Project Vampire (1992)

Horror and Action movies love to open in media res.  That’s smart.  It instantly draws the audience in with the mystery of what the hell is going on, and it gives the filmmakers some breathing space to develop their characters and stories.  One of the great clichés of this type of opening is to have characters running away from someone or something, and Peter Flynn’s Project Vampire is no different.  Three scientists (we know they are scientists because they all wear bright white lab coats, all the better to hide from their pursuers) jog down various streets in Los Angeles (remember, always pronounce “Angeles” with a hard “g,” like in “gator”).  Invariably, these sequences end with the hunters catching up with their prey.  Of these particular three, one gets killed, one escapes and becomes villainous, and one gets picked up by student nurse Sandra (Mary Louise Gemmill) and, by default, becomes the hero of the film.  Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have her rescue the one who goes bad?  At any rate, the opening of this movie does enough of what it needs to do.  We get a quick feel for the timbre of the film, we are introduced to most of the main players (including the cartoonishly colorful henchmen Hopper [Kelvin Tsao] and Louie [Ray Essler], who, tragically, is not “the guy who comes in and says his catch phrase over and over again”), and we get interested enough to give the film some more time to win us over.  Project Vampire could have been given a hundred years to win us over, and it still would fail miserably.

As to the plot, it involves the flagitious Dr. Frederick Klaus (Myron Natwick), an ancient vampire who has created a serum by which he can psychically control the vampires he creates.  Former fellow scientist Victor (he of the white lab coat and introductory trot to freedom, played by Brian Knudson) sets out to stop him.

Science and the supernatural have gone hand-in-hand ever since Dr. Frankenstein stitched together pieces from a bunch of corpses and imbued it with life.  What’s wonderful about this idea is that it has the opportunity to expand on a legend and give it a new spin, a new vantage point.  That doesn’t mean modernizing hoary stuff, per se.  After all, the classic Universal monster movies were set in contemporary times, but they still clung tenaciously to the old school, gothic atmosphere from which the base legends sprang.  What I like is things like Event Horizon which is basically a haunted house story set on a spaceship that has a literal gateway to Hell on it.  Brilliant.  Project Vampire has scientific elements in it, but there’s not much thought put into them.  The biggest leap this film takes is in expanding drastically on a vampire’s ability to control the minds of others.  That’s fine and dandy, but it also does so with no real explanation of how this works to begin with.  It doesn’t ground Klaus’ supernatural powers in the real world (even with a bunch of techno-jargon).  All it does is puts Klaus in some medieval-esque piece of equipment (I immediately thought of all the old horror films where naked women are held captive in some mad scientist’s lab with straps just large enough, and strategically placed, to not show us any of their naughty bits) that makes him “vamp out.”  Flynn and company, in fact, go so far as having bio-chemist Lee Fong (Christopher Cho) ask his computer, “What is a vampire’s most powerful strength?”  The thuddingly stupid response is, of course, “His psychic spell.  Destroy the vampire, destroy the spell.”  In terms of scientific breakthroughs, this ranks up there with Timmy Spudwell’s vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano experiments and Amanda Hugginkiss’ famous potato clock revolution.  Naturally, films like this don’t need to use real, hard scientific data to back up their ideas, but they do need to be convincing with what they serve up.  Project Vampire is simply dumb and confusing.  I re-watched segments of this film multiple times to try and make sense of what these people were saying, and all I did was further bewilder myself.  Would I have been more forgiving if this were a Eurohorror film, where I expect idiocy in its rationales?  Possibly, but I would have been no less nonplussed.

One of the more intriguing things this film gets up to and almost develops satisfyingly is its idea of eternal life and addiction.  This stems, primarily, from the core of the vampire mythos.  It’s not just that they need blood to survive.  They crave it.  It both enflames their passions and sates them.  Their fangs, like, say, hypodermic needles, pierce the veins of their victims.  Their victims, then, become like junkies, lusting for the return of those teeth to their skin, chasing the proverbial dragon.  Tom (Christopher Wolf) goes to a pal’s party, specifically looking for a blood meal.  He finds one in a woman he drags into the bathroom and begins to make out with before putting the bite on her.  Alongside the obvious sexual angle, I found myself thinking (perhaps in a severe bout of thematic overreach) of people sneaking off to go snort some coke.  In this scenario, Tom’s victim would be the coke.  In the film, it’s intimated that Lee used to make drugs for wealthy clients (I may have imagined this; so much of this film is nebulous even when it’s being blunt as fuck).  Klaus provides his Project Alpha serum to the wealthy elite who want eternal life, which is injected.  The price of this lifespan is their thrall to Klaus and his drug, especially once Klaus chooses to exert his psychic abilities over them.  Klaus is the pusher, long life is the drug, loss of identity is the come down/price of addiction.

