Part 8 – The Flawed
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Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
Most of this tier is the vampire film working through its own variations. Hammer takes Carmilla at face value, Morrissey makes Dracula an invalid who can’t keep anything down, Blacula gives the count an African prince with a legitimate grievance, and Vampire’s Kiss removes the vampire entirely and leaves a man who has decided he’s one.
The strongest entries build a rule with a victim attached. The Hunger keeps its discarded companions conscious in coffins for centuries, and Underworld gets more from elders sleeping in rotation than any amount of chronicle would have given it.
I’m fond of this tier, and it also frustrates me.
Every film here had somebody with a real idea, and nearly all of them let it leak away somewhere between the first act and the last. That leak is why they sit in Part 8. I’ll still take a vampire picture that swings at something odd and misses over a polished one that never swings at all, and this batch is full of odd swings worth your evening.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the eighth of nine parts.
Count Yorga gives a centuries-old vampire a lease and a telephone, and Underworld builds its politics on elders who sleep in rotation. Do the paperwork in the World Builder’s Handbook.
1. The Transfiguration (2016) [full review]
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RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Both readings stay open from the first frame to the last."
Michael O’Shea made his first and so far only feature for almost no money in Queens, and the premise is a boy who may or may not be a vampire and who has certainly watched every vampire film ever made. He keeps a notebook of them, he ranks them by realism, and he’s strong opinions about which ones are lying to their audiences.
The film never settles what Milo is and that refusal is the whole design. He drinks blood on a schedule he’s worked out, he avoids sunlight because he’s decided to, and every supernatural element in the picture has a mundane explanation available alongside it that the film declines to rule out or confirm at any stage.
Eric Ruffin plays him with almost no affect at all and the performance is the reason the ambiguity survives. He’s a bereaved child living with a brother who has stopped functioning, he’s bullied by a local crew, and the vampirism reads equally well as pathology, as fantasy, or as a genuine condition he’s learned to manage alone.
The film’s argument is about how the genre lies. Milo criticizes Twilight for sentiment and praises Let the Right One In for honesty, and O’Shea uses a boy’s film criticism as a running commentary on the picture the audience is currently watching, a trick that should be unbearable and somehow isn’t.
Chloe Levine plays the girl who moves into the building and the relationship carries the second half. She has her own damage, she’s not a rescue, and the film is clear that two isolated children finding each other in a housing project doesn’t fix either of them or change anything about where they both live.
I liked this one a great deal. A kid ranking vampire movies by realism could have turned smug in a hurry, and O’Shea keeps it sad instead. My reservation is the same refusal that makes it work. By the end I wanted one scene that leaned harder in either direction, and the film won’t give it to me, so it left me admiring the discipline more than feeling the ending.
2. Abigail (2024) [full review]
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RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Professions instead of personalities, and then they are taken apart."
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett made a kidnapping film that turns into something else, and the marketing gave away the turn in every trailer. A crew of criminals take a twelve-year-old ballerina for ransom, lock her in a house for twenty-four hours, and discover the arrangement is considerably less favorable than the fee suggested.
Alisha Weir was fourteen during production and carries the entire film once the premise arrives. She’s small, she’s delighted by the situation, and the film uses the ballet training throughout as choreography for the killing instead of as a decorative detail somebody added to the character during development.
The crew are the reason the first half works and each is given a profession instead of a personality. A hacker, a driver, a sniper, a muscle and a medic, all under assumed names taken from the Rat Pack, and the film establishes their competence before dismantling every bit of it methodically.
Melissa Barrera plays the medic and the film gives her a reason to protect the child. She has a son she’s not allowed to see, she talks to Abigail as a person instead of as cargo, and the picture treats the resulting bond as something the vampire is actively exploiting.
Dan Stevens is enjoying himself enormously as the crew’s least trustworthy member, and Giancarlo Esposito appears at both ends of the film as the man who set the job up. The gore is practical, extensive and closer to comedy than to horror once the situation has been fully established.
