'Bloodlock' should have stayed locked up

Bloodlock (2008)
Starring: Ashley Gallo, Dominic Koulianos, Gregg Biamonte, Debra Gordon, Karen Fox,
Dick Hermance, and Nick Foote
Director: William Victor Schotten
Rating: One of Two Stars

Young married couple Christine and Barry (Gallo and Biamonte) discover a sealed door made of titanium in the basement of the house they have just purchased. As Christine grows obsessed with what might be behind it, her husband and slutty sister (Fox) are having an affair... and the creepy neighbors (Gordon and Hermance) are plotting to get into the door and take possession of what's inside.

William Victor Schotten is a filmmaker who is learning is craft as he goes. This is evident from the two films from him I've watched so far... this one, the oldest, and the Rapture/Zombie tale "Sabbath". Both date from 2008, but while "Sabbath" is far from perfect, it's a much, MUCH better film than "Bloodlock."

Heck, based on the difference in quality between "Bloodlock" and "Sabbath", I may have to get my hands on Schotten's most recent film--"Silver Cell" from 2011, because if he's continued that rate of of improve, he may just have created one of the Greatest Movies Ever Made.

There's no word to describe "Bloodlock" better than "inept." The pacing is wrong from the get-go and it only gets worse as the film unfolds... with sequences that could have benefited from a little a pause being raced through like they were running out of film, and sequences that should have been quick being dragged out. The script is disjointed and chaotic, with a number of tones drifting through the disorganized story like so much flotsam as the film moves from being a erotic thriller, to a gory monster flick, to a half-assed comedy. There was also clearly a lack of funding when it came to special effects and a lack of rehearsal time when it came to the fight scenes... and the inexperience of Schotten and his technical crew only makes these shortcomings more obvious because they were either unable to use cinematic trickery to cover for them, or unaware of the fact they were looking at inadequacies until it was too late to do anything about it. And, finally, the ultimate doom for the movie are the mostly amateurish actors struggling with flat, poorly written lines. (Dominic Koulianos and Karen Fox are not only called upon to deliver awful lines, but they don't seem to be all that talented to begin with. That's a mix that destroys almost every scene they're in.)

This is, however, also one of those films I wish I could say nicer things about, because hidden inside this mess are some gems. I like the pirahna-style design used for the vampires in the film, and I think something cool could be done with the psychic housewife-turning-monster-hunter. But in this film, both of these cool aspects are all but wasted.

The one thing I have to give Schotten (or maybe screenwriter Tom McLaughlin) is that he realized this movie was disjointed and messy. So clear was that realization was that the film ends with the old "it was all a dream" and then loops back on itself by repeating an early scene. If you have a movie that doesn't make any sense, I suppose that's not a bad way to try to say "We meant to do that!". My reaction to such endings are typically either an irritated growl at the lazy cop-out or a grin at the well-executed creepy moebius loop, but seeing it here at the end of "Bloodlock" just made me a little sad. It seemed to say that the filmmakers knew what they had here didn't amount to much of anything.

Conrad Brooks tries to out Ed-Wood Ed Wood (and fails miserably)

Gypsy Vampire: The Final Bloodlust (2009)
Starring: Bruce "Porkchop" Lindsay, Mark Byrne, Matt Burns, Gail Maureen Hanson, Donna Burns, John Durham, Judi Durham, and Conrad Brooks
Director: Conrad Brooks
Rating: Zero of Ten Stars

A writer named Raider (Byrne) comes to visit a mortuary for... well, for some reason. Here, Count Lugo (Lindsay), a vampire posing as a mortician and moonlighting as a zombie master, turns him into a vampire so he can lure Dr. Cabasa (Durham) to the mortuary, so he can make him revive a dead woman to be his bride. But when Lugo's chief zombie (Burns) falls in love with Cabasa's lovely assistant (Hanson), he leads a zombie revolt and hijacks the Satanic ritual so he can marry her instead. I think.

Conrad Brooks, the writer/director/producer of "Gypsy Vampire" was a bit-player in a slew of movies during the 1950s and 1960s. He had retired from acting until the combination of a book by Michael Medved and Harry Medved, along with the Tim Burton comedy "Ed Wood" revived interest in Brooks' friend and third-rate filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr. Brooks has claim to fame of having appeared in every movie that Wood directed, and for the past twenty years, he's been a fixture on the convention circuit, cashing in the rest of his 15 minutes of fame.

