This Geek In Netflix: Kiss of the Vampire
Well, kids, we’re back to digging through crap… but I’m learning to love it. Just imagine me cracking my knuckles before getting down to this week’s flaming pile.
“Kiss of the Vampire” was released straight-to-DVD in 2009 under the name “Immortally Yours” and has a couple of names you may recognize… if you’re a giant geek. Not that that’s a bad thing or anything. Continuing past that awkward moment…
We’ve got Daniel Goddard in the male lead role, who you might remember as Dar from the “Beastmaster” TV series and Costas Mandylor from the “Saw” movie franchise. We also have one Mr. Martin Kove who you may remember was John Kreese from the “Karate Kid” franchise and Eric Etebari from the “Witchblade” TV series. We also have Phil Fondacaro, legendary(?) “little person” actor from such movies as “Willow”, “Return of the Jedi”, and several episodes of “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”.
One big name you will definitely recognize is Matthias Hues, who played Klingon General #2 in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”. (I bet I just made some of you trekkies feel really insecure right now.) There’s also a randomly appearing iguana.
I bet you’re all raring to go now, aren’t you? With such a star-studded cast, who can blame you?
How do you say “fucked” in Klingon?
So, this is the part of the article where I tell you what this movie is about in effort to either entice or dissuade you from watching it. I’d really like to tell you which way to go, but the plot is just a bit too disjointed. By “bit,” I mean “fucking” and by “disjointed,” I mean “disaster.”
I’m going to try anyway. If it doesn’t make any sense, it’s not because I currently have the death (AKA bronchitis) and am curled up in bed with “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” playing in the background. It’s because the movie was written by a woman with the emotional and cognitive IQ of a house elf.
Just imagine, if you would, Dobby pounding away on a laptop trying to write the next “Twilight” while “The French Connection” plays in the background on one TV and “Days of Our Lives” plays on another and he happens to be wearing a tinfoil hat as he’s trying to prevent the Illuminati from accessing his brainmeats. Oh, and he’s decided to write it in German.
That’s the summation of this movie. But we’ll go more into that later.
We open with some nameless man being chased by vampires that sound like the harpies from “Xena: Warrior Princess” or, possibly, pterodactyls. At the same time, we follow the female lead, Estelle, as she progresses from her snazzmobile to the opera with her family and two-dimensional drunken fiancee.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome is serious business.
At the opera, Estelle has a magic moment where she locks eyes with vampire Alex Stone (the Beastmaster… insert joke about pussy-taming here) and, as they head to their cars after the opera, the fiancee punches Estelle’s father in the face. Then Alex, who desperately wishes he was Stuart Townsend, steps up and distracts the drunken idiot long enough for the security guards to haul the guy away.
This point, about five minutes in, is where we realize that Dobby has no grasp of human emotions or interactions. Once Estelle’s father is helped off the ground, he offers Alex any favor he could possibly give in exchange for his help.
Because distracting a drunk is incredibly difficult and only can be done by the most bravehearted of noble folks.
Alex asks for dinner with Estelle, which he bails from after about five minutes of conversation for reasons that the viewer cannot quite comprehend. This is when the stellar dialogue begins to shine through, as Estelle uses such words as “whilst” and Alex says things like, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be your knight in shining armor.”
I wonder if she’s his own personal brand of heroin, as well?
A still from Depeche Mode’s latest music video.
We shift to a club scene (because no vampire movie can really be considered a vampire movie without a club scene) where most of the extras are kinda incredibly unattractive and we are introduced to the token asian vampire chick who walks like she was in the middle of a DVDA scene with four John Holmes clones.
She’s not actually important, I just found her walk astounding.
The movie falls apart from here. Not that it was that great to begin with.
How does it fall apart? Well, Dobby attempts to jam in as many genres and separate plot lines as he can.
Let’s do a breakdown.
We have the shitty vampire romance between Estelle and Alex, who only go on two very short dates in a month before Alex determines he is willing to give up his immortality for her.
We have the comedy cop-duo with vampire hunter Marshall Pope and some little douchebaggy actor who wishes for god knows what reason that he was Jay Mohr.
We have a medical drama as doctors scurry about trying to find a source of immortality.
We have the female badass cop who is desperately trying to prove herself.
We have the drug cartel smuggling cocaine and selling XTC inside the dance club.
We have the high class beauty spa acting as a cover for the Illuminati. (Insert: !!!??!?!?!?! here)
Hissing: Because it’s easier than choreographing a fight scene.
We have the vampire politics story as Alex’s fellow vamps think about staging a revolt.
We have the vampire hunter (as mentioned above) who is tormented by his wife’s death and travels the world seeking revenge against those who killed her.
This could be okay, though a little convoluted, if Dobby had developed past the mental state of a four year old. Instead it comes off as a vomited mess that couldn’t have been saved even if its budget was in the billions.
Normally I’m not so quick to blame the writer, being a writer myself I know how much can get lost in translation from the page to the screen, but this was entirely the writer. A typical example of this movie’s dialogue:
Estelle: “Let my father continue here and in exchange he will provide you with immortality. But only if Alex agrees.”
Evil Illuminati Dude: “Whether or not he agrees is irrelevant. He has no choice. But nevertheless I’m willing to allow you to continue your research and give you ten million dollars if and only if he gives us what we want.”
The entire movie is made of stuff like this, where Dobby wrote in a language that he did not have full command of. It’s truly awful.
So, in spirit of vaugely journalistic research, I checked out the writer. Kat Hawks. Seems familiar. Is it Katherine Hawkes, the actress who played the female lead, Estelle, who produced this movie?
Oh, it is? Shocking.
He can’t believe it’s not butter.
This movie was a vanity project. This woman wrote and produced a movie so she could star as a woman so amazingly desirable that a vampire would give up his immortal life for her after two short dates. It doesn’t take a psychoanalytic critic to see what is going on here.
And it’s obvious that no one was honest with her about the script or was allowed to touch it to translate it to something that would actually make sense in English. This movie is an epic failure of poorly written narcissism.
The ending? I’m just going to show you an image of the ending so you can see how this woman decided to wrap up the part of the movie that didn’t pertain to her character.
Wait, what?
Stepping away from the script, this movie is supposed to be classified as a horror movie but there isn’t a single tense or horrific scene in it because the vampires are so pathetic. Whenever confronted with anyone with a weapon, they hiss and sway. That’s it. There’s a complete lack of competence and predatory instinct that I entirely blame the director for.
My recommendation: don’t watch it unless you want to become a misogynist. Seriously, if I was male, this movie would make me hate women just due to witnessing the writer’s fantasy world. This is “The Room” with a budget.
It is, as always, available on Netflix on Demand. Don’t do it. I’d rather watch “Vampegeddon” five times in a row than watch this thing again.
