John
Carpenter's Vampires
Reviewed
by Leonard Heldreth, May, 1999
John Carpenter has had a very
uneven career in Hollywood. With Assault on Precinct 13,
his remake of Rio BravoI, he gave the action suspense film new life;
with Halloween he single-handedly created the slasher genre; with
Christine he directed one of the best Stephen King adaptations; and
with Escape from New York and his remake of The Thing he created two
science fiction classics. While Starman had its moments, several of
the recent work, such as Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness,
and Escape from L. A. have been mediocre at best. As an action thriller,
Vampires exhibits the typical Carpenter suspense pacing, macho sensibility
(all the women are vampires, hookers, or cleaning ladies), violence,
and Carpenter-composed soundtrack but doesn't have the plot originality
and interesting characters he sometimes creates.
The vampires in Carpenter's film, based upon a novel by
John Steakley, have some parallels with those in Blade, and both films
focus on killing as many vampires as possible. Jack Crow (James Woods)
leads a team of Vatican-financed vampire hunters who are combing the
Southwest for nests of the creatures. They also hope to eliminate
some of the master vampires. Using automatic military weapons to slow
the vampires down, they stake them or shoot them with cross bow arrows
connected to a steel cable, and then pull them into the sunlight where
they explode. In an opening scene, the team kills nine vampires but
fails to locate the master. That night he comes to their motel and
with his bare hands kills all but two of the team, as well as the
girls who are visiting them. Crow, his second in command Tony Montoya
(Daniel Baldwin), and a priest who looks like Stephen Spielberg (Tim
Guinee) set out in search of the vampire to extract revenge; consultation
with a Cardinal Alba of the Catholic Church (Maximilian Schell) reveals
that this vampire is Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), the First Vampire
who was created early in the thirteen hundreds in a botched exorcism.
To rachet up the suspense, Valek has found the cross used in his original
exorcism and plans to complete the process to give himself the ability
to move in the sunlight.
The acting is adequate–no great histrionics are required–but
only Schell manages to give some individuality to his characterization.
The master vampire reminds one of Stephen King's Barlowe (the book,
not the film version), except Valek is handsomer. The vampire mythology
is similar to that in Blade, i, e. holy objects have no value, but
the garlic that worked in Blade is ineffectual in the Carpenter film,
and nothing is said about silver (given the ineffectual holy objects,
one wonders why the crew of hunters employs a priest who blesses the
men, the weapons, and the burned vampire corpses). The vampires in
Carpenter's film are much harder to kill, requiring decapitation,
staking, or explosion in sunlight, and the disintegration special
effects are less slick than they are in Blade. But both films derive
their energy from the number of vampires killed. Does Carpenter's
film work? Vampires is not up to the level of his best work but neither
is it as bad as his worst. As a solid vampire variation, it's somewhere
above from Dusk to Dawn but below Near Dark and Interview with the
Vampire.
