Vampires (Superbit, 1998)
Film:
DVD:

Written by Don Jakoby, based on the novel Vampire$ by John Steakley
Directed by John Carpenter
Starring James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, Sheryl Lee, Thomas Ian Griffith, Maximillian Schell

Released by Columbia Tristar
Rating: R
Region: 1
Anamorphic: Yes.

My Advice: Skip it.

Jack Crow (Woods) is the best there is at what he does. Mostly. What he does is kill vampires. However, he must have been having an off day, because he and his entire team got their collection arse handed to them by a new undead master, Valek (Griffith). Left picking up the pieces, he realizes he's found himself in the middle of a plot to take away the biggest thing that keeps vampires at bay: sunlight.

It was this film that proved to me Carpenter had been either replaced by a bit of the Thing or perhaps fell asleep next to a strange alien pod somewhere. After the goofball nonsense of They Live, the slide began. First you had Carpenter directing Chevy Chase (!) in Memoirs of an Invisible Man, then you had his creepy but extremely messy Mouth of Madness. After that came the tepid remake of Village of the Damned and the ill-advised sequel to Escape From New York. We were all hoping he had gotten everything bad out of his system. I mean, vampires, right? How can you screw up vampires? Carpenter did, and thus, he was lost to us forever.

The problems with this movie can be put down to this one little example: if you're the best vampire slayer in the world, how in the hell could you not check the perimeter of a nest you were cleaning out? Why would you not check the one patch of turned earth within a hundred yards of ground zero, especially if you knew that a vamp was missing? That's right, when in the first ten minutes of the film, your so-called master slayer could be put out of business by any film geek who's seen a few horror movies, then your script has some serious issues. The entire film is just senseless from the get go and continues to deteriorate as it goes.

This is a Superbit release, so of course you're forgoing features for solid audio and video. Granted, the disc delivers in that department. You've never heard James Woods over-emote like you will coming off of this disc. And that's what it comes down to: if for some reason you liked the film, and you have a home cinema setup to die for, then this is the edition of the disc for you. If, like me, you thought the film was wretched, overhyped trash, then it's probably for the best that you stay away. Or...if you don't know yet, at least rent the original version so there's some features to help with the taste stuck in your mouth.