[WORK] John Carpenters Vampires 720p Movies [WORK]
Antonino Hawj
I was disappointed to find that the traditional spiritual weapons against vampires no longer seem to work. But maybe it's just that Jack Crow's theology is rusty. At the end of the movie, bidding farewell to a couple of vampires he sort of likes, he tells them, "Vaya con Dios!'' Not a tactful thing to say to a vampire.
In this universe, vampires hide in desert shacks during the daylight hours, and sometimes merely bury themselves in sand. They are all ghoulish monsters immune to crosses, holy water, and garlic. The vampire hunters stalk into said shacks and fire wooden stakes into vampire chests with specialized harpooning equipment. The hunters also attached tethers to the vampires, then activated a winch outdoors, dragging the vampires into the sunlight. They like to scream things like "Die, b****!" and celebrate a hunt by drinking whiskey and hiring sex workers. If there are any Catholics reading, know that your tithes and offerings are going to more than just missionary work.
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It was only a matter of time. A matter of time that is, before veteran horror master John Carpenter, the brains behind Halloween, Escape From New York and The Thing, would give in and take on the most enduring of all movie monsters--vampires. After dreaming up such characters as Michael Myers, Snake Plisken and Starman, there's no way Carpenter's career could have been complete without at least one film about bloodsuckers. The resulting effort is John Carpenter's Vampires, a piece of joyful, over-the-top, gonzo trash film-making that delights in wallowing in its own bloodbaths. Every vampire film boasts its own interpretation of the sacred "rules" of vampirism. In Vampires, James Woods' master slayer, Jack Crow, snarls "Forget everything you've seen in the movies. It's not like vampires go around seducing everyone with cheesy, Eurotrash accents. They don't turn into bats. Crosses don't work. You want to kill one, you take a wooden stake and drive it right through...his...heart!"
Ridiculous without being awful enough to be hilarious, "Vampires" is chock full of exhausted lines like: "Let's go to work," "Suck it up," "We were set up," "End of the line" and, if I'm not mistaken, "Let's kill some vampires, padre."
I'm unable to find a reference to the first usage of 'nest' to refer to a group of vampires. The earliest I can recall is Blade (or possibly John Carpenter's Vampires) but both of those are fairly recent (in terms of movies).
As far as what a nest is, it depends on the work in question. "Night/Day Watch" series by Lukyanenko defined a nest as vampires initiated by a given "originating" vampire - that is a frequent interpretation.
James Woods has lots of fun playing this monomaniac tight-arse. Sheryl Lee does sterling work with a fairly thankless role. Thomas Ian Griffith is unfortunately made to resemble an Anne Rice pretty boy, but I could live with that since Carpenter is reassuringly consistent in his depiction of vampires as monstrous blood-drinking subhuman savages.
Vampires: The Turning
- The Atoner: Sang, for unintentionally siring the jai tham vampires.
- Betty and Veronica: Amanda and Sang respectively for Connor. The former is his actual girlfriend who was captured by the Big Bad and the other is a sexy female vampire whom he falls in love with over the course of the movie.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The reason the vampire hunters double cross the heroes is if Sang ended the curse they'd be out of business.
- Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: All the vampires and our lead hero know Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) which relies on the use of fists, elbows, knees, and shins to attack and block.
- Holiday in Cambodia: The movie takes place entirely on Thailand and follows a Muay Thai fighter and his girlfriend vacationing there.
- Impressed by the Civilian: Father Adam Guiteau is just an analyst of the Vatican and Jack Crow is quite unimpressed with him, especially because he keeps information on Valek (the Master Vampire Crow is hunting) secret until Crow literally beats it out of him. However in the final act the Padre finally is accepted by Crow when he helps kill some of Valek's goon vampires at great risk to his life and threatens to blow his own brains out with a shotgun to prevent Valek from fulfilling a ritual which would make him immune to sunlight (the ritual requires a Catholic priest and Guiteau had just blown away the one in league with Valek with said shotgun).
- In Name Only: This third entry in the series has no relation whatsoever with previous movies.
- I Will Find You: The driving force of the film is Connor's relentless search to find his missing girlfriend despite everybody telling him to forget it and go home.
- Martial Arts Movie: The
- Mighty Whitey: Downplayed for most of the film where Connor is a hapless tourist (while good fighting skills) that needs saving but come the end of the film chooses to become turned, fights better than all the other vampires, defeats the Big Bad and saves the day after literally all the other song neng die.
- Only in It for the Money: The local vampire hunters are driven mostly by monetary gain rather than personal reasons or any sense of justice like previous slayers. At the end, they double cross the heroes and attempt to prevent them from ending the curse so they wouldn't be out of the vampire business.
- Our Vampires Are Different: There are two types of them in the movie - the good phi song neng vs the evil jai tham. They don't appear to be related to Valek and other vampires in any way.
- Police Are Useless: The Thailand police treat the fact that Connor's girlfriend has been kidnapped like it's a lover's quarrel and tell him to go away, wait for two days, and then file a report. Up to the viewer to decide if they know about the rampant vampire population in town or they're just incompetent.
- Race Against the Clock: Connor must slay the vampire lord before his girlfriend is turned.
- Warrior Monk: The Song Neng who live in a monastery. The main one looks a lot like a traditional Shaolin monk.