Brooks has often spoken of his affection for Edward D. Wood, Jr.--and he does so at length in a 1990 interview/mini-documentary titled "On the Trail of Ed Wood", the DVD release of which also contains "Gypsy Vampire: The Final Bloodlust".

Thanks to the Medved Brothers and Burton's movie, Edward D. Wood, Jr. is often labeled as "the worst filmmaker ever" by reviewers and critics who can't be bothered to actually watch his movies (or, at best, they label "Plan 9 From Outer Space" as "the worst movie ever"). Uwe Boll is starting to become the "new Ed Wood" for such lazy commentators, but the label of "worst filmmaker" is equally false when applied to either gentleman. Anyone who has devoted any real time at all to trawling through random films at the bottom of the cinematic barrel knows for a fact that Wood Boll are nowhere near the worst directors, and none of their films come even close to being the worst that is out there.

Conrad Brooks, for example, has made a far more awful movie than either Wood or Boll have ever been brazen enough to inflict upon the public. With random posterization of some scenes and others being in black-and-white for no discernable reason; costumes and make-up effects as awful as the actors wearing them; a nonsensical storyline; camera-work barely suitable for YouTube video than a film; and editing so bad a it would earn any beginning film student a failing grade, even if he or she was sleeping with the professor, there is nothing in this film that is at all competently made.

I'm not sure what Brooks was trying to achieve with this movie. Perhaps just to have a good time with a bunch of young actors. Perhaps he was trying to emulate his old friend Ed Wood and make a movie that out-Ed-Wooded Ed Wood. If it was the latter, Brooks certainly managed to make an awful movie, but he failed to capture that intangible, poetic quality that Ed Wood managed to bring to the messy pictures he created.

Watching this movie, I found myself wondering if Brooks ever paid attention to movies while he was watching them. Such niceties as varying between close-ups and two-shots, the ocassional zoom and reverse angle shots are all simple cinematic elements that anyone should be able to see the value in after just watching one or two movies. But not, apparently, Conrad Brooks. This movie is so incompetently and amateurishly made that watching it through to the end is a test of stamina, and it deserves the dubious honor of being at the very bottom of the scale.

(If you have a "bad filmmaker" that you have a warm spot for in your heart, you should bring up this movie the next time you see someone tossing out that "worst filmmaker" or "worst movie" label. If the critic casting aspersions hasn't seen "Gypsy Vampire: The Final Bloodlust", they are in on position to judge what is and isn't "the worst movie ever."

The cleverest thing about the film is that it was shot in a pair of famous "haunted Halloween houses,"--Creekside Manor in Maryland, and Darkwood Manor in Virginia. A few years back, I did security of one such Halloween haunted house, and I often thought its various sets would work well if one were to film a low-budget horror picture on them. It's nice to see that great minds think alike. Of course, Brooks also used many of the actors who perform in the Darkwood Manor spook-maze in his flick, which wasn't such a good idea. I've no doubt they're perfectly capable of spooking people in dark hallways, but virtually none of them understood how to act in front of a camera. It really is a toss-up between who was more incompetent, director Brooks or almost any member of his cast you could mention. (The exception are Brooks, who with more than half a century's experience should probably do better than he does, but he looks like Boris Karloff next to the people he shares scenes with, and Donna Burns, who showed enough presence that I think she could have done far better if she had been delivering better lines in scenes that had been properly edited.)

'Lust for Dracula' isn't very desirable

Lust for Dracula (2002)
Starring: Darian Cain, Misty Mundae, and Julian Wells
Director: Tony Marsiglia
Rating: Zero of Ten Stars

Misty Mundae stars as Mina Harker. Darian Cain is featured as a female vampire named Dracula who likes to stand around naked and spout nonsense. There are also a pair of lesbian vampires who wander in and out of the film at random, occassionally masturbating as they do. Oh, and then there's Jonathan Harker, Mina's transsexual shemale husband. Plot? Storyline? This movie contains no such trivialities!

I suppose I should have known what I was getting into, but the plot on the back of the DVD case sounded interesting... and the promise of boobies is always alluring. But "Lust for Dracula" bears very little resemblence to what is described on the back, and the procedings are far too boring to even be remotely sexy.





