by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Just about anything
might have seemed like a masterpiece after Earth Girls Are Easy, but the 1996 direct-to-video Roger Corman-produced Vampirella turned out to be a minor gem, a clever film with
some engaging “spins” on the Dracula myth. Directed by Jim Wynorski (who was
well known enough he got a possessory credit — “A Jim Wynorski Film”) from a
script by Gary Gerassi, Frank Frazetta (better known as an artist who did a lot
of elaborate illustrations for fantasy stories) and Trina Robbins, Vampirella was born as a character in the mind of Forrest J.
Ackerman, science-fiction mega-fan and founding editor of Famous
Monsters of Filmland magazine. Ackerman
appears both in a younger incarnation played as a minor character by actor
David B. Katz and as himself in a cameo appearance in a dance club, much the
way Stan Lee appeared in cameos in so many of the Marvel Comics movies (and
probably still will — though he’s dead I suspect Marvel’s current owners,
Disney, have a lot of clips they
can splice in to future productions) — and I couldn’t help but muse on the
irony that last Monday I’d seen a film at the central library, Premium
Rush, in which the corrupt cop out to take
down our bike-messenger hero uses the alias “Forrest J. Ackerman” at several
points in the story. The conceit of this one is that the vampire cult
originated on the planet Drakulon, whose natives lived off blood but didn’t
have to put the bite on each other (or on any of the planet’s lower life forms,
none of which we actually see) because their rivers literally ran red with blood and therefore they didn’t have to
drink anything else.
Alas, one of their noblemen, Count Vlad (Roger Daltrey —
yes, that Roger Daltrey, lead
singer of the Who and previously star of Tommy and Lisztomania), developed a taste for his species’ blood and turned the vampire cult
on its head, assassinated the leader of Drakulon and then set off throughout
the rest of the universe looking for a planet they could colonize. Of course
they found it in Earth and established a vampire cult — including ordinary
Earthlings turned into vampires by exchanging blood with the Drakulonians —
that somehow managed to survive under the radar of normal humanity for 30,000
years. Ella (Talisa Soto), stepdaughter of the murdered Drakulon ruler,
followed Vlad and his crew to Earth but got caught up in an ion storm in
mid-space and got delayed, finally landing on Mars but, since her spaceship
went bust, she had to wait for 30,000 years until humans finally landed on Mars
and she, by turning herself into a bat, was able to stow away on their
spaceship and end up on Earth when it returned. Meanwhile, there’s a special
agency on Earth devoted to hunting down and killing vampires (with an array of
high-tech weapons including guns that shoot silver-tipped wooden bullets that
act like stakes through the heart and a so-called “sun gun” that vaporizes
vampires by exposing them to artificial sunlight, while being harmless to
normal humans), and its head is Adam Van Helsing (the genuinely cute Richard
Joel Paul), who had to kill his own father when Vlad turned him into a vampire. The good guys capture Vlad’s
second-in-command, General Demos (Brian Bloom), and by threatening to inject
him with holy water worm out of him the secret that Vlad is holing up in Las
Vegas, where he performs as a rock singer in a small nightclub doing a song
called “Bleed for Me” by Gerard McMahon. Once I saw this sequence I thought, “Now I understand why they needed a rock singer for this
role,” and though McMahon hardly wrote for Daltrey as well as Peter Townshend
did, it’s still a good vehicle for Daltrey and he performs it to the nines.
lad’s ultimate objective is to win Vampirella (as she’s called in her
vampire-fighting persona) to the cult, get her to put the bite on the captured
Adam (Vampirella normally survives on a high-tech blood substitute but Vlad
takes it away from her) and vampirize him, and set off bombs he’s concealed on
satellites he’s orbited around Earth to cause an artificial nuclear winter that
will darken the skies over Earth for centuries and allow the vampires to take
over without that pesky little inconvenience of not being able to go out during
daytime. The good guys, led by Adam’s partner Walsh (Lee de Broux in a nice
caricature of the spit-and-polish military officer), storm the vampires’
redoubt on the wreckage of the old Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas, and
ultimately the good guys win and Vampirella and Adam pair up for the fade-out. Vampirella is hardly a great movie but it is an engaging and genuinely funny combined knock-off
and spoof of the Dracula mythos,
succeeding where Earth Girls Are Easy failed — and though the supporting players are a bit weak, the stars
are just fine despite the atrocious costume the makers gave Vampirella to wear,
a red plastic bikini darkened around her crotch to tastelessly represent her
snatch. (That was a touch I could
have done without.) Tarisa Soto is delectable for the horny teenage straight
guys who were obviously the film’s target market, and Roger Daltrey’s
performance is delightfully over-the-top in a role that demands it — while
Richard Joel Paul is a nice, if a bit milquetoast, bit of cute man-meat for Our Heroine to end up with. Vampirella is a neat film that deserved theatrical release —
though it may have been made specifically for TV since it’s in the old 4:3 TV
aspect ratio that was still standard when it was shot (and the Showtime cable
network is one of the credited producers), and it’s a real pity the sequel
promised in the closing credits, Death’s Dark Avenger, never got made.
