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Dec. 19th, 2005 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenWell, I finally watched the fourth and last of the vampire movies I mentioned a while back. This time I got Rey to watch it with me; ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
waitingman had come over for dinner, but managed to avoid Bad Vampire Movie Theatre by dint of a prior engagement, so the two of us watched with a manic dog.
Speaking of which, if you own a cocker spaniel (or any other type of dog) and you are the sort of person who buys chocolate-coated coffee beans (which I'm not, but certain other family members are), you should probably make sure that those coffee beans are stored in a Safe Place That Really Is Safe. I'm just sayin'.
Tonight's fare was This Darkness. Plot summary, once again:
When world-famous genetic engineer Dr. Van Helsing discovers the secret to immortality, his world is ravaged by true-blood vampires. The Lord of the Undead makes a pact with the young doctor: "Make a bride for me, one as perfect as I, and I shall show you wonders this world has never seen." Shadows haunt the doctor, when a hot young student enters his lab and the line between ethics and curiosity are crossed. As bloodshed fills the halls, the battle between Good and Evil begins. Should he believe the promises of the vampire or is he creating another Anti-Christ?
Plot summary: Begins with two women and a young girl in a house. Girl demands to go out to the park; mom says that it's too late (at about this point we know they're All Doomed), but girl insists and they go out anyway. Monster's POV Camera approaches them menacingly, to confirm that they are indeed Doomed.
Meanwhile, other woman heads into the shower. All four of these movies stuck religiously to the "We've Seen Your Breasts, Now You Must Die" formula, but it seems a bit rough to kill her off just for showering. That's what they did, though.
Then we cut back to Two Days Earlier. Two brothers snap polaroids of summer break partiers for money, and then wandering back from the beach they notice Spooky Goths hanging around the toilet block. One of them warns the other to stash the money, then they Split Up (TM) and one of them is killed gruesome-like by vampires in said toilet block. His brother will take the next two days to figure out that something bad has happened to him.
Meanwhile, back at Prestigious University, an improbably young fellow is established as Mr. Veryrich Donor (not the character's actual name), visiting to see what the world-famous genetic engineer Dr. Van Helsing has done with his money for AIDS vaccine research. Another character explains the significance of Van Helsing's work at some length for the benefit of the audience, and then Dr. H himself shows up to deliver a lecture. Dr. H gets most of the better dialogue in the movie, which may possibly have a teensy weensy bit to do with his also being the writer and director. (Later on, vampires will show up and deliver cheesy dialogue of the "if I pause at random bits maybe it'll sound weighty" variety, and he scoffs at it as it deserves, but maybe he ought to have written better dialogue in the first place.)
While he lectures, he is distracted by Vampire Chick In The Audience, whose mystical power is the ability to make him see her in her underwear even when she's fully dressed. Spoooooky. She pops up at random moments in the movie from here on in, mostly to do the "you see me while you're talking to people and suddenly you can't concentrate" shtick.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Our hero delivers a brief lecture on how viruses work, and then goes off to his lab where Sexy New Student is introduced, as is Expendable Black Dude Who Talks Funky, Despite Apparently Having A PhD. They discuss genetics, and this is disconcerting because the dialogue actually had some scientific merit. Yes, there was the obligatory handwaving necessary to set the scene for vampirism-as-virus, and the "uh, and that's how they can shapeshift into bats and wolves" bit wasn't very convincing*. But it was written by somebody who actually knew the difference between somatic and mitochondrial DNA and knew what the function of mitochondria is, and that alone earned it a couple of points.
Then he has Sexy New Student over to his place for dinner, and we meet Two Women And A Girl Who Died In The Opening That Hasn't Happened Yet. I think they're a friend, his housekeeper, and his daughter, or something. They go out to leave him with SNS, and he talks to her about the long history of the Van Helsing family, something that is almost completely irrelevant to anything else that will happen in the film. She's not there long before Vampire Chick shows up and works her patented distraction magic. SNS gets annoyed and stomps out, and having schticked the Vampire Chick moves on to 'schtupp'. Not only is she still in the house next morning when he wakes, but she's downstairs having breakfast, with a prominent milk-moustache. He dreams about cutting himself shaving and lots of blood or something, and then he's woken up to discover that she's not there after all, and the kid is there with the phone: the Dean is pissed, because the FBI have been called in to investigate what he's done with the research money.
