Vampires, Werewolves, the Undead

Well, it's safe for people to come to the house again. We watched "John Carpenter's Vampires" over the weekend and sent the dreadful thing back to Netflix. Philip warned me how awful it was but I think he undersold it.

I find that kinda sad, actually. The plot -- while more or less predictable -- wasn't really all that bad. My feeling is that the blame lies firmly on the shoulders of the screen writer -- I wrote better stuff than that when I was 8.

IMDB tells me that the writer's name is Don Jakoby. Further, it gives me the interesting fact that he is sometimes credited as Michael Edmonds. Seems like somebody has something to hide, perhaps that he's a fucking hack?

Mr. Jakoby-Edmonds' other credits include such screen masterpieces as Blue Thunder, Lifeforce (aka Space Vampires), and Aracnophobia. The telling bit is that Mr. Jakoby-Edmonds -- if there IS such a person -- has a total of 11 writing credits in the past 22 years. One of those is a TV series ( Blue Thunder) based on his prior movie; another is a sequel to one of his scripts ( The Philadelphia Experiment ) where he gets a "characters" credit.

ASIDE: You may or may not remember the Blue Thunder TV series. I happen to have vague recollections of it, as two of my near cousins were way into those redneck/commando TV shows. ( Emergency, Blue Thunder, SWAT, BJ & The Bear etc. etc. not to even mention The Dukes of Hazzard. ) My grandmother had a car, a blue 197x Mercury Maverick (?), that we nicknamed "Blue Thunder" for some stupid reason. I owned it for about a 2 week period in 1985 during which it broke down numerous times (once getting me a parking ticket because I couldn't move it); came down with a flat tire the day before I was supposed to drive a bunch of people to a Dead Kennedys show (an interesting story in and of itself); and, ultimately, died.

Getting back to the point -- the movie was based on a book called "Vampire$" by the unfortunately named John Steakley. Now, it is posible that Steakley is the one to blame. According to the IMDB trivia in his entry: "the film contained much of his dialogue and none of his plot." This would tend to get me to soften my condemnation of Mr. Jakoby-Edmonds somewhat as the dialogue was the worst part of the movie. It's hard to tell if the offending lines belonged to Steakley or Jakoby-Edmonds (who is also sometimes credited as Raymond Luxury-Yacht) without reading the book, something I am not prepared to do.

The IMDB trivia ALSO tells me that the studio cut the budget on the flick by 2/3 just before production began. That could be the cause of the suckitude of the movie -- or it could be the result:

Okay, Bob. You're an extremely expensive movie-biz attorney. How much funding can we cut from this stinker without getting our pants sued off?

Let us not dismiss how truly awful the acting is. I know James Woods is not that bad an actor. Hell, even Daniel Baldwin isn't that bad. (Sheryl Lee I don't know about. Who cares, she's just supposed to be hot and mostly naked.) I have to conclude that they just gave up:

JW: Dan, do you realize how bad this thing is?
DB: Yeah, Jim. I think I'm just gonna stay drunk the whole time. You?

The bottom line is this: I could have made an orders-of-magnitude better movie given that plot and even those actors. Lose the cheezy dialogue, play up the cowboy motif a bit, move things on a little faster with some judicious editing. You end up with a movie that ain't Citizen Kane, but still sucks less than this turd.