Director: Richard Wenk
Writers: Donald P. Borchers, Richard Wenk
Keith....Chris Makepeace
Vic...Sandy Baron
AJ...Robert Russler
Amaretto...Dedee Pfeiffer
Duncan...Gedde Watanabee
Vlad...Brad Logan
Katrina...Grace Jones
In order to gain admission into a dorky but comfortable 1980s fraternity house, two college boys must hire a stripper. Unfortunately, their quest takes them across to the wrong side of the tracks: to the vampire section of town.
Vamp (1986) is a bad movie, but it's a pretty good bad movie.
It beats the bloated Dusk to Dawn out as the first film to feature a strip club that's really a snack bar for vampires. Of course, one might question whether this premise makes the best foundation for a full-length movie. The story would probably fare better as one part of a horror anthology. Indeed, many an old horror comic features a story where vampires or other beasties set up some business to lure human prey. You can't do to much damage in a few pages of a cheap comic book.
But give a flimsy premise 90 minutes on a screen and it wears terribly thin.
We get some passable proto-Buffy banter between the college students and the vampires, though not nearly enough. Many of the jokes simply fall flat. Gedde Watanabe meanwhile, as a wealthy wannabee out to buy friendship, struggles to convince us that the weak material he's forced to work with is actually funny. I think we all knew guys like this character at some point in our lives. They become annoying on-camera, too.
The film also boasts a little girl vampire, who recalls less Claudia in Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire than the literal ankle biter in Stephen King's early, fun piece, "One for the Road." She's fairly creepy. The late Sandy Baron also manages a memorable turn as the vampire queen's lounge lizard toady.
Jones herself proves the film's real saving Grace. Clad in blue contacts, red wig, body paint, and metal goddess spirals, she performs a dance number that bleeds animal magnetism and raw power. She also gets an effective death scene with memorable vampire make-up. The other vamps, when they bare their fangs, merely look walrus-like.
Against these positive elements, a significant number of negative ones rather heavily weigh. The acting is generally shoddy. Dedee Pfeiffer, as Makepeace's long-lost childhood-girlfriend-turned-stripper, deserves particular note for her Oscar-resistant performance.
And we scarcely could have a bad flick without silly plot contrivances. The vampires can be killed by flame, so naturally the bar's brandy seems to be 90% kerosene. Of course, the bloodsuckers store large barrels of this same highly-flammable stuff in their sleeping quarters.
Naturally, you transmit the sexuality of one hundred thousand matadors.
The preceding non sequitur has been included to give you some idea of the effect the scene transitions in this film have. Seriously, this film has a couple of transitions that rival anything in Un Chien Andalou for sheer incoherence. The College Boys' turn from downtown to the vamp neighborhood plays like a spacetime warp. And the physical relationship among the darkened bar, the brightly-lit sewage systems, and the industrial park where much of this was filmed cannot be determined. Physical layout and transitions do not make sense in this film. One can only assume the editor was intoxicated. Come to think of it, so was I when I first saw this film in the 1980s. Sorry to anyone I may have recommended it to. I enjoyed it much less this second time through.
Fans of vampires and related genres will find Grace Jones' queen vamp appealing. Other sober viewers should pass this one over.
A variation of this review was written some years ago by this author for Bad Movie Night.