3. The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The rescuers carry the infection out of the mountains."
Polanski made a vampire comedy in the Carpathians that MGM recut, redubbed and released with a cartoon prologue he had nothing to do with, and he disowned the American version entirely. The European cut is the film he made and it’s considerably stranger than the one most audiences saw at the time.
The comedy is built on incompetence and the film commits to it fully. Professor Abronsius and his assistant are the worst vampire hunters ever put on screen, they arrive late to everything, and the professor spends the climax frozen in a bath while the situation resolves itself badly around him without his participation.
Ferdy Mayne plays Count von Krolock as aristocratic and a shade bored, and the castle ball is the sequence everybody remembers. A room full of the dead dancing, a mirror on the wall, and three living reflections moving through a crowd that casts none at all while the music continues.
Sharon Tate plays the innkeeper’s daughter and the film is difficult to watch now for reasons that have nothing to do with what is on screen. She’s funny in it, the bath sequence is played entirely for comedy, and Polanski married her the year after it was released.
The ending is the joke the whole film has been building toward. The hunters escape with the girl, congratulating themselves, and the last shot reveals they’ve carried the infection out of the mountains and into the world, spread by the people who came to eliminate it.
4. The Vampire Lovers (1970) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"She means it, and the film is worse for that."
Roy Ward Baker adapted Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla for Hammer, and the film is the most faithful screen version of a novella that predates Dracula by twenty-six years. The studio made it once the British censors had relaxed enough to permit what the source material had always been about.
Ingrid Pitt plays Carmilla and the casting is what the film survives on. She’s thirty-two, she’s entirely in command of every scene, and the performance treats the seduction as genuine affection instead of as predation, considerably more unsettling than the alternative would have been.
Hammer’s film is explicit about the relationships in a way the genre had avoided for fifty years, and Hammer was accused of exploitation on release. The accusation has some weight and the source material had the same content in 1872, the argument the studio made at the time.
Peter Cushing appears as the General and does what he always did and takes the material completely seriously. His daughter dies in the first act, his grief is played straight, and the film gains a register from him that nothing else in it quite reaches on its own.
Two further Karnstein films followed and neither has this one’s discipline. Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil both push harder on the content and lose the melancholy, and the trilogy is the clearest example of a studio discovering what sells and then selling only that.
Pitt is the reason I’d put this on, and Cushing’s grief is the reason I’d take it seriously.
I think the exploitation charge has some merit, though, and it sits awkwardly next to a film this good at melancholy. The sequels really irritate me. Hammer found out what sold and kept selling it until the sadness drained away, and I can’t think of a clearer case of a studio eating its own best idea.
Carmilla means what she says to the people she’s killing, and Morrissey makes Dracula too weak to stand. Two subtractions that work, in the Antagonist Handbook.
5. Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) [full review]
► Read the full review of Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"A centuries-old vampire with a lease and a telephone."
Bob Kelljan wrote and directed a vampire film set in contemporary Los Angeles, and almost nobody was doing in 1970, and the picture was originally shot as softcore before Robert Quarry persuaded everybody involved to make it straight. The change is the reason it survives at all.
Quarry plays Yorga as a working occultist running seances in the Hollywood Hills, and the modern setting pays off. He’s an assistant, he’s a lease, he conducts business by telephone, and the film treats a centuries-old vampire as somebody who has adapted to a city with parking and a property market.
The best sequence is the one nobody expects. A woman is found in her apartment eating a kitten, in daylight, and the film holds on it without music or comment, and nothing before or after suggests the picture was capable of producing an image with that much unpleasantness in it.
The vampire brides are handled with unusual restraint for the period. They’re silent, they’re kept in a cellar, and Kelljan shoots them in fragments so the audience never gets a clean look at how many there are or what condition any of them have been left in.
6. Blacula (1972) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Marshall rewrote the part and gave the film a subject."
