Carmilla, the Lesbian Vampire

First off I must stress how rare it is that I take the time to comment on a movie that I have seen, it takes a very special case for me to take the time and write about how I felt about a film. That said, of the hundreds of movies I have watched I have seen some of the most brilliant, Shawshank, the scariest, The Woman in Black, the funniest, Shark Attack III: Megaladon, and now the worst: Vampires vs. Zombies.

The first thing that must be said is that this movie is not funny! For those that are looking for a light hearted movie that will just be fun or at the very least so bad that it's funny, look elsewhere. It is true that a movie such as this is not trying to be subtle and brilliant, with a title such as this you should know what you're getting into. That said, there is no excuse for a movie to abandon any and every rule that governs the movie making world. This is not an argument between the traditional movie making process and newer and more "artsy" methods to creating a film, this is an argument between bad directors and companies being held accountable for making terrible movies.

This movie suffers from the over used saying "I don't know where to start." Truly everything about this movie is broken. From the acting and to the editing there is no reason any movie should ever fail to deliver a cohesive series of events such as Vampires vs. Zombies. Some of the following problems are; 1. Scene misfires- It's clear that the director, the camera crew and the actors were not on the same page. In one scene in particular the scene begins with the camera resting on the ground looking at the passenger side door of a car. You are expecting the person inside to get out, but there is a, and this is NO exaggeration, 10 second, at least, delay between the camera comes on and the director says "action" to where anything happens on screen. The viewer is left staring at a car door for the entire time with no sound, no movement, just the stereotypical "dead air" that radio or TV commentators dread. Where was the editing? 2. Acting- A forgivable offense in most cases, you can't expect a movie like this to have Oscar winners after all, but Vampires vs. Zombies takes bad acting to a whole other level. These "actors" were barely able to read their scripts obviously because anyone with any ability to read and to speak would have been able to pronounce the lines better than these fools. My only comparison for acting would have to be the opening scene from Resident Evil on Playstation. But that acting was even better.

3- Story- Wait, what? Story? Again you can't expect this to be The Greatest Story Ever Told, but is it too much to ask that we have some semblance of a narrative? Why the Vampires? Who are the characters? Who are the bad guys? Are there good guys? Why all the lesbians? But most importantly, what's the deal with the zombies? If you have seen this movie then you will understand what I mean, but to those who haven't I'll be plain, there are no zombies in this movie aside from maybe five minutes of it. It was almost as if the director forgot about the name of the movie and was forced to throw some zombies in without explanation at the very end.

There's so much more, but I hope I've done enough to keep anyone from seeing this movie.

I'm pretty sure when I watched this movie, the only way I could get through it was to assure myself that later, after seeing it, a very long shower and an eye scrub would purge my body of the sin that is seeing "Vampires VS Zombies."

Honestly, I'm pretty sure this is the worst movie ever. While watching it, I had to pause every few moments to keep my brain from exploding. The scenes did not at all move together, and it was in no way comprehensible. It seemed that the best the director did was build up to something during every scene, but that "something" was never there.

While some people say for a bad movie that the best part is the end, I would have to disagree for this one. I waited an entire 85 minutes for some sort of rejuvenation from this movie, but was only greeted by a spinning book displaying the words, "THE END." The movie's acting was like something out of a terrible video game's voice acting, and the plot I'm pretty sure didn't exist. I was glad to see that the creators could let themselves go so easily, but this doesn't even go on the list of B-movies.

I suspect that there is a secret companion film to this abomination which consists of all the "other" scenes that would, coupled with many of the scenes in this movie, form a complete porno-film. Have you actually seen a movie that made your head physically hurt? This one did.

I'm sorry, but don't ever, EVER, EVER watch Vampires vs. Zombies. Not even as a way to pass time or laugh at how bad it is. It's nearly impossible to get through.

The above seemed a much more appropriate title when me and my suicidal underlings decided to watch this masterpiece of modern bullshit.

Erotic, scary, suspenseful, well thought out, these are all the things this film fails to be.

