Vampires: Los Muertos
(2002) dir. Tommy Lee Wallace
viewed: 11/01/02
Don’t ask.
No really…
Okay, I rented this almost solely because it has one of my big guilty pleasure actresses in it, Natasha Gregson Wagner (who here is billed simply as Natasha Wagner), daughter of Natalie Wood. Wagner bears a distinct resemblence to her late mother, though maybe less classically beautiful. She is also not a great actress. It’s an irrational sort of attraction thing, okay? I came to like her from seeing her in Another Day in Paradise (1998) and reconfirmed my liking in Modern Vampires (1998), which is probably one of my all-time guilty pleasures (and it’s pure pleasure and pure guilt there).
So,…I bit,…pardon the pun, I rented Vampires: Los Muertos.
It’s probably easy to see my interest in it, another vampire movie with Natasha (Gregson) Wagner. This film is a sequel to the mediocre, yet not awful Vampires (1998) which was directed by John Carpenter and starred James Woods. Woods didn’t come back for this sequel as the big star in the lead vampire-slaying role, but interestingly enough, a like character is played here by Jon Bon Jovi (a less fully campy selection than I originally thought it might be.) This film also featured Diego Luna, who I liked from Y tu mamá también (2001).The film was released direct-to-video, so as one would imagine, it’s no great masterwork of cinema.
As in the original, the film is a mixture of several genres, borrowing most heavily from the Western, but also, of course, from horror and science fiction/fantasy. The narrative follows a roaming bounty hunter (a lone hired gun) who rounds up a gang of misfits to fight the bad guys, who are in these scenarios vampires.
Bon Jovi’s vampire bounty hunter is meant to read as a tough, “cool” version of the Van Helsing character (who in many other more traditional vampire/Dracula films is often portrayed as a hero, but a very uncool one. This is part of the film’s angle on the traditions. The character is a secular hero, though he is often aligned with equally heroic Catholic priests and monks. Bon Jovi hunts vampires wearing tight jeans, t-shirt, a leather vest, and cowboy boots. He also travels with a surf board, that he never uses. Wagner plays a half-dead victim of a vampire, held in stasis from converting to the “undead” by some drugs that she picked up in Mexico City.
The film wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it was also a less campy than I expected, too. Instead, it’s somewhere in between. A guilty pleasure, but less guilty, and less pleasure.
