Tattooed Vampire

Back in her early 20th Century day Oriana Balasz, an underground movie icon, was quite the spanker, what with her deviant behavior and excesses of the flesh. A publishing company wants the rights to all her works, including the film she never released, which promised to be more shocking, even by today’s standards. I don’t know; the bar on shocking is set pretty high. But what the heck — I say go for it.

A publicist travels to Oriana’s Spanish mansion to sink the deal with her heirs. That’s when Snake Woman shows up, a sort of punk rock biker chick with no clothes, vampire fangs and a snake tattoo that goes all the way around her body and across her butt region.

The “shocking” love scenes in Snakewoman (2005) are overlong and about as sexy as cardboard. And what is it with European chicks and the unshaved armpit thing? That’s more scary than anything else in this “erotic thriller.” Boring excuse for owning a TV.

Turkish Dracula

1953’s Drakula İstanbul’da — painstakingly translated to Dracula in Istanbul, paints the Prince of Darkness in humorless hues. (Actually, the movie is in black and white, but Dracula was/is a pretty colorful guy.) This Turkish Dracula is balding, has crayon tip fangs pointing opposite directions, and is only interested in real estate deals and juicing your neck.

Drakula İstanbul’da is a re-vamping (heh) of the 1928 novel Kazıklı Voyvoda (Impaler Voivode). And that book was a near photocopied translation of Bram Stoker’s novel that brought Dracula into the mainstream. Only difference is the Mina character is a stripper (um, I mean “showgirl”) and Dracula boot lick Renfield is nowhere to be found. (He’s probably in some basement eating the life force of bugs.)

Drakula is hungry and his feeding techniques look more like he’s leaning in to tell you a bawdy joke rather than a perforation. His target is two young ladies, one of whom has a mysterious secret: sleepwalking. Scary, but assured it’ll go away once she’s married. (Heard that doesn’t work with uncontrollable flatulence.)

Drakula is hunted down in a long and boring process (the only chills would be if you watched this in the Antarctica with the windows open), and dispatched with a medium rare stake through the heart as applied with a rock. Time to take down the anti-Drakula decorations — all garlic must go. “But I use it to cook with,” says Mina, who protests she won’t be able to make her eggplant recipe without it. (No person in their right mind would eat that crap anyway, so better to just move on to mac ’n cheese and give up this eggplant madness and schemes.)

Dracula isn’t the only intellectual property grave Istanbul has robbed. Superman, Flash Gordon, Zorro, Captain America, Batman, Tarzan, Satan and Spider-Man (as a green-suited criminal) have all been given a Turkish bath, and look like they were dressed in clothes their moms made them. Final note: You haven’t any idea of what Istanbul is all about until you’ve seen Turkish Batman cavort with ladies of burlesque.

P.S. For some prime hardcore Turkish horror action, check out Baskin (2015), wherein four cops enter the foyer of Hell when they happen upon a Black Mass in an abandoned building. Hope you have a strong stomach. Otherwise it’s recycled eggplant time.

Vampires, Lobsters and Dinosaurs

The Italian made Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970) might possibly be the all time WTF horror/sci-fi movies ever made. You can start with its numerous re-titlings, from 7 per L’Infinito Contro I Missili Spaziali (translation: 7 For The Infinite Space Against Missiles), to Space Mission to the Lost Planet, Vampire Men of the Lost Planet and The Flesh Creatures. I honestly can’t decide which one I like best.

Then there are the movie’s “everything but the kitchen sink” elements: vampires, cavemen, dinosaurs, UFOs, space rockets, lobster people, flying bat people, snake men, missiles, spears, lasers, bow and arrows, hatchets, supermodel cave girls and the highly-convincing (ahem) Spectrum radiation that keeps turning the “atmosphere” from orange to green. Yep, you guessed it – Horror of the Blood Monsters is actually a Grateful Dead hippie drug party.

The movie begins with gangs of vampires attacking citizens at night, sucking their blood or “sangue” from throats as if artificially-flavored cherry milkshakes. Then the movie abruptly shifts to outer space and a mission to a distant galaxy to discover the source of the vampire plague being a pain in the neck to us Earthers.

A shiny spinning UFO mothership dispatches a smaller less shiny UFO landing party to the mysterious planet below. And it’s here they find an ongoing war between vampire cavemen with candy cigarette sized/shaped fangs violently beating and stabbing a non-vampire tribe.

Everyone wears animal skins for performance boxer briefs (or “britches”) except for a super hot cave chick sporting an off-the-rack open shoulder ensemble with matching panties or “smoothing hi-cut briefs.” Meanwhile, up in space, rocket ships and the UFOs are shooting armed missiles at each other. I don’t know why.

Watched this one without sub-titles (free on YouTube™) and was unable to learn the entire Italian language during its 80 minute running time. Figured it couldn’t be that hard. But as supremely dumb as this movie is (the cavemen fight scenes were spliced in, taken from the 1965 Filipino movie, Tagani and other monster stock footage was also wedged in there), you can’t help but entertained by the lobster people with pain-inflicting pinchers and the mini bat people that live in caves and fly right at your face when you spelunk their caves.