On the way to work, he stops in at the local gym/dojo, where the sensei is hard at work demonstrating martial-arts techniques to his students. While we watch, he teaches his students that sometimes you need to use hard techniques (demonstrate blocking techniques), sometimes you need to redirect your enemy's energies and pull him off-balance (aikido-style throw), and sometimes you run up against something so evil you need to drive a stake through his heart. Funnily enough, this character will show up in the movie again later. He's reasonably believable as a martial arts instructor, because he actually is a RL martial arts instructor, and they used his real name so they could take advantage of the money he'd spent on "Ron Little's Dojo" signs. We also establish that while the hero is comically inept in martial arts generally, he can do some fancy moves with a butterfly knife (which are actually reasonably fancy in a decorative sort of way, if of questionable use in combat).
At work, he is menaced by a FBI agent who turns out to have a PhD in biochemistry, who is convinced that he's researching something other than an AIDS vaccine and vows to come back with a warrant & bust him. Then SNS shows up and offers much the same interrogation. He admits to her that actually, he's been working on immortality research. It will come as no particular surprise to anybody here that while doing so, he managed to Awaken A Sleeping Evil (TM). (The Vampire King ends up saying something like "I felt ripples in the gene pool" - I wasn't joking when I said the hero kept most of the decent dialogue for himself.)
Vampire King shows up, tells our hero to make him a queen because he's bored and mortals are stupid, our hero says he'll think about it. Misc. stuff happens (I think some of the above stuff actually fits in here chronologically, but never mind), and a day later our hero tells the Vampire King he's not going to be pushed around. V.K. responds by having his womenfolk killed (we've caught up to the start of the movie!), leaving their heads in his fridge (there's a funny bit from this scene in the outtakes reel at the end), and leaving a "you ought to reconsider" message made with one of those fridge-poetry magnet sets.
Expendable Black Dude shows up, and our hero mopes at him. Then the FBI agent shows up to arrest them, they offer to turn state's evidence, and he immediately agrees to drive to a remote location with them to hunt vampires without calling for backup. He meets and kills an actual vampire, and takes Our Heroes' side. Then they go recruit the martial arts guy, who wants to know how they figured out he's hunting the same sort of creatures they are. They point out the stakes and mallet in his office and the stake-and-mallet pendant he wears around his neck. (I wish I was making this up.) Apparently he was a Psycho Militia Dude until a vampire killed his daughter, everybody thought it was him, but he got off on an insanity plea and three years later is running a dojo in another state with a shitload of firearms cached in his office.
Our Heroes have ascertained that Vampire King is planning to kidnap SNS at a concert that evening, so rather than CALL HER UP AND WARN HER they try to ambush the vampires at the concert. This goes about as badly as you'd expect.
Almost-Disneyesque Side Plot: Turns out the brother who got killed near the start of the movie was drummer for the band who's playing at the concert. They've replaced him with a crappy player who's an asshole and gets killed during the break by two vampires, leaving the stage clear for the younger brother to fill in and show his stuff before joining in the vampire-hunting.
Once everything's gone to hell and VK has kidnapped SNS, Van Helsing agrees to make him his queen potion thingy. He locks the other heroes out of his lab for a couple of minutes, during which a vampire attacks them for no very good reason and Expendable Black Dude is expended saving the FBI agent when the latter takes about half an hour to draw his gun on a charging vampire. Then Our Hero opens the door and reveals to them that it was all a trick to make VK think he'd betrayed them, when actually he'd betrayed VK and made an anti-virus to poison the vampires.
