John Carpenter's Vampires (18)

John Carpenter's Vampires comes across like a version of Dracula made by Howard Hawks. Instead of fog-shrouded Transylvania, the locations here are the wide open spaces of the New Mexico desert - and the hero Jack Crow (James Woods) drives stakes through vampires' hearts with the same rugged professionalism John Wayne used to show as a gunfighter.

Crow and his buddies are working for the Vatican, and their ultimate goal is to track down Valek, a handsome 600-year-old bloodsucker. As you can probably tell, this is a boys' own adventure story. It is bloody and macho, and teeters throughout on the edge of absurdity. The dialogue, for example, is strictly cornball. "They'll be unstoppable!" hisses a courageous young priest roped in to help Jack. "Unless we stop them!" And the shifts in tone are simply baffling. One moment Jack and his cronies behave as if they're pest controllers trying to flush out an infestation of cockroaches the next they'll be discussing the nature of true evil with the slippery, untrustworthy cardinal (Maximilian Schell) who employs them.

There are no strong women characters, only prostitutes and vampires. Indeed, Sheryl Lee of Twin Peaks fame manages to be both - she starts off a hooker, is bitten by Valek, and spends most of the rest of the film tied up while the men wait to see if she'll grow fangs.

The distributors have delayed releasing Vampires for many months, and actually seem embarrassed by the film. They shouldn't be. In its own lurid way it is highly enjoyable. It is full of in-jokes, just occasionally manages to frighten us, and yields yet another of James Woods' sublimely over-the-top performances - he hasn't been quite this manic since he played the cocaine addict in The Boost. It's preposterous, yes, but no more so than all those Hammer and Universal horror movies to which it pays homage.

Geoffrey Macnab

Copyright 1999
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