It is however incredibly funny. The slow sound effects and bad dubbing add to this to make one of the greatest comedies I have seen in recent years. And yet this film doesn't even offer and attempt at humor and that is one of the movies grand achievements, it becomes a comedy without even trying to amuse.

Throughout the film, an old guy who looks amazingly like Santa Claus goes around ploughing over zombies and smashing vampires into the ground. This made me fail to believe the films title, if this was vampires vs zombies why were vampires and zombies not fighting? Oh well, whatever, besides there were more flaws to this rental than the title.

Such as this one; there has been a virus sweeping through America creating zombie like beings who go around acting a lot like your average tourist. However there are only four zombies in the entire film. Another problem is besides one shop the entire set is deserted. Surely you'd see zombies roaming about in the woods or in the background a bit? It honestly seemed like they just drove around in a circle of forest over and over again since they didn't have a high enough budget to film in a wider location. It was that or the director didn't want to waste his precious time filming in different areas of wood. He was to busy sitting in a trailer jerking off to be bothered with such trivial matters.

Seemingly the director had so much fun doing this that he didn't have enough time to hire a big enough cast or even an editor. And so he told the eight members of the cast to dress up as different people and try not to act inconspicuous, whilst I assume he changed his name and began randomly snipping at the film reels "editing isn't a hard job anyway right?" The only reason this "movie" found it's way into our bag was because somehow we got it confused with Freddy vs Jason, strange how these things happen isn't it? And the only way we made it though the night was by strapping gas masks on and bolting them to our skulls to avoid the stink of this nauseating mess.

Oh yes we did laugh at the end, but I'm sure one does that a lot when he has lost his sanity...................

In this strangely-lackadaisical apocalypse, the world suffers from a dual plague of zombies and vampires, but no one seems to be too worried about it in this Grade-Z film which bares less resemblance to Sheridan Le Fanu's famous short novel than my mother's lasagna recipe. Bored attendants still run gas stations and doctors still make house calls and helpful police officers still show up with radiator fluid just when you need it. The plot, and I use that term loosely, involves a father and a daughter trying to rendevous with "the general," whose daughter is missing, at a church to kill a vampire who, very conveniently, happens to be traveling with the father and daughter. I must confess that a moment or two of genuine humor can be found between vast stretches of unintentional humor. The film also boasts just enough nudity to keep a boy of fourteen interested. Anyone older beware.

Oh it really really is. I've seen films that I disliked more, due to whatever reason, but never have I seen a film that just fails in every single aspect of film making. It even fails to fail at film making, in a Way the Hercules in New York could be said to do. It's not the film I like the least, but it is the very worst film I've ever seen.

The acting is the first thing that strikes you. I've never seen a worse acted film outside of pornography. In fact I've plenty of pornographic films that are acted a damn site better than this. It really is awful.

Technically, it's terrible. The camera-work is amateurish. The editing is nonsensical. I presume they couldn't afford proper sound equipment, and this meant that every scene in a car (and there's a lot of them) has them driving at about three miles per hour and every scene set outside by the same patch of woods (and there's a lot of them too) is actually dubbed from a studio, again lending more to the bad porn vibe.

The plot is nonsensical, as many have pointed out. I'll defend vampires walking in daylight by the fact that despite it being popularized by Nosferatu, this was never originally an intrinsic part of the vampire mythos.

Speaking of vampire mythos, the writer had evidently read Carmilla, or at very least seen The Vampire Lovers. I'm not sure how I feel about this, swaying from impressed that a movie this dire has at least some aspirations to a Gothic novel I'm very fond of; or annoyed by its at best sledgehammer references and at worst total desecration of source material. At very least 'the General' is an insult to Peter Cushing though.

It gets two stars however, merely because I can't bring myself to vote one star for a film that has, or at least purports to have, both vampires and zombies in it. Incidentally I watched Lifeforce (another film that tenuously has vampires and zombies in it) on the same day as this, and despite being a rather flawed film itself, really comes out a masterpiece compared to this.

So in the end, this is not a film so bad it's good, or so bad it's in any way enjoyable, even drunk. It's just a mess, and worth no-one's time watching.