Oh, John Carpenter’s Vampires.
In the 90s goth went commercial. It delivered Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the Wesley Snipes comic book actioner Blade.
And Carpenter, the horror master, wasn’t to be left out. He brought his own take on the fabled fanged bloodsuckers.
I last saw this movie back in 1998, renting it from a video store (yup, old enough).
My mixed feelings about it at the time are definite concerns now.
The gore disgusted me then, but now I’ve lived through two recessions and a pandemic. So, while it’s not my thing to split someone in half, use your practical and CG splatter effects if you must.
What turns my stomach today are the base and unimaginative ways the film tries to depict its vampire slayers as western film badasses.
But this is a John Carpenter movie, and his filmmaking fingerprints are all over it. There’s some undeniable quality injected into the mix.
It was his most profitable film of the 90s, generally breaking even at the American box office but doing well overseas. And it’s rumored to have cleared a cool ~$40 million in home video rentals.
So is Vampires a guilty pleasure for mature audiences or a schlocky machismo that’ll slap you silly?
The Plot of John Carpenter’s Vampires:
In New Mexico, Jack Crow (James Woods) and his vampire hunters attack a nest of not-quite-Nosferatu’s – aggressive undead bloodsuckers who snarl a lot and take a beating to subdue.
Slay hard, play hard. When the killing’s done and the sun goes down, Crow and his crew, including Tony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), party at a motel with plenty of alcohol and prostitutes, including Katrina (Sheryl Lee).
But an uninvited guest crashes. Jan Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), a master vampire with incredible power, bites Katrina and lays waste to everyone in his path.
Crow and Montoya, dragging along Katrina, manage to escape.
But things only get worse. They learn Valek is after a game-changing relic and suspect they were set up.
With the team dismembered, can Crow and Montoya regroup, find the conspirator, and stop Valek and his vampire horde?
The Rest of the Main Cast Includes:
- Tim Guinee as Father Adam Guiteau
- Maximillian Schell as Cardinal Alba
- Mark Boone Junior as Caitlin
- Gregory Sierra as Father Giovanni
- Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as David Deyo
- Thomas Rosales, Jr. as Ortega
- Henry Kingi as Anthony
- David Rowden as Bambi
- Clarke Coleman as Davis
- Chad Stahelski as Male Master
- Marjean Holden as Female Master
Fun Fact: Screenwriter/Director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) has a cameo at a gas station.
The Good Things:
The Lore and the Gear, +5 Points
If you’re building a story about vampires, you must lay down the lore – your version of the vampiric rules. And you need to set the tone of that lore – serious and brooding or campy and punctuated.
You can only be partially original with such saturated material. Still, the film’s mythos and rules are a nicely stripped-down version, suiting the grounded tone.
These vampires are mean and want to suck your blood. They keep their numbers low to avoid discovery. You can kill them with sunlight or a stake in the heart.
It’s clean and simple, down and dirty world-building.
And the slayers aren’t overdramatic gunslingers with dual-wielding pistols to highly stylized bullet effects, nor are they a clan of scientific Van-Helsings or shamans with holy water and garlic.
They’re exterminators.
The slayers roll up in an armored car and wake the vampires one by one. They drag them outside with a winch cable attached to a Jeep and torch them to death in the sun. Or they impale them with spears, holding them in place while a crewmember drives a stake through their heart.
And they have strict rules to hunt by, like not letting your partner live if they’re bitten.
It’s a no-coffin, no-nonsense approach.
A Sunburned Aesthetic, +4 Points
As a western, the film makes the most of its New Mexico setting.
Crow and Montoya drift through wide shots of dusty skies, abandoned trucks, and dry mountains in the distance.
Somewhere in the desert, under red clouds, we watch Valek and his crew of vampires rise from soft dirt, the black and crimson continuing as they saunter forward in a loose hunting formation in a shot out of a music video.
And Carpenter’s skill with building tension comes through.
Before the opening raid on a vampire nest, the editing flips through a triangle of three recurring images to raise anticipation.
Crow’s team arms themselves for the fight, donning chain mail armor about the neck or slipping wooden stakes into utility belts.
There are shots of the farmhouse door, where the vampires lurk, each image inching closer and closer to the door handle.
And we get close-ups of Crow as he’s fixated on the door, his mind no doubt on what he knows (and we know) is coming.
See Ya in Extra Crispy Hell, +2 Points
When the vampires get dragged into the sun, little pockets of fire break out until they burst into vivid flames. It looks like a mix of practical effects and stunt work pulls off the scenes, and they still look realistic.
And vampires’ subtle makeup effects give them a fear factor. Valek looks pale and has weathering skin lines. You know Katrina is turning to a vampire by the red discoloration gathering around her eyes.
The Not-As-Good-Things:
Posturing Bullies, -3 Points
Forget the vampire conflict for a moment.
This film has a message for you, one it wants to ram home (and I double emphasize ram): You must accept that grizzled Crow and his greasy sidekick Montoya are badasses.
Don’t question it. Don’t you ever f*@^ing question it. Okay?
They’re the breed of tough guys who’ll give Father Adam a bite-negating neck collar and suit of full body armor but barely take a blip of protection for themselves. They slip on a glove to prevent crossbow-wielding callouses, light up cigarettes, and are ready to battle hell’s best.
Carpenter cast James Woods as Crow because he didn’t want a cliched, muscle bound guy in the part, thinking audiences would believe Woods could chew the leg off a vampire.