(Trivia: This film was my first exposure to Misty Mundae and the Seduction Cinema crew. It was acquired at the closing sale of a DVD/music store going out of business in 2003.)

'Project Vampire' is a failure

Project Vampire (1993)
Starring: Brian Knudson, Mary-Louise Gemmill and Myron Natwick
Director: Peter Flynn
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

A mad scientist, Dr. Klaus (Natwick), is perfecting a longevity serum that turns those who use it into vampires. A brave intern from the univsersity hospital (Knudson), a kind-hearted nurse (Gemmill), and a Chinese genius (Cho) join forces to save themselves from the effects of the serum and to stop Klaus's convoluted schemes from coming to fruition.


At the center of "Project Vampire" is a neat idea--I like the notion of the vampire serum--but that idea is brutally strangled by a script so badly structured I doubt the writer/director has even heard the term "three-act structure", and then dumped in a shallow grave by a cast of actors who have almost certainly heard the phrase "don't quit your dayjob" many times. To make matters worse, the film is a mixture of a chase story and a race-against-time story, but both of these normally dramatic plot-types are made deadly dull by chase scenes that have all the excitement of my daily commute to work.

"Project Vampire" is yet another badly executed low-budget film where a good idea falls victim to a shortage of talent. (It's also the only film of recent vintage that features a Chinese character that brought to mind Lionel Twain's rant at Inspector Wang in "Murder By Death" about geniuses being unable to grasp the use of preposition, articles, and pronouns when speaking.)

Nothing to sing about in 'Rockabilly Vampire'

Rockabilly Vampire (1997)
Starring: Stephen Blackehart, Margaret Lancaster, Wendy Walker, and Dennis Davis
Director: Lee Bennett Sobel
Rating: One of Ten Stars

A struggling, Elvis-obsessed writer (Lancaster) falls in love with a vampire who bears a passing resemblence to The King when he was young (Blackehart). Boredom ensues.

"Rockabilly Vampire" is an unfunny, badly executed comedy with pathetically weak horror overtones. There isn't a scene in the film that doesn't go on for at least four mintues too long and that doesn't feel like it was ad-libbed and then not edited down. There isn't anything scary (or tragic or particularly sexy) about any of the vampires, including the one our heroine falls in love with; he doesn't even do a good Elvis impression.

Spend the time you would have wasted on this film reorganizing your underwear drawer. Even Troma should feel embarrassed over picking this one for distribution.

'Transylmania' should have had a stake through its heart

Transylmania (2009)
Starring: Oren Skoog, Jennifer Lyons, Tony Denman, Patrick Cavanaugh, Paul H. Kim, Musetta Vander, Natalie Garza, Nicole Garza, David Steinberg, James DeBello and Irena A. Hoffman
Directors: David Hillenbrand and Scott Hillenbrand
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

A group of American college students travel to a remote Transylvanian university for a semester of studying and partying abroad. Will the partying or the vampires kill them first?


I need to learn the lesson that the smart choice is to go home if I arrive at the theater too late to see the movie I had planned on. But, as I was stood at the box office, I noticed "Transylmania" was about to start. And, seeing that I love old monster movies and this was part college stoner comedy and part spoof of the classic monster-in-the-creepy-castle films, I thought it might be fun. "How bad can it be?" I asked myself.

Well, it was pretty bad. The humor is more stupidly offensive than funny, the acting universally weak--especially when it comes to the comedic timing of the cast, which is surprising given the long resumes of everyone appearing in the film--and the story features numerous characters that do nothing except serve the purpose of a single joke and otherwise just clutter up the film and story.

It's too bad, becuase in the hands of competent writers who understood how to streamline a story (not to mention write funny jokes) and with some better actors, this could have been a really funny movie with roots in classic films from Universal and Full Moon. The vampire/college student look-alike and the midget mad scientist had all sorts of potential, potential that we can see shining through at the film's best moments, but which remains tragicaly unspent or even wasted.

I really wish this film had been better and that it had done well at the box office. I applaud the filmmakers for writing a spoof that actually has an original story instead of just a cobbled together string of lame references to recent movies and current news events and pop culture. Maybe (God willing!) this film is a sign that story will be returning to the spoof film... or maybe the failure of this film will mean the genre will go dormant for a while because the business people and creatives STILL won't get the message that quality is what sells a movie.