Vampires - Los Muertos
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Movie Reviews of Vampires - Los Muertos
Movie Review: This dvd sucks!
Summary: 4 Stars
I love the movie BUT this dvd is in FULL FRAME only! Freaking product description says full screen and wide screen. WTF??? I am returning this dvd and getting my money back.Movie Review: Come on....it wasn't that bad.
Summary: 4 Stars
The movie wasn't as horrible as some make it out to be. It surely wasn't "the worst vampire movie ever". Jon Bon Jovi didn't suck in the roll either.Movie Review: Badly miscast, lame sequel, with one wasted good idea
Summary: 3 Stars
"Vampires: Los Muertos" is a sequel of sorts to "John Carpenter's Vampires," which means that it inhabits the same world. James Woods and his over the relentless and entertaining chewing of each and every scene has now been replaced by Jon Bon Jovi's lethargic turn as vampire hunter Derek Bliss. I guess he is supposed to be a bad ass just like Woods' character, but he only gets the role half right (the first half people, be nice). This was just a mondo bad casting decision and writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace dug his 2002 film into a hole on that basis alone. The second strike is Arly Jover as the master vampire Una, not just because the name strikes me as silly but also because she is no where near as scary or as sexy as she is supposed to be. If the hero and the villain are essentially boring, what hope can a vampire spaghetti-western have?
Whereas Woods headed an organized group of vampire hunters that was decimated early in the film forcing the hero to go almost solo, Bon Jovi does the reverse. Bliss is a free-lance vampire hunter for hire who has to put together a crew, so there are all sorts of trust and competency issues. If Bliss cannot count on Father Rodrigo (Cristián de la Fuente) then his merry little group and the audience are in for a long hole. We are still in the world where vampires explode into flames when exposed to sunlight, even when you use one of their heads as a hood ornament, but that is also something old and something new along with everything borrowed from the first film. The idea of being able to communicate through the shared blood of the vampire from Stoker's "Dracula" comes back and works in with the more contemporary idea that vampirism is essentially a blood disease.
"Vampires: Los Muertos" is a bad film, but it picked up its third star because of one intriguing idea off of the blood disease idea. Having established that a drug cocktail has stopped Zoey (Natasha Gregson Wagner) the requisite damsel in distress from turning into a vamp despite having been bitten, Wallace does come up with an interesting twist by having Una use the magic medicine to help her take a walk in the sunlight like she was wearing the Gem of Amarra. The execution is not as exciting as the idea and you really wish it had been used in the service of a much better film. Here it is just too little, too late in terms of saving this film from driving off the cliff, but it does stand out as the one bright spot in this dreary little film which continues the idea that vampires are flourishing south of the border.
Movie Review: The Surfboard of Doom
Summary: 3 Stars
It is Thursday which means in this apartment it is bad movie and pizza night and the movie I chose was this one: Vampires - Los Muertos. I was prepared for a stinker. Even though Carpenter's name is on it, the property was just licensed from him or some such thing. I settled down with a beer and pizza and watched the film unveil itself as Jon Bon Jovi works for a mysterious Van Helsing Group and gets hired to take out a 'colony' of vampires by an anonymous source. He suspects it is the Catholics because they lost quite a few hunters a few years before (a not so subtle nod to the first movie.)His mission is to put together a vampire hunting unit. In a nice turn of events, all the guys he is supposed to gather get killed or are dead. The monastary he visits to find the priest from the first movie (who died before he got there) gets wiped out by the vampire and only one survives. Yada yada yada, the movie goes on and he collects a rag tag group of unlikely hunters (a vampire who is on a drug that allows her not to be a vampire, a 16-year-old boy, the "priest" who hunted maybe once, and a big black guy the Van Helsing Group sent to help him.) Who are the turncoats? You know somebody has to, I'll leave that part a secret.
The movie kind of revolves around the Black Cross yet again and a Master Vampire wanting to be able to move around in sunlight (kind of like that medicine the vampire chick is taking...hmmm.)
There are some great moments in the movie though. In the beginning Jon is driving this jeep with a surfboard in the passenger seat. It seems odd until he has to clear out a church of vampires and we discover the surfboard is actually the case for his wooden lances and other weapons. It's cool because it made me think of a cartoon that could stem from this: Jon Bon Jovi and his Surfboard of Doom!
All in all I like this kind of movie, not a lot of thought, just enough twists that they aren't 100% predictable and unlike Blade II where he knows who the traitors are, poor Derek Bliss (JBJ) finds himself befuddled.
The movie played out like a bad rpg video game, though, collecting characters, having little asides, watching expendable characters die on cue and putting in the predictable little twist ending. What twist, yeah right, as if you couldn't guess that Jon Bon Jovi would make it through the movie without ... well, I guess you'll have to watch it to find out.
Movie Review: Mexican Bat Dance
Summary: 3 Stars
Right off the bat you realize that Jon Bon Jovi is no James Woods. Jon is a vampire slayer and works alone (unlike the teams in the first movie). He is essentially a bounty hunter who only handles vampires. Now he has a big new job but the client insists he puts together a team. This is easier than it sounds as slayers are being killed all over the place. A tough new master vampire is making things tough. Jon also meets someone who is infected but has not turned due to an experimental drug. The hope is the drug will continue working until a true cure is found.
The contact takes Jon and his new team to Mexico where it is soon learned that the new vampire master is looking for the Black Cross so that she can walk in the daylight. But is the Cross the only way this can be possible? Some old ruins turn out to be the site of the final showdown and the revelations. We learn the motives for many of the characters including the one who hired the team.
Although the tone of this film is much different from the first, the story is fairly consistent with the first film. When vampires are killed they need to be beheaded and we see the same winch technique used in the first film. We really don't get a sense for the bounty hunting end of things other than that Jon has an agent of some sort and that apparently enough people accept vampires as real so they don't need to work under the Church or any other organization. If you are looking for the edginess of the first film you will not find it here even if the rest of the film is quite entertaining.