William Crain made the first major Black horror film and the premise is considerably better than the title suggests. An African prince visits Dracula in 1780 to petition against the slave trade, is turned and sealed in a coffin for his trouble, and wakes in Los Angeles in 1972 to find the city unrecognizable.
William Marshall was a classically trained Shakespearean actor and he rewrote the character himself. The original screenplay had a plantation background and Marshall insisted on the African prince and the anti-slavery petition, and the film therefore has a subject underneath the marketing at all. AIP financed and released it.
The performance is dignified and out of all proportion to the production around it. Marshall plays Mamuwalde as a man who has lost a civilization, a wife and two centuries, and the grief in it is played completely straight while everything else in the film isn’t. The Los Angeles material is the weaker half and the budget shows in most of it. The vampire makeup is minimal, the supporting cast are uneven, and the film moves between tragedy and blaxploitation convention without ever settling on which register it wants to finish in. The ending is the strongest thing in the film. Mamuwalde walks into sunlight instead of continue without the woman he believes is his wife returned, and Crain holds the decomposition long enough that it stops being an effect and becomes something considerably sadder than the film had earned.
Marshall is the reason I’d send anybody to this film. He took a cash-in and forced a real tragedy into it through sheer stubbornness, and that moves me more than anything the script does. The rest of the picture lets him down. Once the budget and the blaxploitation furniture take over, you can watch him carrying scenes that should be carrying him.
7. Blood for Dracula (1974) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"A Dracula too weak to keep anything down."
Paul Morrissey made it back to back with Flesh for Frankenstein using the same crew, the same locations and much of the same cast, and Andy Warhol’s name went on both. The result is the strangest Dracula adaptation anybody has committed to film. Both films were shot in Italy over a matter of weeks.
The premise is funny and entirely sustained. Dracula can only drink the blood of virgins, Romania has run out of them, and he travels to Catholic Italy with his servant looking for a family with daughters, where he’s repeatedly made violently ill by finding out he’s been misinformed.
Udo Kier plays him as a dying invalid instead of as a predator, the decision that makes the comedy work. He’s weak, he’s wheeled around, he vomits at length, and nothing about the performance asks an audience to find him frightening at any point.
Joe Dallesandro plays the estate handyman as an American Marxist with a Brooklyn accent and no attempt at anything else, and the class argument underneath the film is delivered entirely through him. The aristocracy is dying, he says so repeatedly, and the film agrees with him about it.
The last act is the most extreme thing in any Dracula film and the tone never breaks. Limbs are removed with an axe in a single location, the effects are crude, and Morrissey plays the whole sequence at the same deadpan pitch as everything preceding it.
8. The Hunger (1983) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"They do not die. They stay conscious in the attic."
Tony Scott made his first feature and it looks like nothing else in the genre, both the reason it was dismissed in 1983 and the reason it’s lasted. Smoke, backlight, slow dissolves and doves in interiors, with a Bauhaus performance over the opening credits.
The best idea in the film is the premise, and it’s cruel. Miriam’s companions don’t die, they age catastrophically over a matter of days while remaining conscious, and she keeps every one of them in coffins in the attic where they stay awake and aware indefinitely.
David Bowie plays the decline and it’s the best acting he did. John ages several decades across a single afternoon in a waiting room, the prosthetics by Dick Smith are extraordinary, and the sequence where he’s left waiting by a receptionist is the cruellest thing in the picture. Catherine Deneuve plays Miriam as somebody who has done this many times and grieves each time anyway, the note that stops the film being merely beautiful. She’s not lying to her companions about what will happen, she simply doesn’t tell them when it’s beginning.
Susan Sarandon plays the gerontologist and the film’s second half belongs to her. The research material is thin, the seduction is the sequence everybody discusses, and the ending was reshot against Scott’s wishes into something that resolves considerably less than the original cut did. Scott didn’t direct another horror film.
Bowie in that waiting room is the scene I’d hand anybody who claims horror can’t be sad. The film around him is gorgeous and a little hollow, and I think Scott cared more about the smoke and the doves than about Sarandon’s half. The reshot ending was a mistake. Scott didn’t want it, and a picture built on a cruel, permanent idea deserved the finish its director chose.
