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Project Vampire
Celine Dion IS Sandra Jenson
1993
Review: April 1, 2006
Director: Peter Flynn
Starring: Myron Natwick, Brian Knudson, Mary Louise Gemmil, Christopher Cho, Paula Randol-Smith
A must.
THE SETUP:
Evil Austrian is running a program to make everyone into vampires… for no discernable reason.
DISCUSSION:
This movie comes as part of the Ancient Evil boxed set, one of those 10-movies-for-$20 bargain sets that also includes The Sadist and The Killing Kind, and as such is already a total value. I had started to watch this movie a while ago, but didn’t make it all the way through, so I set about to make it through the whole thing.
It begins very well with three guys in lab coats running through an urban tunnel. They just run and run, and already there’s this ‘what are they running from?’ interest. Then we see a limousine is following them, and they dispatch a thug to round the fellows up. There’s a big, low-budget fight, and the thug gets a five-foot wooden stake through the heart. Only, a second later another guy rips it out, and the staked fellow gets up and keeps after our runaways. Eventually one of them is caught, and the other two escape.
Our hero is rescued by Sandra Jensen, who is a nurse that looks awfully like Celine Dion [and Natascha McElhone of Solaris fame]. It is hard to tell if she knows this guy or is just a kindly Samaritan, but she drives him somewhere, and he leaves this syringe [it’s a clue, Scooby!] in the back of her van.
Our hero [I forget his name, I need to remember to write down names] goes to a church, where he gives a confession, leading to this enormously overwrought Omen-like religious scene in which we are hearing apocalyptic choral music while the guys recite from the bible in portentous tones—and it goes on For Ever. There’s a whole lot else going on during this time, so much so that I can’t even hope to explain it here, which I ascribe in part to the fact that I really couldn’t follow it. But it’s ominous, that much I can say with confidence.
Anyway, by now we have surmised that both the escapees and the thugs are vampires. It would seem that the lab they are escaping from is the headquarters of Project Alpha [dudes, come now, think of a better name], wherein the evil Austrian [evil genius doctors MUST be Austrian] Dr. Frederick and his lovely co-Austrian assistant Heidi are turning people into vampires. The reasons they are doing this are hard to ascertain, but we are later told that “all the trendy people think it’s a way to extend your life.” Yes, before there was Botox, there was vampirism. But Dr. Frederick also seems interested in world-taking-over activities, though we are never quite clear on WHY he wants to do this. That is, aside from the simple ego rush of having taken over the world. Whatever, sounds like a lot of work to me.
Soon we find out that the serum [one of many serums] allows vampires to walk in the sunlight. Then follows a hilarious scene in which Dr. Frederick asks the wholesome Sandra Jensen to come work for Project Alpha, while Heidi stands next to him, running her hands over her hair and preening orgasmically. What, is she implying that if Sandra signs up for Project Alpha that she can look forward to lots of hot girl-on-girl action? I wouldn’t count on it, Heidi, Sandra looks pretty vanilla to me.
However, I guess I would be wrong, as we find out in the next scene. Sandra, having only met hero dude once, wherein she found him lying prostrate in the street, suddenly finds that he has invaded her home in the middle of the night and awakened her by holding her down with his hand over her mouth. This apparently awakens both her consciousness— and her desire— as she soon afterward throws herself into a passionate kiss with the guy [suffice to say, Sandra’s days as a feminist icon are probably going to be sadly limited]. This is ludicrous enough, but then no sooner have they broken off their kiss when thugs burst into the house and drug Sandra while the hero has a massive fight in the kitchen! I tell you, this thing is a surprise a minute.
Then, on their way to escape, Sandra is shot up with the SuperSerum®, which is the first step in turning her into a vampire. She’s bummed. We are told that the extent to which this happens depends on the extent to which she believes in God; “It’s a matter of faith, baby.” This last line was, I think, an attempt to have sort of cool, blithe dialogue. There follows a long car chase [you know, there’s just something so compelling about watching footage shot straight out of the front window of a car driving at night], and then they get out and end up in the back of a cab. We now have a character-building moment where Sandra divulges that she’s adopted, and a lot of her childhood trauma, while their bearded longhair cab driver is shown, in several intercut shots, seemingly thinking “Jesus Christ, chicks that blab this much about their sad personal tragedies make me go a big rubbery one.”
