JANUARY 26, 2009
GENRE: VAMPIRE
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)
See? I swore off watching nonsense like BloodWars (aka The Thirst: Blood War), yet I am an optimist at heart. So I watch it, and then remember exactly why I swore off watching this shit in the first place. Granted, this is hardly a Dark Harvest-ian no-name affair – the film features Tony Todd AND C. Thomas Howell, which at least suggests some semblance of a budget. Sadly, one can only assume the entire budget went to their salaries, because it sure as hell ain’t present on the screen.
For starters, it takes place in a college. The cafeteria is a few card tables with folding chairs next to a small buffet line that wouldn’t even cut it in a high school. Even my college, hardly a "Country's 10 Best Schools" candidate, had gourmet food and a separate dining hall. The hero’s dorm room looks suspiciously like the spare bedroom in your grandmother’s house, complete with a nice couch and tasteful art on the wall. The only thing that feels legit is the frat guy’s house, only because it, like all other movie frat guy houses, is a piece of shit rundown thing on a suburban street.
But what really sinks the movie is a complete lack of blood, wars, or any combination of the two*. I found out later that the title was originally just The Thirst, but even that hardly qualifies as appropriate. Most of the movie is about a bunch of folks who stepped in off of a LARP session in order to tell the tale about a bunch of dueling vampire clans and the guys who are after them, and also of the love triangle between a vegetarian, a girl, and a rapist frat guy with supernatural powers.
I’d like to dedicate a paragraph to the latter. He has some sort of telekinesis, but he doesn’t seem to be a vampire or anything. And he goes down pretty easily when him and the hero fight over the girl after he attempts to rape her (this actually is a no win for her – the hero guy becomes a vampire as the result of this fight (don’t ask), and later more or less rapes her as well). So why he has powers, I have no idea - He’s the son of a sentry (the monk-esque vampire hunters), but those are the good guys, so why he acts like a total dick is beyond me. But also, the guy, and all of the other characters, are supposed to be college students, but they act like grade schoolers. I once wrote a short script called The Bully which detailed what would happen if there was a bully in college demanding lunch money and such, and it’s pretty much exactly the same thing I see here. Except mine was played for laughs.
Another big problem is that the entire movie is just people TALKING about cool stuff. It’s like watching others play Dungeons & Dragons. They talk about cool sounding battles and powers and everything, but its just folks sitting at a table talking about doing them. There’s some decent martial arts stuff near the end of the movie, but it’s far too little too late.
And the cast! Tony Todd plays the head vampire guy, and it looks like he borrowed his costume from Dracula 3000. C. Thomas Howell has a cameo as a redneck (there is nothing about that phrase that makes sense), and Sean Connery’s son Jason plays a vampire who seems to be an even bigger bad guy than Todd, or something. Since the movie was all talk and no show, I had trouble following it after awhile, because it was all gobbledy-gook. A few hot women kept my eyes at attention, but my ears tuned out right around the time one sentry says to another “My news is grievous: your son has passed. I believe it was the Maltus Coven.”
Thankfully, there are no extras to wade through. My OCD thanks the DVD company and the entire cast and crew for not putting any more effort into the disc than they already wasted on the film itself.
What say you?
*One of my all time favorite bad lines in an otherwise solid movie is in Exorcism Of Emily Rose, when Laura Linney tells the jury “She was not sick, or crazy, or any combination of the two.” There is only ONE possible combination of two things!
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