As a creative choice, you can understand the idea in theory, and I give Carpenter credit for going against the obvious type.
If you squint hard enough, you can ignore the optics of a spindly Crow strolling about in his high-waisted jeans and slip into Wood’s bellicose hardass with a vendetta against the long-fanged bloodthirstes.
Gene Siskel put Woods’s performance on his list for the Best Actor Oscar nomination of 1998.
I’d never go that far. But had the film played it quietly, not hyperfocusing on the character, Woods’s performance is ramped up enough that I could buy into his brand of fury.
But Vampires doesn’t do subtle. It’s got one gear, and that’s smacking you in the face.
Take the moment where Crow finishes the nasty work of dismembering the bodies of his former team so they can’t rise again as vampires.
When finished, he drags on yet another cigarette, dramatically drops his Zippo lighter, and walks away from an exploding building (~2:00). Supposedly lesser humans would run the hell away from all that fiery debris, but Crow wiggle-walks outta there.
I distinctly remember this moment on my first watch as a 14-year-old, even then debating whether I could embrace the film’s gaunt posterman of masculinity as an idol.
Then there’s Daniel Baldwin’s Montoya, a pig whose game is just treating everyone like shit.
Even in a moment as benign as checking into a hotel room, he cops a massive attitude to the clerk, swearing at him. It’s bizarre.
And they both make a lot of dumb homophobic sex jokes. Crow beats up Father Adam and asks him if getting knocked about gave him a bit of an erection.
Adam assures Crow of his athleticism by telling him he was captain of the college soccer team, and Crow, on cue, cringes at the word “soccer.” He muses that now they’re genuinely in trouble.
But even if you find the two’s brand of bullying and depraved jokes amusing, we get to where it goes too far.
Crow and Montoya lay a few slaps on Katrina, who they’ve brought along due to her psychic link to Valek.
Maybe the idea is that, in their eyes, because she’s been bitten, she no longer has any human rights. But it’s blatant and pretty damn uncomfortable.
Montoya, left alone with Katrina, ties her up on the bed and duct tapes over her mouth, perhaps so she cannot escape. Fine. But Montoya has taken off all her clothes, a moment you know because the cinematography lingers on a long shot of the bed, Montoya looming over her.
Horror movies have a long history of exploiting women. But it’s a real letdown from Carpenter. Nudity is one thing, but he’s more talented than needing to resort to abuse against women to characterize two misanthropes.
Action? Let’s Edit that Out, -2 Points
After one or two slayings, the opening raid becomes a montage of vampires getting winch-dragged into the sunlight.
Why not make these scenes more drawn out? You’ve got the horror master at the helm. Walk down some dark hallways. Do some jump scares if you have to, but show us more of this harrowing line of work.
And the film incorporates dissolves to transition between scenes, which is fine.
But when Valek gets revenge, ripping through Crow’s team, the film starts dissolving moment-to-moment within the fight, slipping into a slightly surreal haze. Some have said they like the creative choice, but it glosses over the action.
Wish for a Grander Story, -2 Points
Vampires lacks scale, though funding cuts may have played a role.
The movie was set for a $60 million budget, but it was cut to $20 million at the last minute. Carpenter and film executive/screenwriter Michael De Luca reworked some existing scripts into the final product to accommodate the changes.
What you get is a mystery/road trip second act bookended by the opening raid and the final showdown with Valek. It’s functional but a bit lackluster.
Even riding tight purse strings, the film could have taken place in one or fewer settings, similar to Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 (reviewed here). Think one big raid gone wrong on a hefty vampire nest in a New Mexico town. That might have given us more conflict and set pieces between Crow and the bloodsuckers.
Minor Spoiler Here:
It’s a nitpick, but it’s silly that Crow gets taken captive by Valek in part because he’s lost track of time and been caught off-guard as the sun goes down. Of all the rules and protocols of the slayers, cutting out well before nightfall would be number one on that list.
Lackluster Villain, -2 Points
Valek isn’t painted with vampire film cliches; steering away from the tortured soul, living forever isn’t very fun after all, “I vant to suck your blood” themes. And that’s good.
But while he’ll tear you in two, he’s not entertaining. We don’t get to know what he’s about other than surviving. Does he want to enslave humanity? Does he have a grudge against the Catholic church?
He needed something worth his scheme and eventual takedown.
Let’s Not Watch Vampires
Total Arbitrary Points Total: 2 Points
Vampires was John Carpenter’s most commercially successful movie of the 90s, a bright spot in a troubled decade for the filmmaker. And you don’t have to search the internet too deeply to find the film’s fans.
But it’s always divided opinion, and you can understand why.
The film is a beautifully shot blend of western and horror. It has some fun vampire lore and neat production/special effects.
But you must buy into the antics of two brazen, tough guys. The villain could be more compelling, and the fights against the vampires are too few. Worst of all, the movie slips into some misogynistic moments.
So while it has its merits, it’s not my favorite and not recommended viewing.
I wish it was the pulpy-looking movie depicted on its Blu-ray release, more tongue-in-cheek with its misguided protagonists and spending more time walking down the dark, narrow corridors of abandoned farmhouses to find some vampires to drag into the sun.
Carpenter certainly had those capabilities, and if only that direction was taken.
John Carpenter’s Vampires is rated R and was directed by John Carpenter.
You can stream it on Netflix.
You can watch the trailer here.
Disclaimer:
The factual information about the film in this review was gathered through online sources, such as Wikipedia, IMDB, or interviews. Misrepresentations and errors are possible but unintentional.
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