John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)

The Flick

For those unfamiliar with Columbia’s Superbit moniker, the idea is to strip away all the extras like commentaries, trailers and deleted scenes to make more room for the movie itself; what the consumer allegedly is buying the disc for anyway. This free space adds up to a much better transfer that approaches hi-def, plus DTS & Dolby Digital Sound. It’s safe to say that if you’ve already spent a couple grand on your home theater, a Superbit title is the best way to show it off. But how Columbia selects which movies to give the Superbit treatment is the true mystery. Even by horror fans’ liberal standards, “John Carpenter’s Vampires” is not the director’s crowning cinematic achievement. But it is a genuinely fun time-waster with a coarse, foul-mouthed performance from James Woods as a single-minded vampire slayer out to rid the world of bloodsuckers. It’s no secret that most of Carpenter’s action flicks can be read as new-age Westerns. And “Vampires” makes it even more obvious by plopping its wild bunch of slayers in the American southwest and cranking up the slide guitar on the soundtrack. This time the director veers into Peckinpah territory, using a series of jarring dissolves at numerous points in the film, a departure from Carpenter’s usual straight-ahead Howard Hawks visual style. The film’s opening segment, with Woods and his crew wiping out a vampire “hive” in an abandoned building, works brilliantly. It’s mean, ugly, and brutal. And Carpenter’s camera relishes every macho moment of it. But when the rest of the slayers meet a quick fate a few minutes later, the film spins its wheels until the final showdown some 80 minutes later. But make no mistake, even though Carpenter’s name is above the title, this is James Woods’s movie. Without him it’s direct-to-video all the way. Woods, nearly a foot shorter than everyone else in the cast, dwarfs whoever comes within spitting distance. More accurately, he *****slaps them like a pimp on a street corner. Priest, hooker, or lifelong chum – no one gets between Jack Crow and his vampire.

The Features

As mentioned earlier, most Superbit titles trade the usual plethora of extras for a picture that is second to none. Compared to the earlier release of “Vampires” on DVD, the new transfer is markedly more detailed, beautifully capturing the tricky “magic hour” photography of the desert at dusk that makes up much of the film.

Final Score

No one is going to call “Vampires” a classic. But it is a film that beats its own drum, letting star James Woods pummel the audience with a performance that has to be seen to be believed.