kensmark

I hadn't heard anything about this project until I saw that it was going to be on, so I watched it with a completely open mind. And, gee, the cast is full of strong players.

Unfortunately . . . it's awful. I don't mean it isn't good; I mean it's extraordinarily bad -- sometimes laughably so, but mostly it's just boring. Its strongest appeal comes from having attractive people as naked as US network TV will allow, but it's all tease and no substance, and having nymphs as backup characters can't justify several hours of bad TV.

There are two basic problems that the cast can't overcome. First, the script is *awful*. Yes, making changes to the Hercules myth (which is certainly not a single monolithic story in the first place) is traditional, but this version is relentlessly dull and much too frequently dumb (and sometimes downright head-shakingly peculiar), with terrible pacing, bits borrowed from here and there (and several parts seemingly belonging in different films), and truly awful dialogue. The dialogue is frequently unbearably bad, in fact, to the point where you feel embarrassed for the actors. Sean Astin, apparently now typecast as second-banana, seems especially burdened by one awful line after another. There's no consistency of tone or atmosphere and little cohesion to the plot.

Second, most of the special effects are really bad. REALLY bad. There's occasionally a decent bit of CGI, but mostly, again, you feel really embarrassed on behalf of the cast. I have no idea what the budget for this project was, but it sure looks like crap compared to "Clash of the Titans" or even "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" and doesn't even compare very favorably with the old Lou Ferrigno and Italian 'spaghetti' Hercules movies. Just painfully miserable.

There are plenty of other problems -- the story is needlessly complex and can't keep up with itself, and Hercules himself isn't presented as a very interesting character. Almost everyone who doesn't have a European accent tries to fake one of some kind, which is not merely amateurish and dated but never really made sense in the first place: drama doesn't become better just because the actors use British accents, after all. But the terrible script and equally terrible effects sink the whole thing right off the bat.

In fairness, "Hercules" was apparently intended as a four-hour miniseries but truncated (for this airing, anyway) to a three-hour TV movie. I don't know what they cut, but it's possible the edits made things worse. I don't think you could make "Hercules" good by adding to it, but that doesn't mean that the continuity, say, hasn't suffered from the network edits. There's no way I'll watch the USA version to see, though.

The concept is good, the performances are good, but this film is too uneven to be great. Writer/director Jonathan Kesselman should've watched the much better blaxploitation parody "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka!" a few times and thought harder about *why* it's a good parody. Even then, that film, too, could have been improved.

When you do satire, you get the best results when you stick pretty closely to your target. The funniest moments in "The Hebrew Hammer" are those in which it really mirrors blaxploitation films. When it degenerates into really broad parody, lame social commentary, and random jokes about Jewish stereotypes, it goes downhill quickly.

That's too bad, because the principle cast really does do an excellent job. The villains are weaker than the heroes -- conceptually and by performance -- but I can't really blame the actors (much as I might be tempted to blame Andy Dick) because the villains are *too* over-the-top just as they're written.

Satire works as comedy because it keeps moving back and forth over the line of plausibility -- or, at least, the line of genre convention. "The Hebrew Hammer" has many good moments but, in the end, it strays too far, too often. There's about thirty minutes of really good material in there.

A lot of people really like this film, and, no offense to them, but I can only conclude they haven't seen much in the way of vampire films, or TV shows, or anime, or books . . . . And they probably haven't seen the marginal but better 1985 original "Vampire Hunter D".

"Bloodlust" has some very nice art, especially the backgrounds, and a few cute ideas. Unfortunately, it's drowning in exhausted cliches, poor character design, cutesy and unsatisfying action scenes, and unbearably awful dialogue. What's worse is that it's the unoriginal elements that get the most emphasis and most airtime.

The English-language version actually came first . . . which makes the extreme poorness of that version's dialogue peculiar. Characters repeat themselves, over-explain, belabor the obvious, and generally wax stupid. Normally, you could blame this on a lazy or rushed dubber trying to make the English track match the Japanese original. Here, it's just inexcusable. I've seen both the English and Japanese versions, and the dialogue is bad in both.

But the thing that really hurts my teeth is the way they keep saying "dunpeal". No such thing -- the word is "dhampyre", pronounced like "vampire" is supposed to be pronounced (rhymes with "romp here"). It's a real word, not made up for the anime -- a Romany word meaning the son of a woman impregnated by a vampire (usually her former husband). Dhampyres are, indeed, usually vampire hunters in Gypsy legends.

The word was obviously transliterated into Japanese ("daampiru", or something like that) . . . and then an English translator who didn't know much about vampires and didn't do any research re-transliterated it as "dunpeal". Ugh. The word comes up a lot in the script, and they might as well have said "vunpeal" for "vampire".

Still, this is a film that appeals to an audience that isn't familiar with the material the film draws on . . . so not many fans will notice. But the film is dull, dumb, overlong, and rarely makes much sense. The lack of continuity alone is a big handicap, but there's so much else wrong with the movie that I can't give it a passing grade.