Repeating scenes of the spaceships exploding and then reversing the footage to re-use again and again kinda wears you out. So does waiting for the hot cave chick to remove her top because it’s so hot on that irradiated planet. And was the mission to find out the source of the blood plague (brought to Earth by the Tubaton, vampire men from a distant galaxy) a success? For our sake I’d like to think yes. But man, I just don’t know.

Artificial Werewolves

Always up for a new werewolf movie, but after watching the trailer for the poorly titled Dark Moon Rising (releasing August 4, 2015), I have some reservations. First, the plot…

“A group of shape-shifting werewolves descend upon a small town in search of a girl who is re-born once every 2,000 years. She holds the key to their survival, and all will die who stand in their way.”

Seems reasonable enough. But digital werewolves are not my flea bag. Something about artificial hair and fangs just ain’t cool, man. Even though they self-proclaim Dark Moon Rising as “An American Werewolf in London takes a bite out of Near Dark in this bloody, unique take on The Wolfman legend,” computer generated monsters are suck-o.

P.S. There was another werewolf movie called Dark Moon Rising that came out in 2009. You’d think the filmmakers of the 2015 version would’ve done a bit of homework. But hey, Hollywood – birthplace of the copy machine.

The upcoming Dreadtime Stories anthology shows more promise, and even sports a werewolf in one of its 10 (!) stories. I watched the trailer; Now that’s some quality fur and fang action. Here’s an overview…

“A party turns bizarre when a malevolent book makes its way into the hands of the attendees who reveal its tales of monsters, madmen and the supernatural…”

Dreadtime Stories features more than 50 cast members, the bulk of which we can only hope will suffer painful and splattery fates for our entertainment. But we’re gonna have to wait a bit to experience the mayhem as Dreadtime Stories isn’t slated to come out until early 2016.

That sucks. Heck, by then I could be converted into a religious nutcase, renounce all my horror movie ways and quit drinking refreshing adult beverages. Just kidding. Not gonna happen. If it did, that would be the scariest horror story of all time.

Free-Love Vampire

Several things you need to know before you watch Female Vampire (1973). First, there is a LOT of naked nudity. Front, back, upside down, sideways, rolling around, perpendicular… Secondly, it’s sub-titled. But when you have that much sex and naked stuff, sub-titles seem more or less an annoyance.

Female Vampire is a European horror film about Countess Irina von Karlstein, a young and eerily attractive, fang-less descendant of a family of vampires, who, unable to speak (not with her mouth full all the time), goes around having unsafe sex with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Just so you know, it’s not blood that sustains her. Use some imagineering here.

And since this is the ‘70s and in Europe, there is an abundance of body hair, all of which is zoomed in on – sometimes uncomfortably close. Which reminds me, I should probably mow the lawn and trim those bushy hedges.

There’s a plot, but it only gets paid lip service as Irina pays a lot of lip service on her victims and spends most of the movie wearing nothing but a leather belt, knee-high leather boots and a cape. In case she gets cold. I don’t see how as she’s so hot. Heh.

Unlike Irina, all bases are covered: girl on guy, guy on girl, girl on girl, girl on bed post, girl on bed pillow, girl on bath tub… There’s even an S&M scene thrown in there to make it more continental.

Female Vampire comes in several varieties/titles: The Bare Breasted Countess, in both hard R-rated and X-rated versions. Regardless, you could say this movie sucks. But that’s the point, is it not?

P.S. Female Vampire is available for streaming on Netflix™. You’re welcome.

Vampire Town

Originally a four-part mini-series on television (or “TV”), this thorough 2004 remake fleshes out Stephen King’s best-selling novel about a small town plagued by a vampire and punches the corny 1979 Salem’s Lot right in the neck.

Four hours long, the story begins with published author Ben Mears (Rob Lowe) returning home to Jerusalem’s Lot to do a book on the feared Marsden House, where as a kid on a dare, he witnessed several murders and was scared so bad he loaded his metaphorical pants. Ben wanted to rent the decrepit huge mansion up on the hill overlooking the town, but a vampire signed the lease first. (Probably with a pen filled with blood.) Very convenient having Ben and the vampire show up at the same time.

Soon several school kids turn up missing. Then several townsfolk. Then the whole dang community is one zip code away from becoming Vampire Town. (I could’ve used the word “City” or “Ville,” but I stick by my first choice.)

With four hours to kill (sorry) the movie really gets a chance to define King’s well-crafted characters, although they all talk like they were reading directly from his book. When it happens, the vampire stuff is kinda cheese ball (the garish display of fangs, the hissing of breath like a punctured water bed, screaming like a little girl when impaled with a wooden stake).

This is a rare instance where the story is better than the monster. Several scenes, though, are pretty cool, including the creepy vampire kids on the school bus and a housewife’s dead body coming back to life in the morgue. (Thankfully someone had the frame of mind to construct a crucifix out of tongue depressors or there could’ve been big trouble.)

The best line comes after the vampire (Rutger Hauer) convinces a priest to renounce his faith. When the defrocked dude asks him, “Is there a God?” Hauer replies, “Only the God that feeds you,” and makes the past pastor drink his vamp-y blood. Cool.

Decent horror, great story and a “ville” full of bloodsuckers. I’d move there. In the daylight, though, because hey, vampires.

P.S. The vampire in the 1979 movie was/is way cooler than the 2004 version vampire. This tooth is evident Heh.