Even in trash cinema, there should be something to not make you want to take a nap.  The thing which comes possibly closest to that herein is the henchmen, Hopper and Louie.  Louie is the Renfield character.  He limps, wears an eyepatch and a white-on-black suit, and grovels ceaselessly.  Hopper is a bald chunk of meat with a sadistic streak, a Kurgan who burns in the sun’s rays.  Their old married couple routine is almost entertaining.  Otherwise, the film’s leads have absolutely zero chemistry (see what I did there?).  Klaus and his mistress Heidi (Paula Randol-Smith) are as threatening as a comfy chair.  Lee has one of the worst “Oriental” accents ever put to film.  The script is terrible, muddled, and rote.  There isn’t nearly enough action, tits, or gore to paper over the film’s flaws.  It is painful to watch, not just in experience but in cinematography.  It looks bad.  I can see now who the filmmakers were targeting this film toward, because you would clearly need to be on a ton of bad drugs to enjoy it.

MVT:  Hopper is just an oddball.

Make or Break:  There’s a decent burn stunt at the film’s climax.  Credit where it’s due.

Score:  3/10 

Headhunter (1988)

Surely, I’ve mentioned before that my favorite episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker is “Horror in the Heights.”  The story centers on a rakshasa, a Hindu demon who appears to its victims as the person they most trust before ripping them to shreds, and it was written by Jimmy Sangster (screenwriter for such Hammer classics as Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein).  The story works because (A) the monster is unique, especially for American television, both then and now, (B) there are enough murders and interactions with solid character actors (Phil Silvers, Murray Matheson, and so on) to keep the pace up, and (C) Kolchak, as played by Darren McGavin, is an interesting, colorful guy whom we want to follow, and we learn a little something about him in this episode that fleshes him out just a little bit more.  The rakshasa costume isn’t anything great, basically a stocky guy in a hairy suit, but I love it because I have an affinity for hirsute monsters (King Kong, Alpha Flight’s Sasquatch, etcetera).  The villain in Francis Schaeffer’s Headhunter is also a shapeshifter, and the film had (I’m assuming) a larger budget than any given number of episodes of Kolchak.  However, it also suffers from a terrible script and a lead performance that is, at its best, grating.  Plus, the only hair on the monster is its quasi-skullet.

A Nigerian demon named Chikati Tumo (I could find no reference to him as part of any mythology/religion, so I’m guessing screenwriter Len Spinnell made him up, but you never know) immigrates to America to kill people who don’t believe in him (he is going to be very, very busy, and let’s just never mind that killing everyone diminishes your pool of worshippers).  Hot on his trail is Detective Pete Giuliani (Wayne Crawford) and Pete’s partner Kat Hall (Kay Lenz, who almost convinced me she wasn’t embarrassed to be in this).  And that’s about it. 

This film is not, sad to say, an adaptation of the 1984 novel of the same title written by Michael Slade (actually the pseudonym for a collective of writers).  That book also concerned a serial killer, and it had some supernatural elements and a police procedural aspect, but, even clocking in at over four hundred pages, it is likely better paced than this film (full disclosure: I haven’t read the book, but from the reviews of it I’ve seen, it has to be better than this movie; HAS TO).  To give you an idea of how scattershot and oblivious to the need for story flow Headhunter is, I’ll describe some of its longer passages (hopefully, you’ll be as bored by this as I was watching it).  After a brief introduction in Nigeria, we’re introduced to our main characters as a drunk Pete breaks into Kat’s place, busting up her nookie with boyfriend Roger (John Fatooh).  Pete’s wife has taken up with her girlfriend, and we get a nice, long scene of the two of them bickering while Pete packs his shit and moves out.  From the very start, the filmmakers show that they’re less interested in the genre facets of the film, as the emphasis on this situation proves, despite the fact that we won’t see Pete’s wife again until the film is almost over (and still I wanted to knock their heads together).  This plot thread carries over into the police station, where Pete whines and moans, and Kat puts up with him like a real trooper.  There are also plenty of scenes where, alternately, Pete ponders why he and Kat never fooled around and/or he plays third wheel to Kat and Roger’s love life.  Did I mention this film is about a demon who beheads people?   

