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Vampires Get Wood…

Written By:

James Evans
vampires

As you would have found if you read the two-part feature on the Master of Horror in STARBURST #446 and #447, John Carpenter’s early filmography is outstanding. Across a burst of remarkable creativity in just under 15 years he made Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, the still definitive version of the Elvis story (and first project with frequent collaborator Kurt Russell), The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live. Either successful or critically acclaimed at the time of release or given distance (The Thing and Prince of Darkness, for example) now lauded as major or minor classics, it was an incredible run. But imagine you’re Carpenter back in those days for a moment. How do you sustain that kind of quality? It’s more than likely at some point you’re going to run out of steam. And so it was for Carpenter, starting with the poorly received and underperforming Chevy Chase vehicle Memoirs of an Invisible Man in 1992 and a subsequent slow down in productivity that ultimately found only two Carpenter films released so far this century. Creative people often find the business approach of studios and the ‘suits’ not just unyielding or uncomprehending but actively destructive and find themselves out of pocket or not given their financial due for their projects as well. And even with John Carpenter as the brand or hook for an audience, it became increasingly difficult to get projects decently funded and his directing career all but stalled. Of course, Carpenter is a man of many talents and has kept busy throughout, most notably recently with albums and tours of his music and iconic movie themes. As this year’s reboot of Halloween (actually pitched as a straight sequel to the first film) approaches Carpenter is somewhat back in the game, returning as producer, composer and spiritual godfather to the franchise that made him a horror legend.

But that period following the Chase film also produced at least a small gem or two. His twisted 1995 Lovecraftian horror In the Mouth of Madness was released recently to Blu-ray and has finally earned a wider critical reassessment and appreciation. And the film we’re covering here, Vampires, was Carpenter’s only project of the decade to turn a sizable profit at the international box office. More than that, however, it’s a frequently enjoyable mix of western and horror film that has much to recommend but still divides opinion. However, we here at STARBURST prefer wherever possible to say why you should give something a chance and sing praises where due and that’s what we’re going to do here. Although not vintage Carpenter, Vampires is certainly not bloodless (sorry, really) but succeeds as violent, gory and caustic fun, with some sequences standing tall against his best work.

Before the film, as often it goes, there was a book. Vampire$ was written by John Steakley and released first in 1990. It’s violent, gory, and caustic too, concerning the work of the company Vampire$, Inc., who kill vampires for money. They’re supported and sanctioned by the Catholic Church, and Steakley’s novel is a mix of dark fantasy horror and even darker humour. It’s no stretch to imagine the book as a film and after lingering around as a project for half a decade, it eventually found its way to Carpenter at the right time for him. Filmmaking is a tiresome, convoluted, and exhausting thing to do even when you’re enjoying it, and Carpenter wasn’t. But with Vampires (as the script was now called) he found an opportunity to revisit the western-in-a-modern setting themes he had started his professional career with back with 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13. Vampires would also be a horror film, the genre he was most familiar with and revered for, and Carpenter keeps this aspect awash with blood throughout. A few years before Vampires’ release, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire had brought her world of beautiful, Gothically tortured bloodsuckers to the screen. The ‘90s zeitgeist for vamps was that of the spiritual ennui and emotional savagery of immortality. This would later transfer into things like the character of the guilt-ridden Angel in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. The novel Vampire$ and Carpenter’s film have none of this sort of thing, however. The vampires here are savage, animalistic and totally brutal. This is set up by Carpenter in one a sequence at the start of the film, as we’re introduced to slayer Jack Crow (James Woods) and his crew.

They are somewhere in New Mexico outside an abandoned farmhouse. Crow and his right-hand man Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) survey the peaceful daytime scene before them. But Crow and his crew have been hired by a nearby town and he suspects the house is now home to a nest of vampires and their leader, their ‘master’. Crow and his men unload their various weapons, ranging from stakes to high-tech crossbows. They approach the house and slowly, quietly make their way to the front door. Carpenter layers this with a distinctly western-themed score that could easily pitch Crow as a sheriff, his men as a posse and the inhabitants of the house as outlaws. He also makes it clear these men, whilst trained and brave/dumb enough to go into a nest of vampires, are nervous and on edge. They unlatch the door and head inside, making their way around the house slowly, steadily and with a dread for what is to come. When it does, it’s swift. The crew are set upon by two vampires to begin with, both dressed more like you would imagine cult members would be in bland brown robes. They’re shot, stabbed and one even has a stake rammed through its forehead, but the only thing that stops them is being hooked and dragged outside into the sunlight that finally destroys them as they burst into flames. As the crew clear out the nest, the vampires’ screams echo across that previously peaceful scene. Remember, at this time vampires were more often aware they were monsters and ridden with guilt over their actions. And in this one sequence, Carpenter announces his vampires are something else altogether. In Vampires, they are violent, near-unstoppable killers that deserve death. The crew refer to them as ‘goons’ and we’re not invited as an audience to feel any sympathy for them at all. Crow isn’t satisfied after they’re done burning up these goons. The master should have been there too, the lore being that they don’t stray too far from their nests. As the slayers drive off to their reward (which the film suggests is always cash, booze, and hookers) the one that got away punches its hands from the shallow dirt it was buried under.

