Official trailer
Vampires gets its 7 by doing one thing almost no other vampire film bothers to do: it treats vampire hunting as a job. Jack Crow and his team gut a nest of vampires in the first fifteen minutes the way a demolition crew takes down a condemned house, and then they get drunk and hire prostitutes and argue about money.
Carpenter took the most over-romanticized monster in the genre and handed it to a crew of profane working men who find the job tedious and dangerous in equal measure. That choice is the film. Everything good about Vampires comes from it, and most of what holds the film back from a higher score comes from Carpenter not fully committing to the strangeness of his own idea.
I had a great time with this movie through the first act and a decent time after that. Carpenter’s instinct to treat the monsters like a pest-control contract is so funny and so right that I kept grinning at the nerve of it, and I wish he’d trusted that instinct all the way to the end credits.
The Western Wearing a Vampire Costume
Vampires is a Western. Carpenter never hid this and the film is better when you stop pretending it’s horror. The vampires are outlaws.
Jack Crow is a gunslinger the Church keeps on retainer the way a frontier town keeps a hired killer it’s ashamed of. The New Mexico landscape is shot like a John Ford picture, all flat light and enormous sky, and the violence has the blunt finality of a gunfight instead of the dread of a haunting.
This is why the film works at all.
Vampire movies almost always reach for gothic atmosphere, and Carpenter wants competent men doing dangerous work in daylight. The vampires get dragged into the sun on a winch cable and burn like struck matches. There’s no seduction, no mist, no candelabra. There’s a steel cable and a truck and a man whose job is to make sure the thing on the other end of the cable catches fire.
When the film commits to this it’s fresh. When it remembers it’s supposed to be a horror film and reaches for the standard moves, it gets worse.
James Woods Is the Whole Movie
James Woods plays Jack Crow as a man who hates vampires with an exhausting, personal venom. This is the correct choice and Woods commits to it completely.
Crow is mean. He’s the kind of competent that comes from doing an awful job for too long and having nothing left in his life except the job. Woods delivers Carpenter’s profanity-soaked dialogue like a man who has run out of patience with the entire world and is mildly insulted that the world keeps requiring him to explain himself.
Woods is the best thing here by a mile. I could listen to him snarl at everybody in the frame for another two hours, and the meanness is what makes Crow such a pleasure, because the film never once tries to make him likable.
The performance sustains the film through its weak stretches.
When the plot sags in the middle, Woods is still interesting to watch, because Crow is interesting even when nothing is happening to him. That’s the difference between a star performance and a good one. A good performance serves the scene. Woods generates scenes out of nothing but attitude.
The problem is that nobody else in the film is operating at his level, and Carpenter doesn’t give them characters strong enough to survive next to him. Daniel Baldwin’s Montoya is supposed to be Crow’s partner and counterweight, but the script gives him a romance subplot that drains the character instead of deepening him.
Sheryl Lee spends most of the film transforming into a vampire. That means she spends most of the film unconscious or feral. The supporting cast exists to be killed or to react to Woods.
The Middle Loses the Thread
The film’s center is its weakest stretch, and it’s weak for one reason: Carpenter splits his attention between the thing that makes the movie special and a romance plot that belongs in a worse film. Katrina bites Montoya, who develops a psychic link to her, and the film spends real screen time on whether he’ll turn and whether he cares about her. None of it works, because the film has spent its first act teaching us that these men view vampires as vermin to be exterminated.
Asking us to suddenly care about a tender connection between a hunter and a turning woman contradicts the movie’s own established logic, and this is where the film loses me. I checked out whenever the Montoya and Katrina scenes came around. I’d have cut the psychic link down to a couple of minutes and spent the time with Crow.
Carpenter built a film about men who kill vampires for money and feel nothing about it.
Then he tried to graft on a love story that requires those same men to feel something. The graft doesn’t take. The film keeps stalling out whenever it tries to make us care about Montoya and Katrina, because the film has trained us to view what’s happening to Katrina as a problem to be solved with fire.
Valek and the Problem of the Legible Villain
Thomas Ian Griffith plays Valek, the first vampire, the one Crow is hunting.
Valek is a problem. He’s physically imposing and the film treats him as an unstoppable force, but he’s never more than a function. He wants an ancient relic that will let vampires walk in daylight. He kills people impressively. That’s the whole character.
The film would be stronger if Valek had a coherent point of view that competed with Crow’s, some argument the audience could half-understand.
Carpenter gives him nothing. He’s a destination for the plot to arrive at. In a film already carried entirely by one performance, a hollow antagonist is a real cost. Crow has nothing to push against except a special effect.
Valek bores me, and I resent that, because a Western lives or dies on its villain. Give me an outlaw with a grudge and a reason and I’ll forgive a lot of plot. Give me a guy who throws people around and says nothing worth hearing and I start checking my watch.
Carpenter’s Craftsmanship
Even at less than his best, Carpenter is a real filmmaker and builds the film with craft. His score, which he composed himself as usual, is a grinding blues-rock thing that fits the sweaty Western tone perfectly.
He stages the daylight kills with a clarity and brutality that most horror directors can’t manage. The opening nest assault is a model of how to establish a world, a team, and a tone in one efficient sequence.
That score is my favorite thing in the film after Woods. It sounds like a bar band that’s been playing since noon, and within a few bars it tells you this is a Western with fangs.
The film also understands its own violence. When the vampires burn, it costs something to watch, because Carpenter shoots the kills with weight. These aren’t throwaway effects. The practical work on the burning vampires and the staking is grimy and convincing in the way Carpenter’s films usually are.
This is the frustrating thing about Vampires. The bones are good. The tone is original. The lead is excellent. The craft is solid. It’s the screenplay’s divided attention that keeps the film from being the minor classic the premise deserved.
Is Vampires worth watching?
Vampires gets its 7 on the strength of an original premise, a great James Woods performance, and Carpenter’s reliable craft. It loses points for a middle act that contradicts its own logic, a romance subplot that drags, and a hollow antagonist who gives the hero nothing to push against.
It’s a film with a minor classic trapped inside it, held back by a screenplay that didn’t trust its own best instinct. Watch it for Woods and for the audacity of turning vampire hunting into blue-collar work.
I land on a 7 because I enjoyed the hell out of Woods and the daylight kills, and the romance subplot and the empty villain kept pulling me out just when I was having fun. Take out the middle act’s detour and give Valek something to say, and I’d be arguing for this as a minor classic. As it stands, it’s a good time with a hole in the middle, and I’d still pick it over most vampire movies that take themselves seriously.