Next, setpiece scenes work when there is a sense of momentum building to a solid payoff.  That is their raison d’etre.  The central setpiece in this film consists of Kat and Pete wandering around a trainyard for what feels like a good third of the entire runtime.  And it’s all for nothing.  By “nothing,” I mean, we learn nothing, it leads to nothing, and nothing even remotely worthwhile occurs during the whole sequence.  At one point in the film, Pete spots Sam (Sam Williams), who they’ve talked to about Chikati Tumo, and he suddenly treats Sam like a suspect for absolutely no reason.  Pete chases Sam through a meat plant before getting chucked (get it?) out a window and into a dumpster (the sight of Pete soiled with dumpster meat juice is an apt visual metaphor both for the character and the movie).  A very small section of the film focuses on the actual murders, but they all feel the same, and they’re all edited confusingly.  Not good for a film sold on the premise of a demon who chops the heads off people, but I’m pretty sure I mentioned that, already.

Pete, as the lead character, spends the whole film in one of two modes.  Half the time, he’s engaged in miserable self-pity which leads to no self-realization or character growth.  It’s just a whine-a-thon.  The other half of the time, he’s screaming at everyone around him.  Sure, the two can be seen as being interrelated, but neither is played with enough nuance (or any nuance at all) to do anything but alienate the audience.  While a fellow cop goes on and on about sexual conquests, Pete opines, “What happened to romance?”  At one point, he barges into a hardware store, frantically searching for anything to use as a weapon.  An understandably concerned store associate tries to help him, and Pete shrieks (I am not making this up), “I want…SOMETHING!  SHUT UP!”  Crawford’s performance is the type that makes one want to reach into the screen for the sole purpose of throttling the living shit out of his character.  He plays every single moment like he was the amp head in This is Spinal Tap (although, arguably, Crawford may, in fact, go up to twelve).  Lenz, by contrast, does her level best to be a professional, though it’s just not enough to save the film.  Nevertheless, it’s baffling that her character would put up with a guy like Pete for too long before shooting him in a non-vital organ (maybe she knows it would just give him something else to bitch about).

Headhunter leans heavily on other films, but it also doesn’t build on them at all, or try to make the references into something of its own, or do them all that well.  There is a scene where a Pentecostal pastor is baptizing a Nigerian woman in a pond.  Chikati’s machete appears in the water and moves in like the Great White from JAWS (thank God, Schaeffer didn’t do anything to the John Williams score).  When he strikes, the pastor loses his mind in a flurry of cursing and running.  I suppose this was meant to be funny.  It isn’t.  It’s dumb.  Whenever the demon strikes, it is heralded by hurricane winds and a dense fog.  The camera takes on the monster’s POV, but it’s nothing more than Evil Dead’s Raimi-Cam, just poorly executed.  The filmmakers also decided, inexplicably, to intercut scenes from 1959’s The Hideous Sun Demon into this film as it plays on a nearby television.  I can only guess that the reason for this is because both films deal with “demons,” though one is literal and the other is not.  What I do know to a certainty is that you should never include in your film scenes from another film which is infinitely better than yours.  Especially when that film is junk, too.

MVT:  The concept is okay, but it would be done, in a manner of speaking, far, far better in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil some four years later.  Go watch that film, instead.

Make or Break:  The domestic squabble that opens the film is just brutal and a solid sign of things to come.

Score:  2/10        

Demon City Shinjuku (1988)

The evil-looking Rebi Ra (Kiyoshi Kobayashi) proves that you can judge a book by its cover when he fights the heavily bearded Genichiro (Banjo Ginga) atop a building in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo.  Genichiro’s Nenpo (which I assume is not to be confused with Ninpo, the martial art of the Ninja, as Nenpo deals with controlling and channeling one’s chi) and his wooden sword are no match for Rebi Ra’s demon sword and magical powers (one of which includes regeneration, which Genichiro also fails at as two of his limbs are hacked off), and the bad guy causes an earthquake which rends Shinjuku in half and unleashes demons into the sector.  Ten years on, Genichiro’s son Kiyoya (Hideyuki Hori) is conscripted into the struggle between good and evil when Sayaka (Hiromi Tsuru), the daughter of the Federation President who has been attacked by Rebi Ra’s forces, approaches Kiyoya, and he falls in love, or lust, or something.

