★★★
“Vampires vs. Zombies”
Is it possible for a film to try and cram in too much? This might be guilty of that, being simply too full of ideas. It begins with a serial killer mother and son pair, who are also cannibals, to boot. They think they’ve found their next victims, when they pick up a pair of young hitchhikers, Ursula (Steadman) and Rose (Brown). However, the psychos are in for a shock, because their targets are actually a pair of vampires, centuries old. But, wait! There’s more! Weird meteorites have landed on Earth containing alien creatures, that devour human souls. Those they infect turn into aggressive, zombie-like creatures, that can only be terminated by destroying their pineal glands. And I haven’t even touched on Father Cooper (Travis), and his “nun with a gun” associate, Sister Gigi (Smith, right).
You certainly can’t fault this for its inventiveness, and some of the ideas work very well. For example, the soul-stealing aspect of the aliens fits nicely with the vampires; they’re immune to this, because they have no souls. The two leads have good chemistry, exhibiting the easy rapport you’d expect, from people who have known each other for hundreds of years.Yet, they both have their own traits, and feel like individuals. It’s perhaps this angle which feels most pushed out by all the other stuff, and it is a bit of a shame. The idea of vampires dealing with an alien invasion or the zombie apocalypse is strong enough to carry a film. All the other stuff piled on top, feels kinda superfluous, operating as a series of distractions, rather than adding dimensions to proceedings. That’s especially true, given the relatively short running time of only 75 minutes.
Ursula and Rose provide a no-nonsense response to their predicament – or, more accurately, series of predicaments. Their fangs are far from their only weapon; indeed, they’re not much use when it comes to destroying pineal glands. Semiautomatics work much better, and the pair wield them with some enthusiasm. For a low-budget entity, the technical aspects are pretty decent. The model alien which gets dissected with cutlery by our heroines (technically, one of them; the other has a bit of a weak stomach) being a particular highlight.
The other main issue is a lack of escalation. Rather than plot threads being developed, they get replaced. As a result, we reach the end, and almost nothing has been resolved. The aliens are still invading, as the vamps hit the road again. They don’t even seem too fazed by the thought of their food supply being zombified. After all, as one of them points out, there are enough blood-banks in the country to keep them going for a good century. It’s one last piece of invention, in a film that hardly needs it. Yet it seems churlish to complain about too much of that, and this remains a pleasant slice of energetic horror/SF, powered by two heroines with whom it’s fun to spend time.
Dir: Richard Lowry
Star: Victoria Steadman, Kelly Brown, Greg Travis, Kannon Smith


Despite a very brief running time of only 70 minutes, this still manages to seem talky and overlong. That’s a shame, as it manages to waste a good performance from a genre veteran, playing an action heroine who is not your typical one. The former is Camille Keaton, who is having a bit of a B-movie renaissance in her career, forty years after starring in the notorious rape-revenge film, I Spit on Your Grave. And the latter? Well, Keaton is now in her seventies, but based on this, is still capable of wielding a mean shotgun. And clearly, of taking no shit from anyone. Indeed, you could almost read this as the sundown years of her Grave character, Jennifer Hills.
There are times when I am bracing myself, going into a movie. Here’s the synopsis for this one: “A transgender teenage girl on summer vacation in Los Angeles fights to survive after she falls in with four queer feminist vampires, who try to rid the city’s streets of predatory men.” Given my long-standing aversion to message movies, this seemed like 90 minutes of my worst nightmare. What had I let myself in for? But this proved to be surprisingly accessible – even for those of us who are neither transgender nor queer, and are enrolled in the Camille Paglia school of feminism.
This was likely not going to qualify for inclusion here, until a twist in the final 15 minutes. Up until that point, it had been a largely irritating saga, that was considerably more horror than action heroine – and not even good horror at that. I’m still significantly unconvinced about the quality, but must grudgingly admit, this was a twist which I did not particularly see coming (though there is a large clue dropped near the beginning). Three gal-pals, Tamara (Betham), Maddy (Taylor-Compton) and Brooke (Allbright) head for a weekend’s lakeside R&R. On the way, Tamara’s car runs out of fuel, and she encounters the local creeps, but eventually arrives, and joins the other two in scamming drinks out of horny guys.
It’s weird what you stumble across on Amazon Prime. This is the feature-length version of a web series, originally made in 10 episodes. Just based on the title and description – “Delinquent girls are trained to perform risque but dangerous kung fu fight shows in a Las Vegas now owned and operated by the Chinese Mafia.” – I thought it best to wait until Chris was not around. Mostly because I’m not sure I could have stood the dripping sarcasm. Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Everyone remains attached to their clothes, and it’s resolutely PG-13 rated. Indeed, we actually see very little of the “risque” shows mentioned, which is a bit of a shame: the fragments we see, along with the training clips, suggest it’s something I’d love to attend in Vegas.
Bonnie Blackwell (Lesseos) is a battered wife, whose husband, Zach (Bottoms), eventually goes too far, putting her in hospital. He gets a spell in prison, and she decides to take control of her life and become a police officer. However, the scars of her abuse run deep, and she finds herself initially “freezing” when faced with potential threats, due to the PTSD resulting from her abusive relationship. Encouraged by colleague Bill Starr (Douglas), she eventually manages to work her way past that, just in time for Zach to be released from jail without her knowledge. She discovers that he had been running a human trafficking operation, bringing in Vietnamese mail-order brides, and sets out to take him down.
Maybe I’m getting too old for this kind of thing. Perhaps there was a time in my callow youth when I would have been grateful for the light-to-moderate amount of gratuitous nudity which this contains. Now, though? Its flaws overwhelm any such merits. Or maybe it was the fact that I watched this while dozed up to the eyeballs on DayQuil, and frankly, coughing up phlegm proved to be a more satisfactory pursuit.
After an incident where she shoots dead a woman armed only with a toy gun, Marie (DeCianni) quite the police force to become a housewife. However, her husband, Barry (Spadaro), has some dodgy friends, in particular, Nadi (Regina, who also co-wrote this), a man with ties to organized crime. Barry falls behind on payments, and an unfortunate car “accident” befalls him: a recent large life-insurance policy named Nadi as the beneficiary. It’s all very shady, as Marie’s old police captain (Session) admits. However, there is just not enough evidence for the authorities to take action. That’s not an issue for Marie, however, who decides to take revenge for the loss of her husband, against Nadi and his associates.
Wildlife photographer Harper Sykes (Dexter-Jones) is out in the wilderness of the “Watchatoomy Valley” [fictitious, but apparently located somewhere in the Virginias], when she stumbles across a group of men brutally attacking a victim. She snaps a few pics before fleeing the scene, but her attempts to report the incident to the authorities backfire immediately, and she quickly finds herself at the mercy of their leader, the appropriately-named Ravener (Longstreet). He explains the victim was a scout for big business, whose predations would destroy the natural environment, and so had to be stopped. Now, Harper is next in line. However, she is not the innocent and helpless victim they think. Even when she has the chance to escape, Harper decides to stay in the valley, and take vengeance on Ravener and the rest of his clan.