Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #164 John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)
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This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
There was a time, not so terribly long ago, it seems, when I had absolutely no idea what James Woods was thinking at any given moment. Oh, what a beautiful, beautiful time that was!
Oh sure, Woods always seemed like a real creep, something that undoubtedly helped him play reprehensible lowlifes, scumbags and deplorable pieces of shit and he always had a pretty scuzzy personal reputation for cradle-robbing.
But it’s one thing to vaguely sense that someone is probably a horrible human being behind the scenes, that in real life they’re every bit as toxic as the monsters they play onscreen. It’s quite another for a public record to exist online saving for posterity every toxic thought and hateful opinion someone might have at the ugliest stage of their life.
That’s James Woods’ Twitter feed. For the last five or six years James Woods has been a Toxic, terrible Trump Twitter Person first and foremost and an increasingly irrelevant, rarely employed actor a very different second.
If Woods were to be cast in a film today, which is a VERY big if, his presence would be distracting. Audiences exhausted by his Twitter presence (which is very exhausting) would look at him and see a notorious real-life asshole at least nominally different than the one Woods would probably be playing.
That said, it’s not as if Woods’ self-outing as an insufferable jackass and Donald Trump super-fan makes his performances as major-league shitbags in movies like Videodrome, Casino and John Carpenter’s Vampires less convincing.
Carpenter of course wanted Kurt Russell, his leading man of choice, for the lead role of Jack Crow, a hard-drinking, hard-living, cigar-smoking professional vampire slayer employed by the Catholic Church to destroy nests of vampires with his crack team, and Bruce Campbell as his loyal second-in-command Montoya. This would be many areas of the Vampires experience in which Carpenter would be horribly disappointed.
On paper, John Carpenter’s Vampires sounds like a can’t miss proposition: a violent, profane, casually heretical, hard-R vampire western from one of horror’s greatest and most distinctive auteurs, a bonkers combination of shit-kicking action thrills and horror mythology.
Vampires should be nothing less than John Carpenter’s Near Dark with the poetry of Kathryn Bigelow’s cult classic replaced by gleeful profanity. Alas, it’s lacking a whole lot more than the lonely lyricism that Bigelow brought to the vampire genre. John Carpenter’s Vampires also lacks mood, style, sensuality, melancholy and unforgettable characters, i.e pretty much everything that makes Near Dark remarkable beyond its macho juxtaposition of western and vampire tropes.
At a certain point, John Carpenter’s Vampires doesn’t even feel like the work of John Carpenter, which is one of its primary draws. I experienced Proustian shivers of excitement when I first heard Carpenter’s signature synthesizers but it did not take long for that excitement to fade and the score to become disconcertingly generic.
The film’s style quickly follows suit. Carpenter had an amazing seventies and eighties but Vampires feels like the rest of his 1990s output (Memoirs of an Invisible Man, In the Mouth of Madness, Village of the Damned and Escape from L.A) in showing incredible potential on paper but ultimately coming up very short.
Vampires at least gets off to a rousing start with Crow and his band of debauched, heartless vampire slayers completely destroying a nest of countrified blood-suckers, then celebrating with one of their signature drunken bacchanals, complete with sex workers, whiskey and bad behavior.
Crow and his manly men are happy because they got to brutally murder a lot of vampires, including women, but disappointed that the nest’s “master” or head vampire, is nowhere to be found.
At the motel where the team’s victory is being celebrated, the missing master shows up in the towering, blood-thirsty form of Jan Valek (C-list action star Thomas Ian Griffith) and literally tears Jack’s team apart.
The ancient, powerful vampire decimates the vamp-busters, leaving behind only Jack and grizzled second in command Montoya (Daniel Baldwin). In Doug Hutchinson’s unspeakably awful memoir/manifesto Flushing Hollywood, he writes about how he’d hit the bars after shooting a film with Daniel Baldwin, and how the larger, lesser Baldwin brother would constantly get mistaken for his more successful brother Alec.
Rather than correct these tipsy young fans, Daniel would instead essentially rasp, “Yep, that’s me. World famous movie star Alec Baldwin. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired! I was married to Kim Basinger and now I want to hook up with you. Now let’s go have sex before either of us sobers up.”
The O.G Squad
Daniel apparently got his role in Vampires through similar means. Alec Baldwin was cast, then left the project but recommended his younger brother, who, in a devastating detail, had to audition for the role because Carpenter was unfamiliar with his work.
If Carpenter had succeeded in getting his first choices of Kurt Russell and Bruce Campbell for the roles of Jack and Montoya they undoubtedly would have succeeded in making the savage vampire killers bastards we can’t help but love.
Woods and Baldwin, on the other hand, just play them as one-note assholes, proud misogynists whose dialogue consists mostly of yelling, “Die, bitch, die!” while driving stakes through the hearts of interchangeable soon-to-be extinguished vampire women.
The dastardly duo kidnap Katrina (Sheryl Lee Ralph), a sex worker who was bit by Jan Valek and consequently has a psychic connection to him that they can exploit to track his movements.
Montoya peppers Katrina with an endless series of misogynistic insults, strips her naked in a cheap hotel room and threatens her repeatedly in a manner that betrays that he would think nothing of killing her but then they kiss at the end. So, in a way, this is a tender romance as well as a movie about men who hate women and aren’t shy about showing it, through profanity as well as indiscriminate slaughter.
Carpenter apparently gave Woods free reign to improvise, which may help explain why his shit-kicking monster murderer is constantly peppering Jan Valek with homophobic insults and asking the unexpectedly white-bread priest they hook up with about whether or not killing the unholy gives him a boner.
Not to be outdone, Montoya at one point rasps, “How do you like your stake, BITCH?!?” while driving a stake through a vampire woman’s heart, which provides a good indication of the level of thought and effort that went into Vampires.
Vampires makes audiences pay for its moderately interesting twist on vampire lore with a never-ending parade of artless exposition. Characters are constantly vomiting forth the film’s rules to each other, then updating us when those rules are broken as Jan Valek approaches his goal of unleashing a plague of day-walking vampires on an unsuspecting world.
Woods has one of those tedious monologues early on where he insists that real life vampire hunting is nothing like what you see in bullshit Hollywood movies.
All that lore? Fucking nonsense. Vampires don’t care about garlic or rosaries. No, in reality, the only thing that can destroy a vampire is sunlight and a stake through the heart, which you might recognize as pretty much the core of traditional vampire lore.
Look behind you! And up! It’s a vampire-man!
The budget for Vampires was slashed at the last minute so much of the second half of the movie is filmed in near-darkness, as a way of hiding the surprising cheapness of the monster make-up and vampire effects rather than as a deliberate stylistic choice.
I have now seen John Carpenter’s Vampires twice, in the theaters when it came out and for this column yet my strongest and fondest memory of it has nothing to do with the movie itself.
No, what I remember most about this hopelessly disappointing muddle is that Jon Bon Jovi starred in the direct to video sequel and when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog roasted Bon Jovi and its frontman on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, the puppet joked that it was great that Bon Jovi was making a vampire movie because he finally had “a role that REQUIRES you to suck!”
Just thinking of the way Triumph pronounces “REQUIRES” brings me infinitely more joy than the colossally disappointing John Carpenter’s Vampires does in its entirety.
John Carpenter’s Vampires promises to be badass. Instead it’s merely bad.
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