Vampires have headed off to do their thing, and of course the new queen is SNS. Our heroes arrive at an abandoned fort where she's being held (except for Younger Brother, who has vanished into a plot hole never to be seen again). Martial Arts Dude takes on the vampire who killed his daughter, in what's probably a martially-accurate stickfight but wasn't very exciting, and ends up getting vengeance just before dying himself, ho hum. FBI Dude, who still hasn't called any sort of backup, kills some stuff and then gets killed himself, and it's left to our hero to save the day. He has a confrontation with Vampire King and Vampire Chick, who reveals that she is in fact his revived mother (ewww....) while trying to persuade him to joooiiiinnn theeeemmmm. For some reason, he finds this revelation not quite 100% persuasive, and instead performs stabbity death upon VK. VC performs slicy death upon SNS, and then I think she dies too. Van Helsing wanders off, bumps into another vampire, loses his sword, and GOSH WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED HE STILL HAD HIS BUTTERFLY KNIFE IN HIS POCKET? Well, both Rey and myself, for starters. And he somehow decapitates a vampire with one slice of a 4" blade, and that's the end of the movie.
Yeah, it had a lot of silly patches. But it actually had some sort of a plot, and had the money spent on Van Helsing been put into this one instead, I think the vampire-movie-going public would have been better served. It was certainly better than the 1.6 rating it got on IMDB.
*BTW, despite their going out of their way not once but twice to rationalise the ability to shapeshift, nobody shapeshifted into anything at all in the entire movie. Why did they bother?
waitingman had come over for dinner, but managed to avoid Bad Vampire Movie Theatre by dint of a prior engagement, so the two of us watched with a manic dog.Speaking of which, if you own a cocker spaniel (or any other type of dog) and you are the sort of person who buys chocolate-coated coffee beans (which I'm not, but certain other family members are), you should probably make sure that those coffee beans are stored in a Safe Place That Really Is Safe. I'm just sayin'.
Tonight's fare was This Darkness. Plot summary, once again:
When world-famous genetic engineer Dr. Van Helsing discovers the secret to immortality, his world is ravaged by true-blood vampires. The Lord of the Undead makes a pact with the young doctor: "Make a bride for me, one as perfect as I, and I shall show you wonders this world has never seen." Shadows haunt the doctor, when a hot young student enters his lab and the line between ethics and curiosity are crossed. As bloodshed fills the halls, the battle between Good and Evil begins. Should he believe the promises of the vampire or is he creating another Anti-Christ?
Plot summary: Begins with two women and a young girl in a house. Girl demands to go out to the park; mom says that it's too late (at about this point we know they're All Doomed), but girl insists and they go out anyway. Monster's POV Camera approaches them menacingly, to confirm that they are indeed Doomed.
Meanwhile, other woman heads into the shower. All four of these movies stuck religiously to the "We've Seen Your Breasts, Now You Must Die" formula, but it seems a bit rough to kill her off just for showering. That's what they did, though.
Then we cut back to Two Days Earlier. Two brothers snap polaroids of summer break partiers for money, and then wandering back from the beach they notice Spooky Goths hanging around the toilet block. One of them warns the other to stash the money, then they Split Up (TM) and one of them is killed gruesome-like by vampires in said toilet block. His brother will take the next two days to figure out that something bad has happened to him.
Meanwhile, back at Prestigious University, an improbably young fellow is established as Mr. Veryrich Donor (not the character's actual name), visiting to see what the world-famous genetic engineer Dr. Van Helsing has done with his money for AIDS vaccine research. Another character explains the significance of Van Helsing's work at some length for the benefit of the audience, and then Dr. H himself shows up to deliver a lecture. Dr. H gets most of the better dialogue in the movie, which may possibly have a teensy weensy bit to do with his also being the writer and director. (Later on, vampires will show up and deliver cheesy dialogue of the "if I pause at random bits maybe it'll sound weighty" variety, and he scoffs at it as it deserves, but maybe he ought to have written better dialogue in the first place.)
