humanity into outright misanthropy, then Vampyres is the film for you.
