Every week, I scour Netflix for a movie rated at one star and put it in my queue, suffering through it for your entertainment so that you don’t have to. In the past, I’ve taken on anime cancer demons, softcore Iraq War porn and racist ventriloquism, and this week, it’s a vampire story that makes Twilight look like… well, like something good.
VAMPIRE WARS (1990)
Starring: A bunch of voice actors that I’m pretty sure have Tourette’s.
According to Anime News Network’s encyclopedia, which you’d think would know, Vampire Wars is the story of a CIA agent named Lassar who fights Vampires in “the rural American west,” and considering that it’s:
a) actually bout a freelance terrorist blackmailed into working for the French government,
b) whose name is Kosaburo Kuki, and
c) set entirely in France,
…I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who’s ever been paid enough to actually watch it.
And with good reason: It is thoroughly wretched. For one thing, brother, if you think early ’90s anime voice actors are bad when they’re trying to sound American, just wait’ll you hear them attempt a French accent.
The plot, if you really want to make the stretch of calling it that, focuses on the aforementioned Kuki, whose terrorist resume includes blowing up Tokyo in order to manipulate stock prices, which – and I’m saying this as someone who has only ever dabbled in high finance – seems a little extreme. Regardless, he ends up being framed for the murder-by-spiked-dildo of his lady-friend (an act that seemed to bother me a hell of a lot more than it bothered him) and blackmailed by French officials into discovering what’s going on with an American operation codenamed “Project Dracula.”
Needless to say, Project Dracula is never mentioned again.
Instead, after a hooker gets her face punched in and a sexy secretary does a striptease while she gives Kuki his assignment, we’re introduced to the real love interest, Lamia.
The women in this movie have exactly three settings – useless, horny and dead, usually both and occasionally all three – and Lamia’s no exception, going from shrieking baggage to the kind of sobbing wreck that can only be consoled by some hard ex-terrorist lovin’ without much explanation given for one or the other. And it’s shortly after she’s introduced that the plot goes completely off the rails.
There are people – vampires, one would assume – who want her dead, and Kuki rescues her and then takes her over to her aunt’s house, where she’s confronted with a set of test results mailed over from her doctor’s office. Before Kuki can inch towards the door and make a sprint to the STD clinic, it’s revealed that she has a chemical in her DNA that is completely unknown on the planet Earth.
“I’m havin’ trouble buyin’ this,” says the quick-witted Kuki, “You’re sayin’ she’s some kinda space monster?”
This is never really explained.
Instead, the movie shifts into its third plot, as the vampires show up.
At first, the filmmakers only seem to have the vaguest sort of notions about vampires, getting the whole blood-drinking thing but then filling in the rest with the kind of details you get from talking to an eight year-old while you wait for the train. Eventually, though, this becomes the one thing they actually do explain, through the form of a ten-minute monologue from Blondula up there.
It is, as you might expect at this point, completely incomprehensible, and while I might’ve gotten more out of it if I’d gone through again, Heavy’s not paying me that much. As near as I can figure, all the vampires are actually the descendants of a race of a space-vampire who fought a space-war against computers in his spaceship made of magic until he crash-landed on Earth 5,000 years ago and then fell asleep, which uttely fails to explain how he has descendants.
It’s basically Scientology, but with vampires.
Once that’s cleared up, there’s a big fight on a plane where Kuki gets deservedly stomped by a fat guy, and Lamia gets all pouty and starts glowing, because maybe she’s also an OT VIII Space Vampire.
Then Kuki tells her that they have to go – I swear to God – to Transylvania.
And then it ends.
Seriously, the movie just kinda stops at that point. It’s mercifully short, but it’s like even the producers got fed up with it and said “Are we at an hour? 52 minutes? Screw it, that’s close enough.”
Check out the Worst of Netflix archive.
 Chris Sims is a freelance comedy writer from South Carolina. He briefly attended USC before he dropped out to spend more time with Grand Theft Auto, and his career subsequently took the path that you might expect from someone who makes that sort of decision. He blogs at http://www.the-isb.com and creates comics at http://www.actionagecomics.com. |
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Worst of Netflix: Vampire Wars