While he lectures, he is distracted by Vampire Chick In The Audience, whose mystical power is the ability to make him see her in her underwear even when she's fully dressed. Spoooooky. She pops up at random moments in the movie from here on in, mostly to do the "you see me while you're talking to people and suddenly you can't concentrate" shtick.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Our hero delivers a brief lecture on how viruses work, and then goes off to his lab where Sexy New Student is introduced, as is Expendable Black Dude Who Talks Funky, Despite Apparently Having A PhD. They discuss genetics, and this is disconcerting because the dialogue actually had some scientific merit. Yes, there was the obligatory handwaving necessary to set the scene for vampirism-as-virus, and the "uh, and that's how they can shapeshift into bats and wolves" bit wasn't very convincing*. But it was written by somebody who actually knew the difference between somatic and mitochondrial DNA and knew what the function of mitochondria is, and that alone earned it a couple of points.
Then he has Sexy New Student over to his place for dinner, and we meet Two Women And A Girl Who Died In The Opening That Hasn't Happened Yet. I think they're a friend, his housekeeper, and his daughter, or something. They go out to leave him with SNS, and he talks to her about the long history of the Van Helsing family, something that is almost completely irrelevant to anything else that will happen in the film. She's not there long before Vampire Chick shows up and works her patented distraction magic. SNS gets annoyed and stomps out, and having schticked the Vampire Chick moves on to 'schtupp'. Not only is she still in the house next morning when he wakes, but she's downstairs having breakfast, with a prominent milk-moustache. He dreams about cutting himself shaving and lots of blood or something, and then he's woken up to discover that she's not there after all, and the kid is there with the phone: the Dean is pissed, because the FBI have been called in to investigate what he's done with the research money.
On the way to work, he stops in at the local gym/dojo, where the sensei is hard at work demonstrating martial-arts techniques to his students. While we watch, he teaches his students that sometimes you need to use hard techniques (demonstrate blocking techniques), sometimes you need to redirect your enemy's energies and pull him off-balance (aikido-style throw), and sometimes you run up against something so evil you need to drive a stake through his heart. Funnily enough, this character will show up in the movie again later. He's reasonably believable as a martial arts instructor, because he actually is a RL martial arts instructor, and they used his real name so they could take advantage of the money he'd spent on "Ron Little's Dojo" signs. We also establish that while the hero is comically inept in martial arts generally, he can do some fancy moves with a butterfly knife (which are actually reasonably fancy in a decorative sort of way, if of questionable use in combat).
At work, he is menaced by a FBI agent who turns out to have a PhD in biochemistry, who is convinced that he's researching something other than an AIDS vaccine and vows to come back with a warrant & bust him. Then SNS shows up and offers much the same interrogation. He admits to her that actually, he's been working on immortality research. It will come as no particular surprise to anybody here that while doing so, he managed to Awaken A Sleeping Evil (TM). (The Vampire King ends up saying something like "I felt ripples in the gene pool" - I wasn't joking when I said the hero kept most of the decent dialogue for himself.)
Vampire King shows up, tells our hero to make him a queen because he's bored and mortals are stupid, our hero says he'll think about it. Misc. stuff happens (I think some of the above stuff actually fits in here chronologically, but never mind), and a day later our hero tells the Vampire King he's not going to be pushed around. V.K. responds by having his womenfolk killed (we've caught up to the start of the movie!), leaving their heads in his fridge (there's a funny bit from this scene in the outtakes reel at the end), and leaving a "you ought to reconsider" message made with one of those fridge-poetry magnet sets.
Expendable Black Dude shows up, and our hero mopes at him. Then the FBI agent shows up to arrest them, they offer to turn state's evidence, and he immediately agrees to drive to a remote location with them to hunt vampires without calling for backup. He meets and kills an actual vampire, and takes Our Heroes' side. Then they go recruit the martial arts guy, who wants to know how they figured out he's hunting the same sort of creatures they are. They point out the stakes and mallet in his office and the stake-and-mallet pendant he wears around his neck. (I wish I was making this up.) Apparently he was a Psycho Militia Dude until a vampire killed his daughter, everybody thought it was him, but he got off on an insanity plea and three years later is running a dojo in another state with a shitload of firearms cached in his office.
Our Heroes have ascertained that Vampire King is planning to kidnap SNS at a concert that evening, so rather than CALL HER UP AND WARN HER they try to ambush the vampires at the concert. This goes about as badly as you'd expect.