9. Vampire’s Kiss (1988) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"He buys the fangs from a shop. There is no vampire."
Robert Bierman made a film that was buried on release and has become the single most circulated source of Nicolas Cage footage on the internet. The alphabet scene, the cockroach and the sunglasses have all outlived any awareness of what the film around them is doing.
Peter isn’t a vampire and never becomes one, and that’s the premise. He’s a literary agent having a psychotic break, he buys plastic fangs from a shop, he sleeps under an upturned sofa, and every supernatural element in the picture is something the audience watches him invent for himself.
Cage’s performance is extraordinary and the reputation has done it real damage. He’s doing something deliberate and controlled about a man performing a breakdown he’s read about, and the physical work is closer to silent comedy than to anything the period was producing.
The treatment of Alva is the film’s actual subject and it’s considerably harder to watch than the comedy. Maria Conchita Alonso plays a secretary systematically terrorized by her employer over a misfiled contract, and the film is clear that this is the real violence in the picture.
He did eat a live cockroach and has discussed it for thirty-five years since. Bierman offered alternatives, Cage insisted, and the take used is the second of two because something going wrong with the camera interrupted the first during the only part nobody wanted to repeat.
The Demeter is fixed before the first scene and The Fearless Vampire Killers has the rescuers carry the plague out. Build toward a known end in the Plot Handbook.
10. Nadja (1994) [full review]
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RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Shot on a toy camera because nothing else was affordable."
Michael Almereyda shot it in black and white on a mixture of film stock and a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 toy camera, and David Lynch executive produced and appears briefly as a morgue attendant. The result is a Dracula sequel set in downtown Manhattan among people who are mostly bored.
The toy camera footage is the film’s signature and it was a budget decision that became a style. Pixelvision produces a grainy, smeared, low-resolution image, Almereyda uses it for the vampire point of view sequences, and the effect is closer to memory than to anything the genre had tried.
Elina Lowensohn plays Nadja as exhausted by her own condition and by her family, and the narration is delivered in a flat affectless register throughout. She’s Dracula’s daughter, she’s tired of it, and the film treats the inheritance as a burden nobody consulted her about. Peter Fonda plays Van Helsing as a burnt-out eccentric who has been at this for decades and is clearly enjoying none of it. The performance is loose, the character is unreliable, and he’s the only person in the film with any energy about the situation at all.
11. Underworld Series (2003-2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of Underworld Series (2003-2016)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Elders who sleep in rotation, doing the work a chronicle would."
Five films across thirteen years built on a war between vampires and lycans that predates the first picture by centuries. Len Wiseman directed two, Kate Beckinsale appears in four, and the visual signature of blue filters, leather and rain is consistent enough across all five to be the series’ actual identity.
The most coherent mythology and the best structure belong to the 2003 film. A hereditary conflict, a bloodline nobody has exploited, and a political arrangement among the vampires where elders sleep in rotation for centuries at a time and wake into a world their subordinates have been running without them.
Rise of the Lycans in 2009 is the best of the five and nobody saw it. It’s a prequel with Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy, it removes Beckinsale almost entirely, and it’s an argument about a slave revolt sitting underneath the genre material it’s obliged to deliver. The escalation problem is the same one Resident Evil has. Selene acquires abilities across the sequence, each film requires a larger threat to justify itself, and by Blood Wars the mythology has accumulated more rules than any of the plots have room to use or explain properly. The production design is the reason the series held an audience for thirteen years. The coven house, the lycan dens and the elder chambers are all built practically, and the films look considerably more expensive than the budgets they were made on suggest they should.
I enjoy these films more than I can defend.
The sleeping elders are a smart piece of design, and Rise of the Lycans deserved the audience it never found. My problem is the escalation. By Blood Wars the series was inventing rules faster than it could use them, and a franchise whose real identity was a mood shouldn’t have let its mythology bury it.
