To Sleep With A Vampire

To Sleep With A Vampire
United States – 1992
Director – Adam Frieman
New Concorde Home Video, 2002, VHS
Run Time – 1 hour, 21 min.

As you now know, there are few things I find more despicable than a vampire. I am however a shallow bastard and this film stars Charlie Spradling (Ski School,Wild At Heart.) It was also executive produced by Roger Corman. According to Beverly Gray in her book Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Life there was a period when cheap skin flicks were being filmed at Corman studios during the night on the same sets as other films. For these reasons I had to see for myself, so it was worth the 2 dollar price tag.

Jacob (Scott Valentine) is the perfect example of douchey vampire, he seems to think that exaggerated frowning counts as emoting his inner sorrow. His tragedy is that he looks so much like a low-rent John Cusack that no one takes him seriously. He hates his hunger for blood so he starves himself as long as he can until he has no other choice. On top of this he longs to experience the world of the day. Talk about a snobby tragedy, pick the one thing you can’t have and covet it. Isn’t that a version of the Oedipus complex?

So to solve this problem Jacob wanders around in the slums, looking for people more pitiful than himself, people that no one will miss since no one matters but him. So logically, he seeks his next victim in a woman of the night, someone whose pain he can sense. Nina (Spradling) a stripper at a club, that despite its location in the ghetto is fully crewed and patronized exclusively by white people. Jacob’s attraction to Nina goes beyond her physical attributes though, he’s into that suffering that he sensed. More specifically, her tequila swilling, pill popping, suicidal, homeless unfit-mother suffering. This is the purest undiluted essence of modern tragedy.


But it’s clear that Jacob is interested only in what he can get from her which to him apparently is a lot. This guy is the epitome of snarky stuck up asshole. He acts like a victim and then threatens everybody around him when he doesn’t get his way. Like a schoolyard bully he’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants whether its friendly passivity or violence. Jacob is just like the jerks I knew in highschool who had really hot girlfriends. One minute he’s giving her the puppy-dog and flowers act and the next he’s dragging her somewhere by the back of the neck. Just like those girls Nina gets the picture pretty quick and plays along to avoid the throttlings. She tries to lift his spirits with tales of her own mortal sufferings and a fake sunbath under the spotlights at the beach. For this he strips his all-black stirrup-pants vampire outfit to reveal a cornea rupturing leopard speedo.


When tooth-grinding Nosfericidal restraint in the face of his sleazy undergarments still isn’t enough to shut his whining up, Nina gives Jacob a private package-deal performance at the strip club. But he can’t drop the victim act and just doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. She’ll “never understand the emptiness of living forever,” so he throws yet another hissy fit to draw attention off of her sturdy rack and back onto himself.

In the end, Jacob gets what he needed from the first baby-frown moment, a helping hand into the great oblivion. Nina tires him out in horizontal fashion, and sends him into the great beyond, all purple sparkles and writhing; melodramatic and weepy spoiled bitch to the bitter end.

Deathsport

Deathsport
United States - 1978
Director –Henry Suso (a.k.a. Nicholas Niciphor)
New Concorde, 2001, DVD

The first scene seemingly forshadows the subsequent film by giving us a few heady dizzying shots of David Carradines dangling package as he leaps over the camera in a loincloth.
After minimal narration about a “Neutron War” the world is left in the grip of a violent tyrannical dictator, Lord Zirpola who sends his troops out on future-dirtbikes to capture wandering nomads to torture and participate in Deathsport. The nomadic people have only the range-guides to protect them. Kaz O’Shea (Carradine) and Deneer (Claudia Jennings) are two such minimally clad quasi Buddhist rogues.

Angkar Moor (Richard Lynch) and a band of sinister silver clad dirt-bikers are out to stop the Range Guides free wheelin’ lifestyle. After a few brief skirmishes using simple blasters which turn people into nothing, (minimalizers! I love this!) they capture both, and take them to cells in an unnamed compound where for the first time the Range Guides meet through the bars. In some other room, the banal dictator is told by his doctor that he is dying, so he chucks the doctor and his son in jail with the range guides.
· Quasi spiritualist/naturalist cultural outsiders, check.
· Honest, scientific culturally dissenting realists, check.
Sounds to me like we just formed a core group of protagonists with minimal character development, let’s see what happens next folks.

Rashly attempting to break out of their cells, the Good Guys are quickly subdued, and Lord Zirpola subjects a nude Deneer to sonic torture, while not far away mercifully clothed (but only just) Kaz is flogged.

Afterwards the Guides mutter goofy voodoo at each other and the whole Good Guy team is sent out to matte painting land to participate in Deathsport!, in which they mount minimally modified unwieldy future dirtbikes, and are chased through various minimally dressed flaming sets (or even better, location shots) by Angkar and his lackeys. Lord Zirpola tortures another nude woman in his Sonic Pain Chamber, but soon dies, leaving Angkar Moor and his boys to be whittled away in the field until Kaz and Angkar, old rivals can have a clear plastic swordfight. Set 1000 years after Death Race, for no reason, Deathsport disposes with all the entertaining elements of it’s predecessor and relies exclusively on Claudia Jennings (Playboy Playmate of the Year 1970) and one other woman’s minimal clothing, and Richard Lynch’s portrayal of minimal morality. Nothing escapes the axe in this cheapquel and except for a few minutes of tits, which of course appeals only to a minimal demographic, it is similarly minimally entertaining.


Watch the Deathsport trailer at Cult Trailers

An awesome French Poster with the title Gladiators of the Year 3000:

Alternate video covers the first with the original poster art: