The horror film master is back at the top of his form.
By Dennis Fischer
The trick to making any good genre picture is that the filmmaker must both respect the conventions of the genre while at the same time play against those conventions. The form must be familiar enough so that the audience has some expectations, while being surprising enough to delight the audience by subverting some of those same expectations.
John Carpenter has long been a master at subverting genre expectations, and his best films are consistently imaginative in standing conventional cliches on their heads. Simply put, JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES is the best Carpenter film in a decade. Adapted by Don Jakoby (LIFE FORCE, ARACHNAPHOBIA) from the novel VAMPIRE$ by John Steakley, the film is one of the most inventively different vampire thrillers since Kathryn Bigelow's NEAR DARK.
Like NEAR DARK, VAMPIRES, has a Southwestern setting. But rather than follow an outlaw group of Vampires in their Winnebagos, VAMPIRES focuses on a group of outlaw slayers led by Jack Crow (James Woods). Carpenter cannily casts members of Crow's slayer team with actors better known for portraying bad guys than good ones (e.g. Henry Kingi, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Tommy Rosales), letting us know these bad-asses mean business. The film effectively opens by portraying their infiltration and destruction of a vampire nest.
In Carpenter's film, vampires do not turn into bats nor are they afraid of crosses; however, they can be killed by stakes to the heart and will ignite in sunlight. Crow's team uses bullets and halberds to keep them at bay until they can be staked or shot with a crossbow and dragged into the light. It's a difficult job, but Crow's team is good at its work. They've developed a collection of vampire-fighting equipment, their own specialized jargon (a nicely realistic touch) and a close camaraderie.
Of course, a vampire film mostly stands or falls on the quality of it's main vampire, and in Thomas Ian Griffith's Valek, we have one of the most powerful and commanding vampires ever to hit the screen. Valek is not a suave sophisticate in evening dress, but a feral being possessed of an animal ferocity and superhuman strength. Valek is not just any vampire, but the first vampire ever created and now a Master Vampire who can create and control legions of other vampires to do his bidding. Condemned to live in darkness, Valek is less concerned with Crow than in seeing the Berziers Cross which he needs for an evil ceremony that would allow him to stalk around in daylight.
In LIFEFORCE, screenwriter Don Jakoby established an extraterrestrial origin for vampires, and in this film he similarly creates a new origin for vampires connected with dark secrets of the Catholic Church. We learn through a meeting between Crow and Cardinal Alba (Maximilian Schell) that the Catholic Church has been covertly funding Crow's operation and have raised him to be a crusader in this cause (the slayers' logo is based on the symbol of the Knights of Malta, who were conscripted by the Catholic Church to fight infidels in the Holy Lands).
Bright, foul-mouthed, intense, irreverent and dedicated, the part of Jack Crow fits Woods like a glove (in fact, the film could have used even more of his flippant repartee). Woods, one of our most gifted actors, has the right combination of appealing and appalling qualities to make the character interesting. Crow is a man on a mission, who will do anything it takes to get the job done. He is motivated by the memory of having to kill his vampirized father.
When Valek turns the tables on him and wipes out most of his team, Crow is left to depend on the resources of Tony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), a tough, insensitive but loyal teammate; a bitten prostitute Katrina (Sheryl Lee) slowly turning into a vampire, whom Crow wishes to exploit for the psychic connection this gives him to Valek; and a geeky priest/archivist, Father Adam Guiteau (Tim Guinee), who reminds one of Rene Auberjonois in MASH), whom the cardinal insists accompany Crow.
One of the film's gentler ironies has vampire killing machine Montoya becoming more human as he begins to fall in love with his captive Katrina, which results in the risk of losing his humanity entirely. Montoya and Crow are depicted as badgering companions, as users, people who party hard (Carpenter stages an elaborate orgy scene with plenty of flowing liquor and half-naked women) and are tough-as-nails doing a dirty, dangerous and difficult job. They have no time for niceties such as sympathy or respect for others (in fact, Crow assaults and insults Father Guiteau several times). But like characters in a Hawks movie, one comes to respect their professionalism. They know when the odds are against them, but they will go anyway.
With the ideas of a slayer code and a climactic showdown in a small New Mexican town, Carpenter has fashioned a kind of vampire-western, and he uses the Spanish architecture of churches and missions (nicely designed by Thomas A. Walsh) to help establish why the vampire would feel at home in such a setting. His musical score also gives it a western feel when it does not have echoes of Goblin, and one appreciates the bluesy guitar licks of the legendary Steve Cropper.
The film also features some stunning imagery, including one of the best vampires-clawing-out-of-their-graves shots ever committed to celluloid, an abiding tableaux nicely filtered through Gary Kibbe's non-Gothic cinematography. Additionally there are Greg Nicotero's no-holds-barred, brains-on-the-wall gore effects which will be sure to please the splatterpunk crowd while conveying just how high the stakes are in this battle.
Carpenter knows how to shock, thrill, and amuse, and in VAMPIRES he is able to do all three. He maintains a Hawksian sense of the absurd amidst the carnage. Ultimately, his film comes down to what is most important in life: love, friendship, respect, and a good sense of humor.