12. The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"Everybody knows the ship arrives empty."
Andre Ovredal adapted the ship’s log chapter from Dracula, roughly eight pages of the novel, into a full feature. The project had been in development for close to twenty years with several directors attached, and it arrived in 2023 to almost no audience at all.
In this closed-room horror, everybody in the room already knows the ending. The ship reaches Whitby with nobody aboard, the novel says so, and the film opens on the wreck before going back four weeks to establish a crew the audience has already been told doesn’t survive.
Javier Botet plays Dracula as a creature instead of as a count, and the design is the best thing in the picture. He’s emaciated, batlike and entirely without speech or aristocracy, and the film refuses every piece of the character’s accumulated glamour from the previous century of adaptations.
Corey Hawkins plays a Cambridge-trained doctor who can’t get work because of his race, and the material is better than the film needs it to be. He’s the most competent person aboard, he’s repeatedly overruled, and the ship’s hierarchy is the second problem the crew can’t solve.
The film’s failure is pacing instead of concept. The crew are picked off in an order the audience can predict, the middle hour repeats the same night three times with different victims, and a premise built on inevitability needs considerably more invention than this one supplies.
13. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) [full review]
► Read the full review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A city makes blending in unnecessary."
Philip Kaufman remade the 1956 film and moved it to San Francisco, the decision that makes it work. Paranoia functions in a city because anonymity was already normal there, and nobody notices a person behaving strangely among several hundred thousand others doing the same. W. D. Richter wrote the screenplay.
Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector and the casting of the whole film is against type. Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright are all doing quiet, naturalistic work, and Leonard Nimoy plays a self-help author whose entire profession is explaining away exactly the symptom being reported.
The pod effects are the best practical work of the decade and unpleasant to watch. The forming bodies, the filaments, the flower stage and the partially completed duplicate in the greenhouse are all mechanical, built at full scale, and shot in unflattering light without any concealment.
The sound design is where the horror comes from. The scream the duplicates use to identify humans was constructed from a pig recording, it arrives without warning, and Kaufman withholds it for most of the running time so nobody in the audience knows it’s coming when it does.
The last shot is the bleakest ending in American science fiction. Sutherland walking through a plaza, recognized by somebody who survived, and a sound coming out of him that settles everything the film has been carefully declining to settle for the previous two hours. Kaufman refused to soften it for the studio.
I admire this film more than I enjoy it. The pods are horrible in exactly the right way, and I can’t forget that final scream.
It stays at a six for me because it’s so cold on the way there. I respect every choice Kaufman made, and I still find the long stretch before the ending hard to like.
Amityville traps a family with a second mortgage, and The Purge spends a country-sized premise inside one house. Get the confinement right in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. The Amityville Horror (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Amityville Horror (1979)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"They cannot leave because the mortgage is already stretched."
Stuart Rosenberg adapted Jay Anson’s book about the Lutz family, who lasted twenty-eight days in a Long Island house where a mass murder had happened the previous year. The film took over eighty-six million dollars on a budget near four and a half. Rod Steiger plays the priest who tries to bless it.
The financial horror works, and nobody discusses it. The Lutzes can’t leave because the house was the only one they could afford, the mortgage is stretched, and George is watching a business fail while the heating bill climbs for reasons nobody can account for. James Brolin plays the deterioration well and the film gives him an arc. He stops washing, he can’t get warm, he’s chopping wood at three in the morning, and the performance works equally well as possession or as a man having a breakdown in front of his family.
The material strands Margot Kidder, and she does what she can with it. Kathy is frightened, she’s ignored, and the screenplay has her react to events instead of driving any part of the story, the film’s clearest structural weakness across two hours. Rosenberg had made Cool Hand Luke.
The claims have been thoroughly disputed since and the lawyer for the previous killer has stated publicly that the haunting was invented over several bottles of wine. The film presents itself as a true story throughout and nothing in it’s survived any subsequent examination.
15. Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Forty minutes of institution before anybody dies."
Charles E. Sellier Jr. made a Christmas slasher that was pulled from cinemas after two weeks following protests from parents, and Siskel and Ebert read the crew’s names aloud on television and said shame after each one. It’s become the most famous thing about the film by a considerable distance.
The first act is better than the reputation allows and takes its time. A boy watches his parents murdered by a man in a Santa suit, is raised in an orphanage by a Mother Superior who punishes him for everything, and the film spends forty minutes on the construction before anything happens.
Robert Brian Wilson plays Billy as damaged instead of as a monster, and the film’s position is that an institution built him. Every adult who could have intervened chose punishment, and the picture is clear that the violence is the outcome of a traceable process. The killings are the part that caused the trouble and they’re considerably less extensive than the protest suggested. The sled decapitation and the antler sequence are the two anybody remembers, and both were cut for the original release before being restored on video years afterward. Four sequels followed and the second is almost entirely footage from the first. Part 2 runs roughly forty minutes of recap before its own story starts, and it’s made it a durable joke and is the only reason anybody has seen any of the later entries.
16. Innocent Blood (1992) [full review]
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RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"A crime family that works out immortality is good for business."
John Landis made a vampire gangster film eleven years after American Werewolf and the combination almost works. A French vampire feeds only on criminals in Pittsburgh, interrupts a meal, and accidentally turns a mafia boss who understands immediately what has been handed to him. Warner Bros. released it in September 1992.
Robert Loggia is the reason to watch it and he’s having a wonderful time. Sallie Macelli works out the rules fast, starts turning his own organization, and the film’s best idea is a crime family that becomes functionally immortal and considerably better at the business as a result.
Anne Parillaud plays Marie and the film can’t decide what to do with her. She’s the protagonist, the morality and the exposition, and Landis keeps interrupting her material for gangster comedy that’s funnier but has nothing to do with what she’s in the picture for.
The practical effects are excellent and the morgue sequence is the standout. A turned corpse waking during an autopsy, staged with prosthetics and a sense of a room full of people who have no procedure for what is happening in front of them. Rick Baker supervised the makeup work.
The tonal problem is the same one American Werewolf solved and this film doesn’t. The comedy and the horror sit beside each other instead of inside each other, and Landis never finds the register that let the earlier picture run both at once without either undercutting the other.
17. I Am Legend (2007) [full review]
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RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"The title means the opposite of what the film delivers."
Francis Lawrence adapted Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel and produced the most expensive of four attempts at it. Will Smith carries close to an hour alone with a dog, the empty Manhattan work is impressive, and the film cost around one hundred and fifty million dollars. The first half is the best material and almost nothing happens in it. Neville’s routine, the mannequins he’s arranged and speaks to, the video store conversations, and a man maintaining a schedule that exists entirely to keep him from noticing how long he’s been alone. Sam is the film’s real subject and the sequence with the dog is the most affecting thing Smith has done. The infection, the decision and the grip on the collar are staged without music, at length, and the picture never returns to the emotional register afterward. The Darkseekers are the failure and the digital work has aged badly. They were built as computer-generated figures after practical makeup tests were abandoned, they move in a way nothing physical could, and the film loses every piece of the credibility the empty city had established.
The title means the opposite of what the film delivers. Matheson’s novel ends with Neville realizing he’s the monster in the new society’s mythology, and the theatrical version replaces that with a sacrifice and a cure while an alternate ending closer to the book exists on the disc.
I found that dog sequence devastating, and I’d put the first hour up against almost anything in the genre.
Then the Darkseekers show up looking like a video game and I lose interest. The ending is the worst part. Matheson wrote a final page that turns the whole book inside out. The theatrical cut swaps it for a cure and keeps his title anyway. That kind of vandalism is indefensible.
Vampire’s Kiss has no vampire in it and Silent Night builds its killer out of an institution. Two ways to write damage, in the Deep Character Handbook.
