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"Unnnggh," says Carpenter as he sits on the john, shitting out a monster turd. He stands up and declares, "Wow, look at the size of that! That's a big shit. Honey, come look at this." His wife enters the bathroom, "Oh, John, it's a masterpiece!" "It better be, because it was hard to make. That piece of shit was too wide for my asshole." "Whatever will you do with it?" asks his loving wife. "You think any studio would buy it?" he wonders aloud. "I don't see why not. Did you have some corn?" "No, no, that's James Woods." And, the rest is cinematic history. John Carpenter's latest effort might be the greatest piece of shit ever made, but I don't review shit. I review movies. And as a movie, "Vampires" is so astonishingly lame that it accidentally avoided a one-finger critique. WARNING: In this review I give away all of the plot twists because I don't think anyone should waste their money on this stinker. If you do anyway, you get what you deserve. Woods is Jack Crow, a name that has as many syllables as the screenwriter could handle, a vampire slayer working for the Vatican. He has a band of misfits and a priest that help him kill vampires with stakes and this super cheesy effect of dragging them into the sunlight where they burst into flames. The misfits kill a bunch of vampires but not the "master," a 600 year old goth-rock lover in trench coat named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) who is seeking some crazy cross that will let him become a daywalker. Well after all of Griffith's little soldiers are dead, he's a pissed off master vampire. He visits the "wild" party that Woods' band of white-trash slayers are throwing. I say "wild" because that's what the screenwriter and director want us to think. He must be about 96 years old, then. There is loud rock and roll, naked hookers and lots of booze. It is the lonely screenwriter's pedestrian vision of what happens at all the parties he isn't invited to. Griffith kills everyone except Woods, hooker Sheryl Lee, and everyone's least favorite actor, Daniel "I'm Alec's drug-swilling brother" Baldwin. These two now must stop the master before he kills again. First Woods goes to the church where the Cardinal tells him he can't go after the master alone. He must find a new team of misfits. And he must take along the weaselly priest poorly played by Tim Guinee. Over the next hour or so, Woods and everyone else abuses everyone, especially poor Sheryl Lee. There are loads of blood, fisticuffs, and swearing. They tie Lee naked to a bed, they handcuff her to a Jeep, they call her "bitch" dozens of times, and they slap her around something fierce. It is the most offensive treatment of a woman I've ever seen, and it's not even funny. It just fucking sucks. But maybe it will go over big with the Dungeons and Dragons crowd that don't know how to interact with women. After a suitable amount of fucking around, there is a big showdown between Griffith and Woods. Woods finds out the Cardinal has bought immortality by selling out to the vampires and giving up Woods. They capture Woods and will use his blood in some ancient Catholic ritual. It looks pretty bleak for our hero until the very last moment, when, in an unsurprising, drawn out, stupid climax Woods and Company win. Yay! Now we can all leave the theater. Now, why does this movie blow worse than a Conair blow dryer? Let me count the ways:
I could go on and on, but screw it. Let's just say there are no redeeming qualities to Mr. Carpenter's big turd except that it's so bad that I laughed at it for the last hour. One finger for quality, plus one finger for the audacity the studio had in releasing it. Next time you get an idea for a movie, Mr. Carpenter, please just flush.
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