Dance with a Vampire (2006)

The film opens on a fair bit of painfully forced exposition in which our hero, Redwood Justin, tries to explain to two cops the danger their city might be in. A coven of vampires seems to be headed their way. Their m. o. is always the same: they establish a base outside of a city, and then repeatedly enter the city to feed. They always feed on people nobody will miss – prostitutes, homeless drifters, etc.; or on people whose deaths can be easily chalked up to gang-related violence, etc. Since nobody cares about the deceased, nobody will really try to find out who killed them. And since no-one will believe in vampires even if the evidence points in that direction, the vampires can feel comfortably safe.

This particular coven, we are told, was nearly wiped out in the ’70s by a vampire hunter. Only the master vampire survived, and since he rebuilt his coven in that era, the entire coven is dressed in disco clothes and accessories. The master vampire, who is several hundreds of years old, adapts to that style, although he can also be dressed differently.

Redwood Justin is not actually a vampire hunter as such; he is not well-trained or well-equipped (aside from his knowledge). He is following the trail of this coven for personal reasons…

Everything unfolds as Justin predicted. And since the police do believe neither him nor their own eyes, there is no-one to stop the carnage – until Justin finds some unexpected allies.

 

 

 

This film is one of the productions of Kentucky-based independent filmmaker George Bonilla. Bonilla and his wife Tammy created several ultra-low budget horror films over the years – all shot in Kentucky and all made with an amateur cast and crew.

You know these kind of productions. The ones where a suspiciously large number of crew-members and extras have the same last name as other people on the cast and crew. There is always a mix of bad and good elements in the end-product, with the bad usually being more numerous. And Dance with a Vampire is no exception.

 

Plot and premise are solid, if not new. The same goes for the central character, Redwood Justin. And the same would also go for the story, if Bonilla had kept it straightforward and simple. But instead he kept piling on more and more elements – and so the plot-holes kept growing and the narrative strains that the film should have concentrated on (or made clearer) suffered immensely.

There also seems to have been some confusion as to what the tone of the film is (or was supposed to be). The film’s working title was Disco Vampires, but – according to imdb – it was changed early on to Dance with a Vampire, “because director George Bonilla felt that [the title Disco Vampires] may be mistaken for a comedy”. The problem is that this film is, in my opinion, more comedy than anything else. So either Bonilla did not know what tone he was going for, or he ended up getting a different tone than he had originally intended, or – and this would be the worst option – a lot of the humorous elements are unintentionally funny.

 

The amateur approach has its setbacks, naturally, but the acting is surprisingly solid. Weaker performances are primarily found in marginal characters, so they don’t carry much weight. It seems like Bonilla sorted his cast by ability, giving the more prominent roles to those with more talent.

Stacey T. Gillespie in particular is a solid lead in the role of Redwood Justin; and Billy W. Blackwell and Amy Wills give decent-ish performances as well. They are possibly trumped by Matthew Perry (no, not Chandler from Friends), who completes the main cast.

Gillespie is able to develop enough screen presence to hold our attention in the many scenes in which he is at the centre and is only interacting with marginal characters. And that includes the forced exposition in the opening scene, which is thus not quite as unbearable as it could have been.

 

I mentioned above that the film piles on too many elements at the expense of more depth. That is especially true for the characters. There are too many vampires in this film, and too many cops. That would have been OK if they were merely vampire henchmen or nameless uniformed cops. But Bonilla does this odd thing where – in between the lead and main supporting characters on the one hand, and the foot-soldiers on the other – he inserts a large number of named characters (vampires as well as police-men) who are given a small number of lines and one or two off-hand character traits. Bonilla is clearly signalling to us: watch these guys, they will be of some importance later. Only, they won’t.

All this is to the detriment of the lead and main supporting characters whose screen-time (and writing) is being sacrificed. Character development, character motivation, etc., is either missing or done in jumps and jolts.

This is aggravated by the fact that certain characters seem to be dropping out of the film and then reappearing seemingly at random. This being an amateur cast I am almost tempted to believe that not everyone could make it to each and every scheduled shooting session.

 

 

On the technical side, there are many shortcomings associated with the film’s no-budget, amateur-crew approach. The special effects (CG explosions and vampire bursting into CG flame) are mostly appalling. I will give the CG-flamed vampires a pass, because this is to some degree a symbolic effect, but the big CG explosion in one scene is just weak (and was unnecessary for the story).

The practical effects are more of a mixed bag. The vampire make-up is modelled on Buffy-season-1 vamp-faces, and looks mostly acceptable but also often poor (especially in close-ups). Yet there is one scene with a “skinned” vampire, and that one looks really good.

 

“A mixed bag” also describes the vampires’ wardrobe. As I mentioned earlier, they are all supposed to dress in ‘70s clothes, and they do. But some of them look better than others. Many a vampire wears just some garish piece of fashion that they seem to have grabbed of the rack at some cheap clothing store and that simply looks vaguely retro. The same goes for accessories, such as glasses, etc. The most likely explanation is that Bonilla, due to budget constraints, asked the actors to bring their own costumes; and they just went for whatever they could get hold of.

Overall, the whole “disco” element, which is played up so much in the beginning is almost completely dropped later. The same goes for a number of “Western” elements that are brought up and then go nowhere. These are just two of the elements (of which there are far too many to mention) that are introduced and then never properly used again, due to the way in which Bonilla overloads the film (as mentioned above).

 

One fun idea that kind of works is the fact that there is, in the end, a small group of people assembled in Justin’s house ready to help him hunt down the coven. Only, he didn’t invited them, they just sort of showed up out of their own accord, one by one. And Justin is annoyed rather than pleased by this help he didn’t ask for. It is a subversion of the “getting the band together” trope known from other vampire hunter films. The only setback is that we as an audience learn too little about these characters, which is likely not only due to Bonilla’s general problem with the number of characters and lack of proper character treatment (see above), but also partly due to the fact that they suddenly and surprisingly show up. So the comedic effect, here, sort of induces a lack of detail.

 

 

All the films problems become especially notable in the film’s finale. As Bonilla has too many elements and too many characters to handle, the finale (like the film as a whole) becomes too long and too aimless. There is a lot of stuff going on in the finale without much actually happening. This is not uncommon for low budget films; Dead West, for example, had the same problem.

But overall, Dead West was a “slicker” film than Dance with a Vampire, and so I’ll have to rate the latter markedly lower than the former; 2.5 out of 10 would therefore seem appropriate.

 

 

note: at least some DVDs of Dance with a Vampire were released under the title Redwood Justin: Vampire Hunter.