18. The Purge (2013) [full review]
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RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"A country-sized premise spent inside one gated house."
James DeMonaco built a premise that was considerably bigger than the film he made with it. One night a year all crime is legal, emergency services are suspended, and the country has solved unemployment and poverty as a result of the arrangement. Universal released it in June 2013. It’s a home invasion picture, and the scale is the disappointment. Everything interesting about the concept happens outside a single wealthy house in a gated community, and the audience is given a security system, a family and a siege instead of the country the premise describes.
Ethan Hawke plays a man who sells the security systems and the film’s sharpest idea is that his neighbors resent him for it. The wealth came from the arrangement, the community knows it, and the resentment turns out to be the actual threat instead of anybody outside the gates.
The class argument comes out plainly, and then the film drops it. The purge exists to remove the poor and the uninsured, several characters say so directly, and the film has no interest in following the observation anywhere once it’s been placed in the dialogue. Nobody in the film disputes the claim.
The sequels understood what this film didn’t. Anarchy moves to the street and shows the city, Election Year follows a political campaign, and the series improved by abandoning the house the first picture never managed to leave for more than a few minutes. DeMonaco wrote all three.
This one frustrates me. DeMonaco had a premise big enough to carry a whole country and parked it in a single living room, and I spent the film wishing the camera would walk out the front door. Hawke’s resentful neighbors are the best idea in it. The sequels proved the bigger film was possible, and that makes the first one harder for me to forgive.
19. All Cheerleaders Die (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of All Cheerleaders Die (2013)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.2/10
"A stone rule that keeps producing scenes."
Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson remade their own 2001 shot-on-video film with a budget, and the result is a high school revenge picture that changes genre twice inside ninety minutes. It went almost entirely unseen and has a small following that found it later. It premiered at Toronto in 2013.
About thirty minutes in, the premise arrives, and nothing before it prepares the audience. Four cheerleaders die in a car accident and a classmate resurrects them using stones, and the film is about a supernatural revenge scheme that was originally an ordinary social one.
The stone mechanism is the best idea in it. Each girl is linked to a stone, they can swap bodies when the stones touch, and the film builds several sequences on a rule it establishes early and then obeys exactly, including one where the wrong pair end up in each other.
The tone is the problem and the film never settles. Satire, body horror, teen comedy and cruelty arrive in rotation, and McKee has done considerably better work elsewhere at holding a register while the content underneath it shifts. McKee had made May and The Woman before it.
Caitlin Stasey owns it and the performance is the reason anybody found the film. Maddy is running a scheme from the opening scene, she’s not sympathetic, and the picture treats her plan as understandable without ever asking an audience to approve of any part of it.
20. Warm Bodies (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Warm Bodies (2013)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"He narrates in a voice nobody in the film can hear."
Jonathan Levine adapted Isaac Marion’s novel and made a zombie romantic comedy that’s considerably better than that description suggests. R narrates his own condition in a voice he can’t speak aloud, the structural joke the whole film is built on and sustains for ninety minutes. The narration device does real work. R is articulate, self-aware and funny inside his own head while producing nothing but groans externally, and the gap between what he thinks and what anybody hears is both the comedy and the loneliness the film is about.
Nicholas Hoult plays it almost entirely physically and the performance is careful. The gradual return of color to his face, the first heartbeat, the shift in how he walks, all of it is staged in small increments across the film instead of arriving as a single transformation.
The bonies are the weakest element and the design is generic. They’re fully digital, they have no personality beyond hunger, and the film needs a threat that can’t be reasoned with so that the reasoning with R can be the point, a functional decision executed without imagination.
Romeo and Juliet is the structure, stated openly, and the film is unembarrassed about it. R and Julie, a balcony, a Mercutio, and the argument underneath is that the cure for the condition is being looked at by somebody who doesn’t immediately decide what you are.
