THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks
FEW ANTIHEROES ARE as reliably busy as that weird pop-culture conflation of Bram Stoker’s vampire Count Dracula and the historical Wallachian warlord Vlad Tepes. Currently, he’s manifesting in Osman Kaya’s Turkish mini-epic The Hunt For Vlad The Impaler (aka Deliler), in which seven magnificent warriors with cool handles like ‘the Silent One’ and ‘the Nameless One’ protect grateful Wallachians from their horrible ruler (Erkan Petekkaya). He’s also in Jon Keeyes’ low-budget Victorian horror whodunnit Dracula Bloodline (aka Phobia), in which several Vlad descendents worry about the family curse and take part in a group therapy session run by the feminist best friend (Erica Leerhsen) of huge-bearded Sigmund Freud.
The Hunt... is what you’d expect if the General Custer Fan Club made a film about Sitting Bull, representing the Ottoman Empire as a haven of religious tolerance — some Jewish people do a happy dance to celebrate this — and the Wallachians as grateful for being conquered just so long as it limits their own monarch’s habit of sticking them on poles. It’s a spaghetti-western swashbuckler, with tattooed goodies making odd fashion statements (big, black Hawkman wings stapled to armour) and swearing long-winded oaths of loyalty before plunging into battle. The Drac element stretches to copping a plot from Hammer’s The Satanic Rites Of Dracula, as Vlad invents biological warfare by sponsoring a nutcase minion who breeds a special strain of plague-spreading rat.
Dracula Bloodline is even cheaper, and strangely structured. Its workable old-dark-rapid-response house murder mystery, with the possibility that some Draculas in the group are innocent bystanders, is bookended by trips to Paris, France (shot in Dallas, Texas) to hang out with historical characters, skip through a Jack The Ripper/vampire serial killer plot, and set up some ranting-through-fangs speechifying. Connoisseurs of Dracula relatives will find Chase Jeffrey’s proto-sparkly Val Drakul a bit of a drip, while Jonathan Brooks’ manic Nosferatu knock-off chews more ham than jugular vein.
From the ‘Someone Had To Make It’ file comes quickie Corona Zombies , directed (if that’s the word) by the great Charles Band (Trancers). Some new material shot in difficult circumstances, featuring jokes about hoarding toilet paper that feel so ‘two months ago’, brackets gore scenes from the well-remembered Zombies Vs Strippers and the silly 1980 video nasty Zombie Creeping Flesh, overdubbed What’s Up, Tiger Lily? style. Only an hour long, it could have been a lot worse. however, my immediate takeaway was an urge to watch Zombie Creeping Flesh (an absolute hoot) without the overlaid snark.
More interestingly in tune with these troubled times is Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever , in which a mysterious Lovecraftian cephalopod spreads an infection through the fractious crew of an Irish trawler while a neuroatypical scientist (Hermione Corfield) tries to convince them to self-isolate. Then there’s Joel Potrykus’ 1999-set, stay-at-home, stoner-slacker-weirdo picture Relaxer , in which a schlub (Joshua Barge) vows not to get off his couch until he’s finished a notoriously glitchy level of Pac-man before the Millennium Bug bricks his home computer. Sea Fever is a suspenseful trapped-with-a-monster horror movie with an unusual mix of smart science and credible character players (Dougray Scott, Connie Nielsen, Olwen Fouéré), while watching Relaxer is the sort of endurance test its hero sets himself, but the film nevertheless helpfully surfs the zeitgeist.