Thralls

...about being any good. Because "Thralls" does actually give a damn about being enjoyable and giving B-movie fanatics a fun time. Really, this might very well be the definition of modern day camp. A bunch of gorgeous, hot-looking half-vampire babes open up a nightclub in which unsuspecting, trouble-making ravers end-up as a midnight snack. The plan is to free themselves from slavery by vampire-lord Johnny (played by Lorenzo Lamas who strikes an intentional ridiculous note here) and hereby upgrade themselves from 'thralls' to full-blooded vampires. Johnny-boy has a plan for himself, though: summoning an evil demon to make himself an über-vampire. It's all good and enjoyable campy fun. The CGI demon-head near the end is so crappy that it doesn't even live up to Playstation 1 graphics. But that's all part of the game. And if you don't have any sense of humor at all, then don't even consider giving "Thralls" aka "Blood Angels" a watch.

On a side-note: I always have to laugh with Lorenzo Lamas. Can't help it, when I hear his name pop up, because I've always considered him to be a not-so-very-good actor (and I'm being polite here). But in "Thralls" he's actually quite a bit of fun to watch. And to my surprise, he even managed to entertain me a second time very recently, when I popped in this Z-grade CGI-infested rubbish called "Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus" (proudly produced by The Asylum company). Good old Lorenzo really is a hoot and a whole barrel of fun in this one. Virtually all of his lines had me laughing out loud. And he seems very well aware of how to deliver his pun-filled nonsense. Seems like he does have some talent for something after all... Go, Lamas, go! A few more of these flicks, and you'll hit a strike! Anyway, I think I'm straying off topic here... But do support Lorenzo Lamas, and go watch "Shark Thralls vs. Blood Octopus" or... something... Which movie was I talking about again?

First, there is the word Beli-al, the name of a demon. The word is transformed into the Necronomicon, a powerful book of spells, but then it disappeared. Mr. Jones (Lorenzo Lamas) is a powerful vampire with his minion Rennie. He keeps six beautiful women prisoners as thralls or semi-vampires. Roxie, Leslie, Lean, Brigitte and Buzz manage to escape. Leslie's sister Ashley arrives in the big city. The girls are running a hot local club. It's the winter solstice. Jim falls for Ashley. His cousin is an idiot. Ashley realizes that some of the girls are vampires.

The dialog is god-awful. The acting is even worst. Lorenzo Lamas may be the best actor in the lot which says everything. Beautiful women kicking butt can go a little way but it doesn't alleviate the movie's many problems. Lamas is the big bad but he doesn't have enough screen time. The story is more complicated than it needs to be. The exposition comes too late. It is a mess and not scary as a vampire horror.

Ashley meets her sister in the dead of night at the bus depot. Right away she is almost attacked by a group of hoodlums that sis is able to dispatch without as much as a drop of sweat. Ashley is escaping her traumatic past to live with her sister who happens to run a rave with a bunch of her bodacious lady friends. These girls have got it all….brains, looks, a killer job and oh did I mention they were vampires? Well not exactly vampires but 'thralls' half human, half vampire and the whole lot of them are hiding from their ex-master. Mr. Jones (Lorenzo Lamas) will stop at nothing to get his girls back or is he up to something more sinister? Well I had passed this one by once or twice but I'm glad I reconsidered. "Blood Angels' (aka Thralls) on the surface does appear to be yet another batch of the same old thing. But the film is surprisingly fun and has energy. The director did a good job with what he had. The action scenes pop pretty well and the lovely ladies chew up the screen. True the script is clichéd and the one-liners are real groaners at times, not to mention the digital effects sometimes are a bit weak. But I had fun in the end and with a film like 'Blood Angels' that's all one can hope for.

The story focuses on a group of six beautiful women called Thralls, referred to as "the white trash of vampires;" effectively a lower species of vampire. They don't kill people, they don't have the ability to turn their victims into vampires and they can't fly. These Thralls are under the control of Mr. Jones, the vampire who sired them, and whom they are trying desperately to escape. To do this they must complete a blood ritual which will turn them into full-blown vampires. Their plans hit a snag when Ashley, the younger sister of one of the Thralls, comes to visit. Ashley has no idea what her sister has been up to since moving to the big city nor what she has become...

It's a vampire movie, it's got a bunch of hot babes, running around like vampires normally do. That's pretty much it. The story is stupid and really starts to annoy me as every vampire movie I see, gets more and more similar to that of the last viewed that I just feel like I've watched the movie already.

The acting is decent, it's not good but its usually bearable. There's quite a bit of blood (well, it is a vampire movie) but nothing overly disgusting. There are some small additions of CGI into certain scenes and is executed poorly. There can be so many movies that have had a great idea, but the scenes don't have the proper effect on you because the image is too fake. You've got to go for prosthetics over CGI for the effect.

I'll keep it short and sweet. The main reason why most guys will watch this is because of the women and that really is the only part worth looking at in the movie. If you watched this for any other reason, you're either female or most likely a homo.

