Claudia Coulter plays a young woman taken from her husband and son to be turned into a genetically created vampire, and trained to be a deadly assassin. Things go awry when her creators are all killed and Coulter falls in with eye-patch sporting witch Beacham and occult scholar Sidgwick, who want her to retrieve an ancient spell book called Mallues Maleficarum, which lots of nasties also want their hands on. These nasties include an oddly paired fat female vampire (Reeve) and her bloodsucking dwarf companion (Tompkins), a most odd couple indeed.
When I first started watching this British vampire kung-fu film (with really bad grammar in the title, by the way), I felt like I was watching a seriously weak pilot to a failed
Blade meets
Buffy TV series. It had the same cheap, neutered look of a watered-down (though not necessarily unwatchable) genre piece that you tend to get on terrestrial TV, poorly done and some what under-rehersed fight sequences, and a lot of really silly attempts at humour. Although I have since gotten the feeling that this is not a failed TV pilot (just a low-budget film), this does not change my feelings about the film- it still isn’t much chop and looks really, really cheesy.
The story is probably a good place to start, because it typifies both the strength and greatest weakness of the film. On the one hand, the notion of a genetically-produced, butt-kicking vampire is a nice one, and seemingly impossible to screw up. But that’s just a starting off point, the actual plot of the film seemed rather old hat to me, stringing together elements of
Blade,
Buffy,
Dark Angel, and other films and TV shows too numerous to continue to name. If this were indeed a TV series- as I have lower expectations for something on the idiot box (after all, I even occasionally tune into
Smallville- I know, I’m going to hell for it!)- I’m still not sure if I’d have enjoyed it, but it would have been more suitable at any rate. The whole thing is pretty predictable, right down to the revelation of a character’s supposedly hidden sinister motives.
As I said, the action is dull. The swordplay is unexciting and most of the violent scenes are completely ruined by lame amber sparks that were probably inspired by the fake CGI gore in
Blade, but in my view that was the weakest aspect of that otherwise fine film. And it had Wesley Snipes, whereas all we get here are the photogenic Claudia Coulter struggling with her dialogue through dopey fangs (perhaps she should’ve given Christopher Lee a call), Stephanie Beacham wearing weird eye-patches and picking up a paycheck (I was kind of hoping for a Hammer homage, especially with that title), and the comic styling's of chubby Reeve and diminutive Tompkins.
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And that is, at last, where we get to the (few) positives. Whilst Tompkins’ comical dwarf vampire isn’t nearly as funny as the filmmakers seem to think (getting repeatedly whacked with a frying pan was damn funny though), the very idea of his pairing with Reeve is at least original and inspired. Furthermore, Reeve’s character has a backstory that serves as the film’s one truly shining moment- filmed in black and white, in the style of a silent movie (title cards and all), it is actually pretty amusing stuff. In fact, I reckon the whole film should have been about Reeve’s character Charlotte, and have the entire film done in that style.
Overall, though, this is pretty tedious stuff, as one interesting sequence and a maniacal vampire dwarf can’t save an entire film. Even if Coulter were to have disrobed, I wouldn’t have changed my score (Well, maybe I would, but I’d be very upset with myself and have to be punished). You don’t need to see this,
Buffy is probably still on somewhere (or if you prefer something British, try the witchy-themed
Hex, which was pretty good, but short-lived)
