Movies And Metal

Posts Tagged ‘Vampires’

Although comic book reviews are not normally our thing here at www.moviesandmetal.com, sometimes it does us good to look beyond the music  and films that ‘our’ people are producing and have taste of something different.  And that is what Alex Dementia, frontman with MAM favourites The Resurrection Sorrow  and Midnight Dreams Productions head honcho, has gone and done.

Scripted by Dementia, illustrated by New York artist Isaac Carey Nejako and designed by Seldon Hunt, Vrykolakas: The Unholy is the first in a series of comic books following a story with its roots in the Greek mythology of the Vrykolakas – the dead who return to life to cause misery to the living.  As this is only the first in the series – and is only twenty-three pages long – there isn’t a great deal here to scrutinise, although it must be said that the combination of Nejako’s ‘less-is-more’ illustrative style and an opening scenario that begs the reader to ask questions aplenty is a good start and evocative of The Crow in feel. 

So as soon as issue number two is available then we shall strive to bring you more thoughts.  In the meantime, Vrykolakas: The Unholy is available from the Midnight Dreams Productions website at http://www.midnightdreamspro.com/vrykolakas.html where you can also buy The Resurrection Sorrow’s brilliant debut album Hour of the Wolf, or you can click on the above image.

Originally released in 1987, ‘Near Dark’ is a vampire movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow (‘Point Break’, ‘The Hurt Locker’) and co-written by Bigelow and Eric Red (‘The Hitcher’), although the word ‘vampire’ can only really be used as a convenient description.

Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) is a young cowboy who one night bumps into the mysterious Mae (Jenny Wright), whom he proceeds to pick up and take for a ride in his truck. Seemingly desperate to get home before dawn, Mae starts to get more and more agitated as the sun starts to come up, and thinking she’s playing some sort of game, Caleb stops the truck and asks for a kiss before he continues. Mae leans in and starts kissing Caleb before biting his neck and making a run for it, leaving a startled Caleb to make his way home, on foot as his truck won’t start. The trouble is, as Caleb wonders across the fields towards his house, the sun is coming up and he seems to be burning and in severe pain.

As he reaches his house, Caleb is picked up by a gang – including Mae – and is promptly driven to a disused warehouse where the whole gang go to sleep in total darkness. It turns out that none of the gang are able to go out in daylight and need to drink blood to survive, and in order for Caleb to stay with them, the gang – headed by the intense Jesse (Lance Henriksen) and including Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), the insane Severen (Bill Paxton) and old-soul-in-a-child’s-body Homer (Joshua Miller) – demand he makes a kill, otherwise it’s curtains for the innocent young farmer. While this is going on, Caleb’s father and sister are desperately searching for him in the hope of bringing him home, unaware of what he has become.

Cleverly taking the vampire traditions and basically disregarding them without being disrespectful – the word ‘vampire’ is never used, along with any religious iconography or stakes, running water, fangs, etc. – the only adherence to vampire mythology is the reaction to daylight and the drinking of blood, and this makes the movie stand above more conventional vampire stories, taking away the religious/supernatural elements and putting the vampirism down to some sort of biological trait or virus.

The other aspect of the movie that stands out is the performances, especially those of Henriksen and Paxton as the warped ‘family’ members. There are no backgrounds given to any of these characters, but subtle hints and historical references in the script give clues to their possible origins, and when you give a seasoned actor such as Lance Henriksen such quirks to play with, the results are fantastic.

Unfortunately for this movie, it opened at the same time as some other vampire movie you may have heard of called ‘The Lost Boys’, and when an independent movie with more acting chops than eye-candy is up against a major studio release starring the latest teen idols it really is a no-brainer as to who would fare better at the box-office. A slow-burner on the home video market, the movie seemingly disappeared for many years until the advent of DVD, and actually still looks pretty good by today’s standards.

Overall, ‘Near Dark’ is an intelligent and well-made vampire movie that isn’t shy about making its own rules with regards to the folklore. Tightly directed and well acted, the movie does have some great visuals and the effects are mostly minimal, with only a few shots of excessive gore here and there. Some have decried the ending as a bit of a cop out and it’s easy to see why, but given the fact that the movie treats the vampire condition as biological, it does make some sort of sense (and the same idea was used in ‘Dracula’; so there!) and doesn’t ruin what is otherwise a great movie.

Rating: 8/10

Summary: Clever and well-thought out vampire movie that stands up well nearly a quarter of a century later.

If you like this then try: From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, The Lost Boys, Aliens, Blade, The Devil’s Rejects.

Click on DVD cover to purchase.