Almost-Disneyesque Side Plot: Turns out the brother who got killed near the start of the movie was drummer for the band who's playing at the concert. They've replaced him with a crappy player who's an asshole and gets killed during the break by two vampires, leaving the stage clear for the younger brother to fill in and show his stuff before joining in the vampire-hunting.
Once everything's gone to hell and VK has kidnapped SNS, Van Helsing agrees to make him his queen potion thingy. He locks the other heroes out of his lab for a couple of minutes, during which a vampire attacks them for no very good reason and Expendable Black Dude is expended saving the FBI agent when the latter takes about half an hour to draw his gun on a charging vampire. Then Our Hero opens the door and reveals to them that it was all a trick to make VK think he'd betrayed them, when actually he'd betrayed VK and made an anti-virus to poison the vampires.
Vampires have headed off to do their thing, and of course the new queen is SNS. Our heroes arrive at an abandoned fort where she's being held (except for Younger Brother, who has vanished into a plot hole never to be seen again). Martial Arts Dude takes on the vampire who killed his daughter, in what's probably a martially-accurate stickfight but wasn't very exciting, and ends up getting vengeance just before dying himself, ho hum. FBI Dude, who still hasn't called any sort of backup, kills some stuff and then gets killed himself, and it's left to our hero to save the day. He has a confrontation with Vampire King and Vampire Chick, who reveals that she is in fact his revived mother (ewww....) while trying to persuade him to joooiiiinnn theeeemmmm. For some reason, he finds this revelation not quite 100% persuasive, and instead performs stabbity death upon VK. VC performs slicy death upon SNS, and then I think she dies too. Van Helsing wanders off, bumps into another vampire, loses his sword, and GOSH WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED HE STILL HAD HIS BUTTERFLY KNIFE IN HIS POCKET? Well, both Rey and myself, for starters. And he somehow decapitates a vampire with one slice of a 4" blade, and that's the end of the movie.
Yeah, it had a lot of silly patches. But it actually had some sort of a plot, and had the money spent on Van Helsing been put into this one instead, I think the vampire-movie-going public would have been better served. It was certainly better than the 1.6 rating it got on IMDB.
*BTW, despite their going out of their way not once but twice to rationalise the ability to shapeshift, nobody shapeshifted into anything at all in the entire movie. Why did they bother?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-18 04:28 pm (UTC)Probably filmed the dialog before realizing they didn't have enough budget for the fx to look right would be my guess.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 10:20 pm (UTC)The lead vampire had spooky contact lenses, which worked much better than the bad glowing-red-CGI of two of the other movies.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-18 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-18 10:47 pm (UTC)Mmmm, stabbity death...
no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 09:26 am (UTC)I'd still like to borrow the set, though... How's the hyper hound?
no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 09:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 04:04 pm (UTC)I haven't finished reading yet, but I had to stop here to comment. And my oh-so-intelligent comment is: Hunh!? And I thought some of my story ideas were not worth developing...
Back to reading:
He admits to her that actually, he's been working on immortality research. It will come as no particular surprise to anybody here that while doing so, he managed to Awaken A Sleeping Evil (TM). (The Vampire King ends up saying something like "I felt ripples in the gene pool" - I wasn't joking when I said the hero kept most of the decent dialogue for himself.)
...can't... stop... laughing...
eaving their heads in his fridge (there's a funny bit from this scene in the outtakes reel at the end), and leaving a "you ought to reconsider" message made with one of those fridge-poetry magnet sets.
You know, that's actually creative. And an outtakes reel is always a bonus.
And he somehow decapitates a vampire with one slice of a 4" blade, and that's the end of the movie.
They don't make neck tendons the way they used to, I guess.
I don't know; Van Helsing was kinda fun. It was hilarious if watched with the right eye, and from its outtakes reel, that's the eye the cast themselves had while filming it...
BTW, despite their going out of their way not once but twice to rationalise the ability to shapeshift, nobody shapeshifted into anything at all in the entire movie. Why did they bother?
Three words: Special effects budget. Two more: Ran out.
Thanks for the morning smiles and laughs.