Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

Chiller is like the poorer cousin of the SciFi (soon to be SyFy) channel, but I will give them credit for filling a niche in cable television.  The idea of a 24-hour horror channel is pretty cool, but I do wish, much like SciFi, that they had more quality stuff to show.  Regardless, even bad horror movies are often entertaining in their own right.  So, for this inaugural edition of “When Horror Goes Wrong,” I bring you two vampire movies: Rise: Blood Hunter and The Thirst: Blood Wars.

Rise: Blood Hunter’s only distinction is that it stars Lucy Liu as a reporter-turned-vampire/vampire hunter and Michael Chiklis (The Shield) as (what else?) as police detective Rawlins.  Liu’s character, Sadie Blake, is investigating vampire-themed parties and the deaths of two girls (one of whom is Rawlins’s daughter), and in the course of her invesitagion gets turned into a vampire by Bishop and his “family” of vampires.  After waking up in morgue, escaping, and killing a man in a homeless shelter, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge over a busy freeway.  She is recovered, alive but beat up, by Arturo, who gives her the tools and information necessary to begin her quest for revenge.  After destroying the other vampires, Sadie eventually teams up with Rawlins to destroy Bishop, but makes Rawlins promise to kill her after she kills Bishop.  They track down Bishop, discover Rawlins’s daughter Tricia turned into a vampire (then taken down by Sadie) and then kill Bishop.  Rawlins fulfills his promise to Sadie by stabbing her with a dart, but Sadie still ends up waking up in the morgue at the end of the movie.

I decided fairly quickly after watching a bit of this movie that I didn’t want to get too deep into it.  First, the movie annoyed by beginning in media res and then flashing back to six months before the opening.  Why is this a problem?  After all, starting a story in media res is a tried-and-true device, used with great effect in everything from The Iliad to James Bond.  There is a key to in media res that this movie completely misses.  What’s going on should be action, with the intent of capturing our interest.  The beginning of this movie, instead, is an abortive and completely superfluous lesbian kiss and Sadie shooting some old guy with a crossbow.  Furthermore, after starting in media res, the action of the story should continue moving forward and any relevant information about what went before can be filled in as we go.  However, this movie’s in media res is so far into the story that we have to flashback to six months before.

Second, the first (chronological) deaths that occur happen to, predictably, two collegey girls (the requisite blonde and brunette) who die essentially because they’re stupid.  The blonde is, of course, the stupider one, going first into this shady-looking house where the vampire-themed party is taking place.  The brunette (Tricia Rawlins) is only slightly smarter, going into the house to look for her friend.  Both end up dead, the blonde permanently and Tricia only so long as it takes for her to become a vampire.

Rise: Blood Hunter suffers from a strange illness that often affects B, C, or  D movies.  Paradoxically, the movie feels long but with very little happening.  The reporter-angle is never really covered, the characters are never really developed beyond stereotypes, and the big relationship of the movie (between Sadie and Rawlins) only happens near the end.  The character of Arturo, who seems to know what’s going on with vampires, is not seen again once Sadie begins her hunt, and Rawlins gets very little screen time until the end.  There’s supposed to be some sort of dynamic in his relationship with his daughter, but because she’s also out of the movie so quickly, that’s never developed.  Finally, with the exception of the beginning, it never tries very hard at horror, or mystery, or for that matter anything else this movie is supposed to be.

The Thirst: Blood Wars is a much different movie that Rise: Blood Hunters, but still suffers from the same feeling too long with little happening problem.  Thirst gets credit for two things.  First, it has Tony Todd (Candyman) as a the head vampire, and he has a good time hamming it up.  Second, the movie’s idea of vampire hunters: people almost turned to vampires, but who resisted the urge to drink blood, faced a sunrise, and survived, is actually kind of cool.  Like a lot of low-budget movies, however, this one fails to capitalize on its idea.

The movie takes place almost entirely on a college campus, and the reason is pretty obvious: it was a cheap (or even possibly free) location.  The acting is mostly horrible (except for Todd); lines are usually just said, rather than acted.  With the exception of the last couple minutes, the picture is very flat and uninteresting; bullet-time effects are used to dubious results a couple times, but other than that there is nothing interesting visually in this film.

Story-wise, I suppose it could have been interesting with a higher budget, but as it stands it wasn’t enough to really keep me interested, primarily because the characters are just stereotypes.  There’s Will, the “hero,” who’s a wimp, Jane, his potential love-interest and basic good-girl, Ash, the goth-girl, and Rico, a military buff, and Darren, jerky jock.  Darren, it turns out, is the son of a vampire hunter (called sentries), but he never went through the total process.  He did, however, receive some training by his dad, which he basically uses to bully people around.  When Darren attempts to rape Jane, Will tries to save her and stabs Darren with a piece of glass.  Darren bites Will and begins Will’s transformation into a vampire.  I have to admit that I missed exactly why Darren was able to turn Will; I’m assuming that Darren was able to do that because of his vampire-hunter heritage, but I really don’t remember.  Regardless, a vampire chick continues the turning process and gets inside Will’s head, encouraging him to complete the turning by sucking some human blood.

The rest of the movie basically boils down to this: Will resists his transformation and for some reason is super-strong, even for a vampire.  The vampire-hunter dad seeks revenge for the murderer of his son, and they all end of at vampire-leader Julien’s (Todd) coven for a showdown.  Various rather boring fight scenes ensue, and in the end Will resists the urge to feed and sees a sunrise, become a vampire hunter himself so he can hunt down the vampire chick who was in his head.

That’s really it.  I spent most of the movie confused about who was the vampire hunter’s son (for a while I thought it was Will), I still don’t understand fully how Will turned into a vampire, and I really don’t get why Will was so powerful.  They kept referring to Darren as a sentry, but according to his dad he wasn’t really a sentry, so that was confusing.  Plus there was a whole subplot of a struggle within the vampire coven and Ash wanting to become a vampire and throwing herself at Will and another vampire in the hopes of being turned.  With all this happening, I never really got a good handle on the movie, and that, combined with the bad acting and cinematography, just makes this barely even fun enough to watch ironically.

Overall, I have rarely been disappointed more by a vampire movie than I was by these two.  Neither one really embraced the whole vampire thing and had fun with it.  Instead, they usually took themselves too seriously and were unable to pull it off.