I’m a big JC fan – and by JC I mean John Carpenter, not Jiminy Christmas – though I am a big fan of him, too. Let’s review some of his best work: Halloween, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China (seemingly, the GREAT Kurt Russell is a fan, too), Prince of Darkness and They Live. Jiminy Christmas, does it get any better than this in the genre? Hail no! And JC even composes his own music – this guy does it all. Finally, he looks creepy cool at the same time. He is LEGEND!!
Anywho, this one starred James Woods as Jack Crow, the lead vampire hunter. Daniel Baldwin was Tony, a member of the team. Katrina, played by Sheryl Lee, was a hooker who got bitten by the master vampire Valek, played by Thomas Griffith. It was later revealed that Valek was the first vampire, more than six hundred years old and originally a disgraced priest. Maximillian Schell played Cardinal Alba, Jack’s “boss”. Oh, and the first priest at the opening scene where the team was cleaning out a nest of vampires in New Mexico was Gregory Sierra, aka Detective Chano from Barney Miller.
It was funny in the first scene when they called the vampires “goons”. And even funnier how they disposed of them – harpooned with a silver crossbow, then dragged into sunlight via a winch where they burst into flames in a hilarious manner. It looked like they tied a bunch of road flares to a vampire dummy and ignited them outside. Flame on!
Oh and there’s a fat guy on the team that looked like a young Ned Beatty. Was it his son? Google said no – it was Mark Boone Junior as Catlin. And remember my rule about fat guys – always the first to get whacked – never fails. Speaking of getting killed, after the nest scene, the team retired to a motel for a celebratory party. Valek, the only survivor of the nest extermination, showed up and proceeded to kill every vampire hunter and hooker at the party, except Jack, Tony and Katrina. Why these experienced vampire hunters got wiped out so quickly was kind of silly, but apparently Valek was stronger than any other vampire. Good enough for me. Oh and I almost forgot – there were boobies at the party!
Did I mention how great the music was in this movie? Excellent and really set the mood.
Anywho, after the party, the remaining team tried to kill Valek, but whilst escaping via truck, they crashed in a rather silly scene and had to walk. At another motel, it was revealed that Katrina was telepathically linked to Valek, and therefor could lead the team to him to finish him off. But I have to say, Sheryl’s telepathic scenes were turribly acted – enough of the face/head shaking. Of course, James Woods was hammy in scenes, too, but in a good and funny way. Speaking of hammy, Griffith’s Valek really went whole hog in the fight scenes.
Another thing I noticed about Daniel Baldwin, when he’s not yelling and just using a normal speaking voice, he sounded exactly like his brother Alec. Close your eyes during some of these scenes and check it out – it’s eerily similar. Almost as if they are twins. And speaking of Daniel Baldwin, check out the De Niro face he made when he awoke from sleeping in a chair while keeping tabs on Katrina. It was priceless – I almost choked on a swig of beer, I was laughing so hard.
Later in the movie, as the team closed in on Valek and his new group of vampires for the grand finale battle, they emerged from the ground, but it’s obvious they were “buried” in coffee grounds!
So enough yammering about this one, the ending was silly, and this was not one of JC’s best works, but it’s still a JC movie so… you gotta see it! Five smoldering vampire skulls out of seven.