Yoshiaki Kowajiri’s Demon City Shinjuku (aka Makaitoshi Shinjuku aka Hell City Shinjuku aka Monster City) is an anime loaded with monsters, shit-talking characters, virginally innocent victim women, mystical powers, and lots of action.  So, basically, an anime from the late Eighties.  There is all manner of gruesome creatures, but the key difference between this and something like Kawajiri’s Wicked City is that the monsters here are external.  No human characters explode from some vile beastie escaping its human meat cage.  Also, it moves along at a nice clip, and it is focused on its main narrative (in other words, you can pretty much make sense of it from beginning to end as a single piece).  

One of the points of the film is the old saw about absolute power corrupting absolutely.  Rebi Ra is given power, and it not only corrupts him to the core but it also corrupts Shinjuku.  Rebi Ra’s consolidation of power leaves the area in ruins (why monsters wouldn’t want to live in a nice house is beyond me), like a nuclear bomb producing a postapocalyptic wasteland, just without the bomb.  This corruption attracts, of course, the worst elements of humanity.  The people who walk the streets are vile, manic punks (and again, why they would want to live here instead of leaving via the extremely convenient and unguarded bridge is half-mysterious; in this Shinjuku, there is no law to stop them doing whatever they wish).  When Sayaka approaches a man to lead her to Rebi Ra (in what is one of the clearest indications of both her naivete and the writer’s [Kaori Okamura, based on the book[s] by Hideyuki Kikuchi] desire to get the viewer’s blood pumping with some threats/dress tearing), he and his hysterically cackling cohorts corner her in an alley.  No locals are around to help her, and we know none would, anyway.  The park at the initial quake’s epicenter has been transformed into a purgatory for orphaned kids who have been turned into fire demons.  Below the streets, Chibi (Kyoko Tongu), the rollerskating, opportunistic youngster hides, doing what he needs to survive.  He’s a friend to Kiyoya and Sayaka in as much as they’re human and won’t kill him, and he gets monetary recompense for his troubles.  Chibi knows the new Shinjuku, but he doesn’t participate directly with it, so he’s not totally corrupted by it. 

In this same way, there is a less developed (but still visible) theme about technology and its effects on people in opposition to “the old ways.”  All I know about the actual Shinjuku is that it’s a big commercial area where a lot of businesses are headquartered, so I can’t say if the decision to set the demon city there has to do with the idea of big business being bad, the technology prevalent there being bad, or Kikuchi just wanted to set it there for some random reason and/or wanted to see it destroyed (or a combination of all three).  At any rate, there is a delineation between the forces of good and evil drawn along technological lines.  Kiyoya and the good guys practice Nenpo using thin wooden swords.  Their focus is on empowering and developing the inner spirit (think: The Force in the Star Wars movies before they fucked up its ancient mystical aspects with that Midichlorian bullshit).  They are simple, peaceful people, though still human.  Contrast this to the characters in the demon city.  Rebi Ra’s sword (the clearest distinguishing aspect between he and Kiyoya/Genichiro) is large and wide and steel (a double metaphor for the phallus and the uncaring hardness of the villains), though it also channels power (just externally from the demons through Rebi Ra, not internally from Rebi Ra’s chi).  The guy who accosts Sayaka in the alley has an arm that’s either robotic or heavily armored (we’re never told explicitly which).  Chibi’s two-headed dog was created by humans using science and technology (he’s menacing but a good guy, most likely because, as we all know, animals intuitively sense goodness in people, and it doesn’t hurt that Chibi raised him from a pup).  The hag who owns the music store is represented as images in a bank of television monitors.  She, naturally, is as avaricious as anyone else, though without the barrier of technology to protect her, she’s much more forthcoming.  Sayaka even gives up her laser ring gizmo.  A simple, low technology life frees one from the spiritual clutter that blocks the channeling of chi in this world.  It’s how you beat the bad guys.

As an anime, and as a story, Demon City Shinjuku is satisfying.  It doesn’t bog itself down with subplots taken from the books that it can never develop in its runtime.  The obstacles/battles are interesting in their variety and character designs, and they all move the plot a little bit closer to its finale.  Sure, the dialogue is dumb, but it would be more egregious in a poorly-paced or a more schizophrenic narrative.  While it doesn’t top (for me, at any rate) Kowajiri’s Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust or Ninja Scroll, it would certainly make a nice B feature to either one of them for an evening of anime fun.

MVT:  The designs and the animation are smooth and visually striking.

Make or Break:  The opening sets the stage well in terms of world building, violence level, and basic storyline.

Score:  6.75/10