31 Days of Halloween: The vampires of 1998
John Carpenter’s vampires are certainly a different breed. Some of them have just have the right amount of cleavage ALL of the time and others wear shades just to make sure we know how cool they are. If you thought BLADE or UNDERWORLD were stylish movies, you should see this one, but I guess that was the thing back in the day, following a formula used by similiar movies around that time, like From Dusk til Dawn. I’ve always seen only parts and certain scenes from this movie, usually the ones where James Woods is strutting around like a badass. That was back when we only had VHS and I never actually saw this movie all the way through. This movie is about stylish humans battling stylish vampires who often explode like fireworks. Hoo boy. Watching them go up is really something.
Jack (James Woods) forms a crack commando unit to track down a master vampire. Most of his team is killed at Jack’s rave dance party or something, but he rescues his pal Katrina from the master vampire after he sex attacks her. Woods uses this connection between Katrina and The Master to track him down because killing a master can take out a lot of goons all at once. The Catholic Church arrives on scene and sponors this mercenary outfit (or what’s left of it). The lesser Balwin brother joins Jack and Katrina and the team immediately kicks off their mission.
The effects are all practical and the shadows are all real. Carpenter loves his shadowy backgrounds, that’s for sure, and it’s easy to do with everything set to candlelight or practically in the dark. Carpenter also did the score for this movie, like he’s done for his others, and it works well. Most of the characters are really bad 90s stereotypes, like the type of brooding idiot you’ll find plastered all over the decade. Sheryl Lee’s character is a hooker or former hooker or something like that, and the other Baldwin brother isn’t very nice to her until late in the movie when it’s too late to really develop his character. “You’re the bait, honey,” the Baldwin brother says to her, making the plan pretty clear to everybody watching. Later, he grudgingly accepts her,
Most of the characters follow this pattern, where they’re not nice most of the time, with a few splashes of sarcasm played off as charm. James Woods really has a terrible time leading the movie as a protagonist because his character is just a typical jerk. He later gets bandaged up and soiled as he’s thrown around by the vampires, because these guys are really hard to kill and Jack is really grumpy about it. The vampires take more punishment than my 1986 Ford Tempo. That was my first car.
Overall, this is a good movie with interesting characters but there are a lot of 90s stereotypes and dumb cliches. Everyone looks like they only got a few hours sleep. Everyone walks cool or wears cool leather jackets. There’s a Western vibe to it, as Jack, the Baldwin brother and the hooker get on the road, and have to hunt some vampires. There’s plenty of blood and gore in these set pieces, as the team fights their way through the story for the most part. The worst part of the movie is the pacing, as the first half is full of too much dialogue, discussion, and the banter has a touch of crude humor. The laughs are few and far between though, making even the Underworld series looks like a Mel Brooks movie by comparison. That charm we see so rarely from the other Baldwin brother could have been the spark needed to make the dialogue more interesting if it were more common, but there are just so many dry and serious scenes, many more than just a little more humor would help. It’s just better on my nerves to watch Escape From New York again.