I expected to roll my eyes at a zombie romantic comedy, and it charmed me more than I wanted it to. Hoult and that trapped inner voice do real work, and the idea that being seen properly can bring you back is a sweet one. The bonies weaken it for me. A lazy digital monster in a film this careful about its hero feels like somebody ran out of time or interest.
Honorable Mentions: Horror Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
The Addiction (1995)
Abel Ferrara made a vampire film about a philosophy doctoral student in black and white, where the condition is addiction and the dialogue is quotations from Nietzsche and Sartre. Lili Taylor carries all of it.
Habit (1995)
Larry Fessenden wrote, directed and starred as a man drinking heavily in New York who may or may not be involved with a vampire. The film never confirms it and the ambiguity is the whole design.
Ganja & Hess (1973)
Bill Gunn was hired to make a Blacula follow-up and delivered an experimental film about addiction, faith and class that the producers recut entirely. The original version was restored decades later.
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Bava built a body-count structure around an inheritance dispute and thirteen killings with no detective anywhere in it. Friday the 13th Part 2 copied two of the murders shot for shot a decade later.
Kiss of the Damned (2012)
Xan Cassavetes made a deliberately retro vampire film with the look of seventies European horror, about a household who have agreed on rules and a sister who refuses to follow any of them.
Deathdream (1974)
Bob Clark adapted The Monkey’s Paw into a Vietnam film where a dead soldier comes home and his family won’t admit what he is. It’s the bleakest thing he made before Black Christmas.
Shivers (1975)
Cronenberg’s first feature, set in a single Montreal apartment tower where a parasite spreads through the building. The Canadian parliament debated whether it should have received public funding.
The Brood (1979)
Cronenberg wrote it during a custody battle and has described it as his version of Kramer vs. Kramer. Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed are both extraordinary and the final reveal is upsetting.
Burnt Offerings (1976)
Dan Curtis put a family in a summer rental that repairs itself when somebody in it is harmed. Karen Black, Oliver Reed and Bette Davis are all in it and the ending is unusually cruel.
The Changeling (1980)
George C. Scott in a Seattle mansion with a wheelchair on a staircase and a seance sequence that runs long and quiet. It’s the most restrained haunted house film of its decade.
The Orphanage (2007)
J. A. Bayona built a ghost story around a woman returning to the institution where she grew up, produced by del Toro. The game sequence with the wall is the best thing in it.
The House of the Devil (2009)
Ti West made a film that looks and moves exactly like 1983, with a babysitting job in a remote house and almost nothing happening for an hour. The patience is the entire technique.
Dishonorable Mentions: Horror Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008)
A direct-to-video sequel twenty-one years later with a surfing gang, a new pair of siblings and Corey Feldman returning. It repeats the original beat for beat without any of the design.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
Mel Brooks parodying a property that Polanski and Morrissey had already parodied, twenty years after both. Leslie Nielsen is game and the film has no jokes the genre hadn’t already made.
Once Bitten (1985)
Lauren Hutton as a countess who needs the blood of virgins and a young Jim Carrey as the target. The premise is a single joke and the film runs ninety-four minutes on it.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)
An adaptation of twelve novels compressed into one film, intended to launch a series and canceled immediately. John C. Reilly is well cast and the mythology arrives faster than anybody can hold it.
30 Days of Night: Dark Days (2010)
A direct-to-video sequel that moves to Los Angeles, recasts the survivor and gives the vampires English dialogue. Every element that made the first film distinctive is removed in the opening reel.
The Moth Diaries (2011)
Mary Harron adapted a boarding school novel about an obsessive friendship and a possible vampire, and the film explains the ambiguity away in narration. The novel leaves it open throughout.
What Do You Think?
I’d defend almost every film in this tier to a friend with a caveat attached, and the caveats make me grumpy. Too many came from outside the picture. MGM recut Polanski and Tony Scott lost his ending to a reshoot he didn’t want, and in both cases the people who made the film lost the argument to people who didn’t. That stings more than a weak script does. Tell me which of these vampire variations you think worked best, and which one you’d send back for another draft.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