Yet another modern vampire romp. If you enjoyed "Dracula 2000", this may hold your interest.

Mr. Jones (Lorenzo Lamas) is a vampire living an upper class life in Iowa, of all places, in this Ron Oliver-directed film. He has a Renfield-like acolyte named Rennie (Richard Ian Cox), and most importantly, he's keeping six really hot "half-vampire" slave babes chained up, dressed in sexy white lingerie, in his strangely white "attic". These slaves, or thralls ("thrall" was the Scandinavian word for "slave" during the Viking age), are the focus of the film. At the end of the opening sequence, they manage to escape. Shortly after we see them running a rave club (still in Iowa, amusingly enough). A major subplot involves Ashley (Siri Baruc), a sister of one of the thralls, who has runaway from an abusive situation with her father. But has she run into something even more frightening?

I like most films, especially most horror, and I start watching any movie with very few preconceptions and a high score in mind. For Blood Angels, repeatedly I would be cruising along thinking it deserved a high rating, then it would do something awkward or too corny for its own good, and I'd feel compelled to give it a lower mark. But then it would turn around and make up for the problems with another move, and so on. The final verdict, obviously, was a 7. However, for much of the film it sustained an 8 for me.

Among the minor problems are that the fight/attack scenes tend to be cut too quickly, there is a strange section of repeated footage in the middle (it's ostensibly a dream/hallucination) that seems like padding, and the bulk of the film is set in a club that just looks like a big warehouse. Sometimes such a limited setting works, but here it tends to become monotonous. It feels transparently like a budget-saving device.

In interviews about the film, the cast and crew have made much of the supposed vampire mythology extensions in the film. They were exaggerating, at least slightly. While the thrall idea is unique for the film world, at least in its details, the influences for this "extension" were probably a combination of the mythology of role-playing games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and the "gay vampire" novel by author Michael Schiefelbein entitled Vampire Thrall (interestingly, early reports had Blood Angels' plot as an erotic gay vampire flick--that turned out to be wrong (or it was changed); whether that's disappointing or not probably depends on your gender and orientation, especially when we consider that the protagonists are beautiful women clad in skimpy clothing).

Of course, if we look at it from an even less fine-grained perspective, Blood Angels is basically a Dracula story centered on his brides, where the brides have been merged with the popular idea of the vampire acolyte, but where they are not quite willing to be underlings--they're just partial vampires instead. The thralls' feeding methods are unusual, but certainly not unprecedented--similar ideas have appeared in a number of other vampire films, including Les Avaleuses (1973), Spermula (1976) and the more well-known and mainstream Once Bitten (1985). Blood Angels may be unprecedented in featuring a protagonist (Ashley) partially modeled on The Wizard of Oz' (1939) Dorothy, and also for featuring an odd bit part for an actor dressed up as Hunter S. Thompson.

Other elements, such as a subplot involving the Necronomicon and raising demons from other dimensions are relative horror clichés by this point, although such things did not tend to be combined very often with vampire lore until "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997). Also like Buffy, Blood Angels mixes its modern Gothic atmosphere and liberal tongue-in-cheek humor with martial arts. Part of becoming a vampire, or even a thrall, is that you suddenly turn into a kick-ass kung fu expert. Combining vampires and martial arts is an idea that extends at least back to The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).

Of course, post-Buffy, at least, having strong, intelligent and resourceful modern women as protagonists in a horror film isn't unique, but it is still relatively unusual, and it is certainly welcomed. Some feminists might cringe at the eye candy factor, which is very high throughout the film, but more enlightened feminists realize that being beautiful and proud of it isn't akin to playing a subordinate role. Also on the positive but unusual side is that the film is set in Iowa (though unfortunately not shot there, but surely that would have proved to be too much for the film's budget). It's at least nice to see writers and directors try to be a bit more creative with their locales.

I was surprised that Blood Angels had as much humor as it does. There is a very funny comic relief character known as Doughboy (Kevin Ohtsji), an Asian youth trying to be "rap hip", somewhat reminiscent of Nadir (Saïd Serrari), the comic relief wannabe rapper Algerian in Samouraïs (2002) (Although it's a bit bizarre--but I like bizarreness--that the last five minutes of the film before the final credits run are a rap/hip-hop promotional video). And Rennie is also funny as a continually suffering zombie, reminiscent of Gabriel's (Christopher Walken) zombie assistants in the Prophecy (1979) films, or, without the "slave" aspect, Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) in An American Werewolf in London (1981) or Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) in Idle Hands (1999). Another positive aspect is that the special effects are good for a low-budget film. For the other roles, the performances are fine; nothing exceptional, but not problematic, either, even if Lamas starts to show off his scenery-chewing chops by the end.

Overall, Blood Angels is above average, especially if you're a big horror fan and you enjoy watching attractive women. It's not likely to be remembered as a groundbreaker, but it's more than sufficient entertainment for 90 minutes. It also leaves room for a sequel, which would be welcomed.