John Carpenter's Vampires

Next time I need to take a dump, I'm going to call the process "The Filthy Critic's Vampires" because then people will pay me good money to see it. Here is how "John Carpenter's Vampires" made it to your local movie theater:

"Unnnggh," says Carpenter as he sits on the john, shitting out a monster turd. He stands up and declares, "Wow, look at the size of that! That's a big shit. Honey, come look at this."

His wife enters the bathroom, "Oh, John, it's a masterpiece!"

"It better be, because it was hard to make. That piece of shit was too wide for my asshole."

"Whatever will you do with it?" asks his loving wife.

"You think any studio would buy it?" he wonders aloud.

"I don't see why not. Did you have some corn?"

"No, no, that's James Woods."

And, the rest is cinematic history. John Carpenter's latest effort might be the greatest piece of shit ever made, but I don't review shit. I review movies. And as a movie, "Vampires" is so astonishingly lame that it accidentally avoided a one-finger critique.

WARNING: In this review I give away all of the plot twists because I don't think anyone should waste their money on this stinker. If you do anyway, you get what you deserve.

Woods is Jack Crow, a name that has as many syllables as the screenwriter could handle, a vampire slayer working for the Vatican. He has a band of misfits and a priest that help him kill vampires with stakes and this super cheesy effect of dragging them into the sunlight where they burst into flames. The misfits kill a bunch of vampires but not the "master," a 600 year old goth-rock lover in trench coat named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) who is seeking some crazy cross that will let him become a daywalker.

Well after all of Griffith's little soldiers are dead, he's a pissed off master vampire. He visits the "wild" party that Woods' band of white-trash slayers are throwing. I say "wild" because that's what the screenwriter and director want us to think. He must be about 96 years old, then. There is loud rock and roll, naked hookers and lots of booze. It is the lonely screenwriter's pedestrian vision of what happens at all the parties he isn't invited to. Griffith kills everyone except Woods, hooker Sheryl Lee, and everyone's least favorite actor, Daniel "I'm Alec's drug-swilling brother" Baldwin.

These two now must stop the master before he kills again. First Woods goes to the church where the Cardinal tells him he can't go after the master alone. He must find a new team of misfits. And he must take along the weaselly priest poorly played by Tim Guinee.

Over the next hour or so, Woods and everyone else abuses everyone, especially poor Sheryl Lee. There are loads of blood, fisticuffs, and swearing. They tie Lee naked to a bed, they handcuff her to a Jeep, they call her "bitch" dozens of times, and they slap her around something fierce. It is the most offensive treatment of a woman I've ever seen, and it's not even funny. It just fucking sucks. But maybe it will go over big with the Dungeons and Dragons crowd that don't know how to interact with women.

After a suitable amount of fucking around, there is a big showdown between Griffith and Woods. Woods finds out the Cardinal has bought immortality by selling out to the vampires and giving up Woods. They capture Woods and will use his blood in some ancient Catholic ritual.

It looks pretty bleak for our hero until the very last moment, when, in an unsurprising, drawn out, stupid climax Woods and Company win. Yay! Now we can all leave the theater.

Now, why does this movie blow worse than a Conair blow dryer? Let me count the ways:

1. Dialog - This movie has enough dirty words to make a man like me proud. Except the filth is used in the lamest ways. It's just there to show how tough the characters are. If dirty words make someone a tough guy, I wouldn't have had my ass kicked by two lesbians at the It'll Do Lounge last night. At one key moment, when Woods discovers the Cardinal set him up, he says the incredibly uninteresting line, "Padre, you truly are a pile of dogshit." Jesus fucking Christ! That's the best they could do? Besides shitty lines like that, most of the dialog is brutally dull exposition that explain why a bunch of people will get killed in the next scene.
2. Humor - this is supposed to be a "funny" monster movie. It's a bout as funny as a lesion on a spinster's tit. Here are two examples" When one vampire is about to be killed with a stake, Little Danny Baldwin asks him, "How do you like your stake?" At the matinee I went to, even the fucking retards from the special school groaned at that weak-ass Disney channel-movie pun. Another source of awkward unfunniness is Woods insisting that Guinee's priest is gay. and gets boners when Woods beats the crap out of him. Oh, stop, oh please, my aching sides. I cannot laugh this hard without throwing up. Oh, you fucking geniuses. Oh, shit, whew, that sure is brilliant.
3. Plot - If the Cardinal is with the master, why in the world doesn't he just tell him where Woods is and be done with it? Or kill him. Why would he send his own assistant to help Woods? Why does it take him so long to let Griffith find the crazy cross? I bet I know why. Because some jerk-ass screenwriter was too busy being rejected by girls at his local Starbucks to give a fuck.
4. Acting - Either nobody in "Vampires" can act, or John Carpenter can't direct. I think it's both. James "I'm acting as hard as I can" Woods is so grating as the "tough" guy that I wanted to shove my hand down his throat and pull his balls back up. Sheryl Lee does nothing more than shake and convulse in the role of her lifetime. And Griffith just mopes around like a moody goth teenager. I expected him to say, "I didn't ask to be born."
5. Special effects - I don't know how much this bomb cost, but the money's not on the screen. Everything looks cheap and tacky, like the yarn poodles Mrs. Filthy makes. It ain't believable, it ain't scary, and it ain't original.
6. James Woods - Fuck you, asshole. Stop being in movies right now.

I could go on and on, but screw it. Let's just say there are no redeeming qualities to Mr. Carpenter's big turd except that it's so bad that I laughed at it for the last hour. One finger for quality, plus one finger for the audacity the studio had in releasing it. Next time you get an idea for a movie, Mr. Carpenter, please just flush.