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Review by Susan Granger
1½ stars out of 4
Taking his cue from "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" and
"Bram Stoker's Dracula," John Carpenter includes himself in the title,
which is an indication of how self-absorbed his first venture into
vampirism is. The scare story with campy, comedic overtones revolves
around deception and betrayal as a Catholic Cardinal (Maximilian
Schell) hires a cynical, gunslinging vampire slayer (James Woods).
Along with his grungy driver (Daniel Baldwin) and other team-mates, he
destroys a bloodsuckers' nest in an abandoned farmhouse in rural New
Mexico and then gets ambushed by the 600 year-old original vampire
"master" (Thomas Ian Griffith) who is looking for a legendary "black
cross" through which he can obtain for himself and his successors the
power to walk in daylight. What Carpenter does is transform the Gothic
castle-with-cobwebs cliche into a dusty Southwestern setting with
scenes reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and directorial
touches of Howard Hawks. His inventive manner of annihilation is
picturesque, as the slayers shoot a "stake" into the creatures and
then drag them into the sunlight, where they instantly become "crispy
critters." Unlike Robert Rodrigues's "From Dusk Till Dawn," in which
the characters morphed into bats, there are few computer-generated
special effects. Instead, Carpenter depends on lighting and make-up,
which includes lots of prosthetics and rubber appliances. Don Jakoby's
screenplay, based on "Vampire$" by John Steakley, delivers some
vicious indictments of Catholicism and a curious AIDS virus parallel,
but James Woods emerges as the biggest, bad-tempered spook. On the
Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "John Carpenter's Vampires" is a
raunchy, grotesque 4. Lots of big fangs and blood-splattering scenes.
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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out of 4
