This story opens with a group of surfers intruding on someone’s beach front property. This someone is Tom Savini, and when he comes out to flex his muscle and shows his fangs, he’s rudely ripped apart and beheaded by a new generation of blood suckers. The core story revolves around Chris and his sister, Nicole, whose mother passed away, so they decide to move to a friend's rental property and become the new meat in town.
While hanging out at the pier, Chris meets fellow ex-surfer, Shane, who appears out of nowhere, and invites him to a party. This party has lots to offer: breakdancing, boobies, drinks, bellydancing, and fellow surf rivals. While Chris is preoccupied with the bellydancer chick in the shower, Shane runs his game on Nicole, who decides to take a ride on his motorcycle. Chris hears screaming, so he abandones his sexual interlude, even after some tempting persuasion not to, to find his sister. There, he finds Nicole with Shane, and after a short altercation where Shane's nose gets bloodied, they head home.
Enter-Corey Feldman, aka Edgar Frog, surfboard shaper and vampire hunter, who comes to save the day when Nicole has her first vampire spell. So, how’d she become a vampire when there was no bite? It’s because she drank the blood of the head vampire from a flask thinking it was booze. Might I add, this is possibly the most ridiculous performance Corey has done. Sure, dude’s probably hurting for money, but to partake in insulting a legacy he helped create (unknowingly, I'm sure, since maybe he thought it was a good script, or just needed the loot), is a shame.
So, since his sister is on her way to vampirehood, and dating the head dude, Chris battles with the idea of becoming one too (isn't peer pressure a bitch), and gets his chance on a night out with the boys. But, while the others are sweet talking their chicks around a fire, and then decide to feed on them, Chris can't make the same commitment, and tries to help his flee. Enter-Corey Feldman, and POOF, the vampires disappear.
This pretty much brings us to the finale, where Chris and Edgar go to save Nicole, but rather than bore you with the details, in short, the vampire clan is extinguished, Shane loses his head, and Chris and Nicole return home, blood-drenched and exhausted. And, as if Corey's one-liners weren't enough, a final attempt at humor is made when the landlady claims she knows what has been going on, and it has marajuana written all over it.
The acting is pretty ridiculous, and with no real emotion. When Chris finds out that his sister is a half-vampire, he doesn’t freak out, doesn’t say any choice 4-letter words, and doesn’t seem worried, but just appears to accept it, and heads home. I’m sure I’d be the total opposite, and although I’d be curious as to what my sister had become, I’d try to steer away, and be in constant turmoil over if I had to take her life, could I do it? The attempted humor in dialog and antics (hey, let’s stab each other and film it) is less than laughable too. I have to wonder if this was even a true attempt at a sequel, since if one had never seen the original, this could easily be a stand-alone movie.
There were only a couple of scenes where the gore impressed me, one, when the vampire starts hacking up blood and other colorful bodily fluids, and two, when the black vampire gets jack-hammered. In multiple scenes, the gore is way overdone, and even exhaustive, like intestines being ripped out, or falling out after being stabbed. Of course, much of the FX were done using CGI, which I’m not a big fan of, unless done well, and believable, which is not the case here.
My Side Show partner, Smokeskrene, said that he thought this is one of the movie scripts that was plagued by the writers guild strike. I haven't done any research to support this claim, but even if that’s the case, then it’s still no excuse for this embarrassing follow-up, since they’ve had 20 years to come up with a better concept. So, instead, it gets lumped in with the other new vampire movies that really suck. I really like the Blade movies, but not the Blade series (Sticky Fingaz in place of Wesley, yeah, right!), and there’s only a couple of vampire flicks in the last few years that are noteworthy. 30 Days of Night is one, and then a lesser known one called Rise: Vampire Hunter with Lucy Liu. So, I suggest you rent or buy those instead, and just remember, you can always tell the hokiness of a vampire flick by the first glimpse of the kind of fangs used. If they’re the tired-ass ones you’ve seen time and time again, or look like the ones you buy for 99 cents at Halloween, immediately take the disc out of your player, and demand a refund from wherever you got it.
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OVERALL RATING--2-- |
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