This leads us into the next sequence at the Sun God Motel (the movie always has a sense of humour about itself). The men of Jack’s crew are having a thoroughly misogynistic time drinking and pawing various prostitutes while Crow himself stews over the missing master. Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee plays Katrina, a prostitute who briefly seems as though she will distract him. But Katrina doesn’t get chance, because Thomas Ian Griffith arrives in full bass-player-in-a-’90s-Goth-band get-up as master Jan Valek to bite down on her thigh and suck blood in the only moment of Vampires that tilts towards that Anne Rice sex-and-death fascination. After that, Valek drops by on Crow’s boys and kills them all bar Montoya. It’s not as strong a sequence as the opener but the reason it works, despite some inelegant special effects and Griffith’s (at least initially) cheesy, very literally ‘arrrrggghhh’ performance is because it leads directly on from the house clearance and sits as direct opposition to it. One massacre follows another, and much like the first one, we don’t feel a lot of sympathy for Jack’s crew either, only the girls caught up in the carnage.

Montoya and Jack narrowly escape Valek and take Katrina with them because, as Jack says, he can ‘use her’. It’s indicative of the film’s treatment of women that they’re presented as either goons or prostitutes and Lee’s character doesn’t escape this either. Carpenter has established his film isn’t about good or evil necessarily, or heroes either and so harks back to some of its western influences, focusing on characters that don’t deserve or earn our identification, a more complex approach sitting in line with the predominant Sam Peckinpah influences. And really, Crow is a magnificent douche. After their escape and subsequent car crash, the trio walk to a gas station (Crow refers to Katrina as a ‘piece of shit’ and pushes her in his irritation that she’s slow because she’s been bitten by a vampire and survived a vehicle rolling down a hill) where Crow orders Montoya to steal a car. These men are definitely not heroes; everything’s a commodity to them, including other people, to use to get their job done. It’s interesting because Carpenter’s film (and the script by Don Jakoby) is kicking against everything contemporaries were doing and by also making a western, not exactly Hollywood’s favourite genre at that time, despite the relatively recent successes of films like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Making it a hybrid horror-western seems almost reckless and this is what continues to make the film interesting, with Carpenter’s unwillingness to soften his approach or characters and humanise them or provide even one person we can root for.

The extended set-up then leads into the remainder of the film focusing on Jack’s desire for revenge. It deviates from the source novel in quite a few a few notable ways as Carpenter retools the dark modern fantasy of Steakley’s book towards his concept of nihilistic western. Directly contravening his instructions from the church to hold off and establish a new crew, Crow heads off in search of Valek with Montoya, Katrina and new priest support Father Adam (Tim Guinee). The pace slows somewhat as Crow and Montoya wait for Katrina’s psychic connection to her master to kick in so they can figure out where he is and what he’s doing. It turns out Valek is the original vampire and he’s looking for a MacGuffin that will let him walk in the daylight after 600 years, making him almost indestructible. Meanwhile, Montoya doubles down on his earlier apparent disdain for ‘bitches’ with an oddly pathetic attraction to the slowly vampirising Katrina that displays itself through him generally being awful to her. Crow continues being a scumbag who has no qualms about torturing priests for information and the film builds to a final confrontation where you eventually root for Crow because he’s the marginally better option than Valek.

Carpenter is pretty much incapable of making a genuinely bad film, with even his misfires having their points to recommend. Vampires isn’t top tier Carpenter but neither is it one of his weakest films. It straddles the divide between the two, and some of the rougher moments are right up against some of the best. It also shows how he uses his knowledge of film to create almost off-the-cuff bits of invention. Whether the footage of the motel massacre was working or not we don’t know, but Carpenter says he hit on the idea of using dissolves in the editing process and it works splendidly to create an unreal effect to the sequence that mirrors the disorientating impact on the crew as their evening of carousing and boozing descends into a nightmare of bloody death. And above all, Carpenter has always focused on making his films entertaining and Vampires continues this. If you want to examine Crow’s relationship with God and the church or the movie’s commentary on it or religious hypocrisy, it’s there. Equally, Crow aside, you could have all the fun you want with the film’s deconstruction of the alpha male, most specifically Montoya’s pointless and doomed attraction to a damaged woman that will literally tear his throat out. But most of all, you can enjoy the film as what Carpenter intended it to be, a good fun mix of Peckinpah-style carnage and hard and gory horror. And that job is one it does pretty well.

Although it didn’t become a box office hit, Vampires did nearly recoup its budget at theatres so international returns and a second life on VHS and late-night TV showings (and latterly DVD) made it his most profitable film of the decade. Profitable enough to inspire two straight-to-video sequels that had little connection to the original film other than ostensibly being set in the same universe. The first, Vampires: Los Muertos, was produced by Carpenter and starred Jon Bon Jovi. The second, Vampires: The Turning had no Carpenter and even less to do with his first film. Woods, meanwhile, went via more films and television appearances before settling on his new gig as a performance artist political stooge on Twitter. You don’t have to like the man to enjoy Vampires, of course, because as we’ve covered, Jack Crow is a pretty crappy guy. He just happens to kill vampires for a living, which is probably a good thing for everyone (except the vampires, of course), because without that, he’d probably have taken to killing people himself.

You can sink your teeth into JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES when it screens on Horror Channel. Sky 317, Virgin 149, Freeview 70, Freesat 138.

James Evans

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