Vamp (1986) – Review

For ageless creatures that essentially have the powers of gods once the sun goes down, vampires sure do like to be strippers. From From Dusk Till Dawn to Bordello Of Blood and everything inbetween, numerous creatures of the night found that gyrating on a stage in front of an audience of hollow-eyed, losers was like shooting fish in a barrel when it came to snagging victims. However, long before Santanico Pandemonium strutted her stuff and delivered an interesting new way to deliver tequila to the mouth of a punter, 1986s Vamp was offering up disrobing bloodsuckers with humorous results.
Due to a particularly crowed decade, while the finished product might not ultimately have been fit to drink the blood of pointy-toothed peers, Fright Night and The Lost Boys, it’s still good to know that the title of “Most Agressively 80s Vampire Film” wasn’t just a two-horse race.

Meet college students Keith and AJ who, after sick of living in a noisy, chaotic dorm, want to experience the charmed life of joining a fraternity and settling down in more lush surroundings. However AJ, ever the smooth talker, can’t help but point out that all the fraternity boy’s archaic methods to get them to pledge are nothing but a waste of time and instead manages to score themselves one simple task to bride their way in – hire the frat a stripper for the night. The more tentative Keith instantly sees disaster written all over this, but can’t help but back up his roomie, even when they rent a cadillac from rich, lonely and clingy student Duncan on the promise that they take him with them.
However, they’re not in town for that long when they realise that the streets are strangely deserted, and before you know it, night has well and truly fallen which means some truly strange shit is about to go down. Things get off to an inauspicious start when Keith accidently offends the dentally challenged lady friend of albino street punk, Snow, and the trio have to fend them off and flee before his friends arrive, but soon they arrive at the After Dark Club and AJ starts scouting for talent. However, as bad as a run-in with an albino street gang is (and we’ve all been there), it soon becomes apparent that everyone within the strip joint is either a ferocious vampire or is at least some sort of familiar and AJ only figures this out after a fateful meeting with Katrina, the age-old leader of this nest of gyrating monsters.
From here, Keith and Amaretto, a deeply unfocused employee of the After Dark Club who doesn’t actually seem to be a member of the undead, have to try to not only escape the club, but survive on the city streets that seem to now be crawling with slavering bloodsuckers. Can they avoid vampire bus drivers, vampire bouncers and various other supernatural bottom feeders as they desperately try and outlast the night?

I mentioned them earlier as something of a joke, it’s something of a shame that Richard Wenk’s Vamp was sandwiched between Tom Holland’s Fright Night the year before and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys the year after, because despite containing a lot of similar material. But along with all the usual “vamped-up” brows, youthful cast and post modern jokes, there’s a kind of cool, trapped-in-the-city feel going on here that almost evokes Martin Scorsese’s panic inducing comedy, After Midnight. Once the sun goes down, the filmmakers go all in making the urban background look as weird as it can, mostly down to the magnificent overuse of green and pink lighting that almost screams German expressionism meets punk rock. Hell, even the sewers, which shouldn’t even have a light source at all, are positively drenched in the twin colours which adds a bit of comic book pizzazz to the film and if you are able to plug into it’s glib sense of humour, you’ll probably get a lot out of it.
The leads are crisp and fun to be with, with Meatballs’ Chris Makepeace playing the more normal of the two, where Nightmare On Elm Street 2’s Robert Rusler is more of the slick huckster type, but their rapid, back and forth banter is fast an easy even if they both come reeking of the smug, overconfidence that comes with 80s heroes. Also, like a lot of movies featuring college students, the movie wouldn’t be complete without an annoying, lonely, horny clinger-on and at times, Gedde Watanabe’s Duncan seems to truly be the template for Ken Jeong’s entire personality, but while the set up is pretty standard, matters get nice and weird when night falls and the movie gets to stretch its wings.

Wenk creates a truly off-beat world once the sun goes down, but while this section of the film obviously provides the best moments, there’s still a feeling that we could have explored this world more to greater comic effect. After all, we catch mere glipses of the kind of fanged nightmares that stalk the city that could each branch out and have their own story – I mean a vampire driving the night bus? Surely that’s a stand alone movie right there – but we mostly spend our time within the dingy walls of the After Dark Club.
To be fair, it predates the Titty Twister by a good decade and it pulls the same trick of having scantily clad women suddenly turn around to reveal a grotesque, bat-like visage and the sleeze levels are kept nice and vibrant thanks to Sandy Baron’s cockroach chewing, Vegas obsessed MC. Also providing more than his fair share of weapon’s grade oddness is Billy Drago’s utterly random gang leader who leads a surly group of fellow melanin lackers. However, the movie finds itself hamstrung slightly by two, major characters, with the first being Dedee Pfeiffer’s clueless airhead who somehow has no idea she works in a strip joint full of creatures of the night and constantly takes any tension off the boil with an unfunny running joke about how she knows Keith. Weirdly however, the other major issue lay with headlining star, Grace Jones, as the main vampire, Katrina, who spends the majority of the movie doing absolutely nothing other than looking admittedly remarkable in a variety of bizarre outfits. While the actress/model’s distinct features prove to make her a legitimately striking beast when sporting giant-ass fangs and a bald head, but aside from that early, genuinely arresting moment, Katrina proves to be something along the lines of all mouth, no trousers (literally). Having a set of choppers that resemble a ripped out fire place us cool and all, but all she does for the rest of the film is mutely hold court and as a result, she pales in comparison to other, interpretive dance rocking vampire queens such as Regine from Fright Night Part II.

Loaded with tons of cool stuff, there’s nevertheless a feeling that Vamp’s scattershot focus on its nocturnal world could have been something truly phenomenal if given the time to flesh out an entire community. However, while not as essential as other, toothier movies, as quirky, kooky vampire flicks go, Vamp sinks it’s teeth into it’s cult stylings and drinks pretty deep.
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