VAMPIRES: OUT FOR BLOOD

Detective Hank Holten, obsessed with his ex-wife, a writer of vampire books, loses control and starts drinking and harassing the woman. During the investigation of a case involving a missing girl, Holten will be bitten by a vampire and his ex-wife will turn out to be his only hope. The vampire in the collective imagination has been and remains one of the most fascinating characters to have ever crossed the history of cinema from the silent era to the high-tech cinema we enjoy today. The sauces in which this literary figure has been served to us range from Gothic horror to comic style, to the most unrestrained parody. If we want to remember some titles in this myriad of films, I would cite "Nosferatu" by Herzog, "Dracula" by Coppola, and "Interview with the Vampire" by Jordan. For the reinterpretations, if we want to call them that, we cite "Ammazzavampiri", "From Dusk Till Dawn", "Vampires", and "The Dark Approaches". You will wonder why I start so far away. Simply to make the young director Richard Brandis, author of this "Out for Blood", understand that the average viewer who approaches a horror film, and in this case a film about vampires, possesses a well-rooted cinematic imagination, and even those who only follow TV series like "Angel" and "Buffy", productions of great quality rich in humor and quotes, when they find themselves in front of a mediocre product like this film cannot help but wonder with what audacity one can mix all the genre cinematography and season it with insipid dialogues, improbable situations, and mediocre actors. The story, if we can call it that, begins with detective Hank Holten, played by an excitable Kevin Dillon ("The Fluid That Kills"), obsessed with his ex-wife, a writer of vampire books; an obsession that will lead him to spy on her and harass her until he ruins his career and falls into alcoholism. His boss John Billings, a disoriented and contrite Lance Henrinksen, to help the now-out-of-his-mind Hank, assigns him the case of a missing girl who will turn out to be a vampire who, after luring him into a sort of initiatory orgy, will feed him to the Vampire Master who will transform him into a creature of the night. Only the killing of the Master can free him from the curse, and in the endeavor, his ex-wife, an expert in the field, will help him. Finding something good in this senseless mess is extremely difficult, and the fact that it is a product only for home video does not justify this total waste of means and money. How Lance Henrinksen ended up in the middle of this is a mystery, his jokes seem to come from the dialogues of a series Z comic book, the makeup of the vampires is as bad as the script, and the ending is so inconclusive that it becomes almost funny. A special applause to the rubber mask of the Vampire Master, an example of how bad makeup can sometimes worsen an already terrible product. What else to say, except stay away if you don't want to waste the rental money; but not only that, because getting to the end of the movie is a real feat.