Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Gothic Vampires from Hell (2007)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.
 

There’s a joke that I think applies to this movie:  A guy orders dinner at a restaurant.  After he eats it, the waiter asks how the customer’s food was.  He says, “I have two complaints.  First, it was horrible.  Second, there wasn’t enough of it.”

Ok.  On with the review, then.

The title of the movie comes from the name of a band that wants to win a competition.  The prize is a contract as the house band at a Gothic night club.  Losers at least get some stage time, but the lead singer of the title band has put too much time into the band to settle for second place.  He wants to win.

Enter two women that claim that they want to sign Gothic Vampires From Hell to a recording contract.  If they can get a contract, they don’t need the club.   The women aren’t quite what they seem, though.  People have a way of going missing after meeting with them.

That’s really where the plot description ends.  I can’t even say it’s a battle between good and evil as it’s really just a battle between the to women and the bands that they meet.  As you might have gathered from trailers and other reviews, the two women are vampires who are really looking for their new vampire leader.

There are some movies that do well with a small budget.  This isn’t one of them.  The most obvious sign of it being low budget is the recycling of footage, despite the short running time.  If you’re making a movie and need to reuse footage and it’s going to be very obvious, I’m sure there are ways you can work that into the story.  Instead, there are several scenes with different bands playing where the images of people dancing are used repeatedly.  To boot, the scenes look like nothing more than filler.  (Remember when you had to write a paper for school and you played with the font and margin to make the minimum number of pages?  This is the cinematic equivalent.)

Most of the acting was bad, too.  Yes, good actors had to start somewhere.  I don’t think many of them started in a movie like this.  Normally, I’d go to the Internet Movie Database and look at the actors’ other work as an indication.  With many bad movies, there are no other roles to speak of.  This one seems to be the exception, although I think there’s at lease one actor that hadn’t been in anything else at all.  Others have had a few roles, although some have had a lot of roles in other bad movies.

The video quality looked like the movie was made with a couple of borrowed camcorders.  It seemed like the producers were trying to make up for bad video quality by doing things that made it look more like they didn’t have that much money.  What little CGI they had didn’t really blend in that well and actually was distracting.  They also tried to use a lot of fancy transitions between scenes which made it seem like they were trying too hard.

I think with some more attractive women and a lot more nudity, this could have been a great porn title.  In fact, the one good thing the movie had going for it was a couple of attractive vampires.  If the writing was better, it could have been a real mainstream movie.  As it stands, it looks like someone took an episode from one of those horror series like Tales From the Crypt and put it on steroids.



 

1 comment :

Fred L Taulbee Jr said...

Good and apt review. I think a Tales from the Crypt episode on steroids makes it sound better than it is.