We then cut to a swingin’ party—always a positive sign—where we find the other escapee vampire from the beginning, who, as we’ve seen in the past, is a horny little bugger. He looks at this woman and in like 10 seconds she’s running off down the hall to the bedroom. Now, I know that women can make their own choices about what to do with their own bodies, and I know that we wouldn’t think the same thing about a man who goes off to fuck someone after a mere 10 seconds. I’m just… observing that she makes up her mind a lot more quickly than perhaps most women would. In any case, my straight friends get some tit, and a second later she’s dead.
Sandra Jensen and the hero [Victor. I looked it up] go over to the apartment of this Asian in unnervingly tight pants, who has one of those “database” things that apparently seemed plausible in 1993, in which they feed the novel Dracula [and all the shitty movie versions?] and every single bit of vampire lore from literature and TV and film and comics and reality TV into the computer and it apparently analyzes it and synthesizes it to be able to give you answers to your most pressing vampire questions. I just LOVE the whole air of optimistic hope for the future when it was presumed that some graduate student somewhere had a computer that could do such a thing [it’s a little like the gee-whiz over-belief in computer’s power as embodied by Weird Science]. At one point the computer prompts Victor to ask a question, and THE IDIOT types in “I don’t even know what to ask,” at which point you want the computer to say “Well then wait until you have an actual question, fuck knob, I do not need to hear every single thought that pops into your moronic head.”
So while the Asian in the tight pants is out, Victor and Sandra Jensen make SENSUOUS love in his bed, which seemed rather rude to me. Are they going to wash those sheets? The whole thing gets EVEN MORE random around this point, so you’ll just have to accept what happens and not look for sense to be made. We see Dr. Frederick and Heidi hanging out in their underground lair, which they sensibly illuminate with a ultraviolet lighting scheme. Dr. Frederick has these rings which go around him which electrify him, and we later—in one of the fair amount of genuinely cool things about the movie—are made up of about a thousand little syringes, shooting him with vampire serum. Then the playboy vampire and some other guy get a convertible and pick up these two floozies by offering them coke [not the cola], and things end up as expected. Around this time we are supposed to understand that vampires are kind of taking over L.A., which still doesn’t diminish the shock of seeing a drag queen in a white wig walking on the beach at night with an enormous crucifix and shouting “Repent! Repent!” Then these TOTALLY RANDOM people, who I don’t even think we’ve seen in the movie before, walk into a room and start having sex! I guess anything to get one more tit in there. Then this guy with an eye patch gets his big scene, which he totally blows by being super overdramatic, and soon enough the movie ends. Incredibly, they set up for a sequel! That kind of optimism is SO charming. In fact. I’m sure that the writer/director saved his best ideas for the sequel, knowing that he’d get a huge budget and loads of goodwill based on the anticipated “unexpected success” of this. It’s charming, and a little heartbreaking in being SO close to home.
Overall, I liked it. It’s poorly done, to be sure, but I enjoyed pretty much every moment. It has some very cool ideas, and with a decent budget and production I’m sure it could have fairly well, it’s just that they overloaded it with said ideas and it started to be so much it’s impossible to follow… aside from the fact that the mythology gets very muddled and we never really know what the ultimate goal of the evil Dr. Frederick’s plan is. And then it just all becomes too random. This is writer / director Peter Flynn’s only movie [he continues to work in construction and set design on movies], and while it’s too bad it didn’t pan out, he put out a movie that has a lot of cool aspects, is better than most crappy movies, and, you know—dude made a movie! It’s more than I’ve done.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
You have to understand it is VERY low budget and ultimately not that great, but it has a lot of cool ideas and is definitely entertaining throughout. I say yes.
RELATED MOVIES
The budget Ancient Evil boxed set contains 10 movies for a low, low price, including:
THE KILLING KIND, a fucked-up movie about a rapist and his mother, whom he shares a creepily close relationship with.
THE SADIST, in which a redneck goon tortures three upstanding citizens for 90 straight minutes, and you know, I kind of liked it.