One of the all-time visionaries of the horror genre is without a doubt, John Carpenter. He is responsible for some of the best horror movies ever made, including Halloween, The Thing and Christine. He's also written a lot of his own work, and even composed the score for many of his own movies. One of the last movies he directed was John Carpenter's Vampires in 1998, and it wasn't given the credit it deserved upon its release, but like many of his projects, it has gained a cult following as the years have gone by. It starred James Woods, Daniel Baldwin and Sheryl Lee, and was distributed by Colombia Pictures.
But John Carpenter's Vampires remains his most underrated movie, and it's well worth a watch. In many ways, it was way before its time with the depiction of vampires. Fans are obsessed with vampire movies now, but in 1998 it was still gathering pace, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer only being released the year before that. Since then, the vampire sub-genre has exploded and they are everywhere.
The group come across a roadside motel where they celebrate killing the vampires by getting drunk, and cavorting with sex workers. Until they are interrupted by Jan Valek, a vampire with extra incredible powers. Jack has finally met his ultimate match, as Valek bites one of the sex workers and turns her into a vampire. He then murders the hunters, leaving Crow and his sidekick, Tony Montoya to escape alive as the only vampire survivors. The mission is to track this evil vampire down before he can wreak more havoc in the desert.
However, vampire stories have been and always will be about monstrous killers. These creatures are nocturnal, immortal, and live to feed on the blood of humans. Vampire movies that do not dabble in a romantic subplot are more focused on giving horror fans what they want: carnage, gore, and horror. These are some vampire movies bringing these night-dwellers back to their violent and bloody roots, rejecting the vampires as seductive and mysterious and instead portraying them as brutal, terrifying monsters. Stripping them of any romantic overtures, the films on this list showcase stories of vampires who are on the hunt in hopes of a kill.
Snipes again appears as Blade in the sequel, with director Guillermo del Toro helming the project. This time around, instead of hunting vampires, Blade has to team up with an elite team of trained vampire soldiers called the Bloodpack. They reluctantly work together to track down a new threat: the Reapers, a vicious and hideous new mutant species that feeds on both humans and vampires. The Bloodpack includes vampire princess Nyssa Damaskinos (Leonor Varela), Reinhardt (Ron Perlman), and Snowman (Donnie Yen).
For most of his life, John Carpenter had been directing films. Surrounded by artistic influences ever since he was young - his father was an accomplished violinist and his mother routinely took him to movies - Carpenter naturally made the transition from childhood experimenter, to film student, to finally, professional director. Unexpected, however, was his making one the most important horror films ever in "Halloween" (1978), a chilling tale of a serial killer terrorizing a small town that was shot for a mere $300,000 and became one of the most profitable films of all time. Without stars, special effects or visible gore - there was nary a drop of blood on screen - "Halloween" launched Carpenter's career, while spawning untold numbers of imitators, no less than six direct sequels, and one (awful) remake. Though he went on to direct other seminal films - "Escape from New York" (1981), "Christine" (1983) and "Big Trouble In Little China" (1986) - Carpenter was forever remembered for creating a new horror subgenre - the slasher flick - that has often been imitated, but never duplicated.Born on Jan. 16, 1948 in Carthage, NY, Carpenter was drawn to filmmaking by repeated viewings of "It Came From Outer Space" (1953) and "Forbidden Planet" (1956), thanks to his mother who routinely took the young lad to the movies. His father, meanwhile, was a music director at Western Kentucky University, sparking his son's interest in playing violin. But Carpenter was more adept at playing bass, eventually becoming good enough to play in a teenage band that did USO shows in Europe. His true passion, however, was making films. As a youth, Carpenter ran around with an 8mm Eumig camera given to him by his dad and made "really bad" short films with names like "Gorgo vs. Godzilla" and "Sorcerer from Outer Space." After high school, Carpenter spent two years at Western Kentucky where his dad taught, but later transferred to the University of Southern California, becoming part of the School of Cinema; just missing an opportunity to learn alongside the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.While a graduate student at the USC, Carpenter was the writer, editor and composer on the Oscar-winning short, "The Resurrection of Bronco Billy" (1969). The next year, he worked with classmate Dan O'Bannon (later of "Alien" fame) on the sci-fi black comedy "Dark Star," his memorable master's thesis that he expanded into his first feature in 1974. Shot on a budget of only $60,000, the film offered a witty, yet bleak alternative to Stanley Kubrick's high-minded "2001: A Space Odyssey, in its vision of man in space overwhelmed by technology. British culture magazine Time Out proclaimed it "arguably the last great hippy movie with its jokey references to drugs, the absurd and California surfing...." Described by Carpenter as "'Waiting for Godot' in space," "Dark Star" alerted genre fans of the arrival of a distinctive new sensibility that was smart, playful and technically assured. Though well received at the 1974 Filmex, "Dark Star" was mishandled by several different distributors and failed at the box office. Its cult status was attained only after becoming popular on the college circuit in the late 1970s.With no directing offers forthcoming, Carpenter turned to writing screenplays with some degree of success. He sold a script called "Eyes " to Columbia, "Blood River" to John Wayne's Batjac Productions and "Black Moon Rising" to producer Harry Gittes. "Eyes" metamorphosed into Irvin Kershner's "The Eyes of Laura Mars" (1978), starring Faye Dunaway; "Blood River" later galloped onto the small screen as a 1991 CBS Western telefilm starring the unlikely trio of Rick Schroder, Wilford Brimley and Adrienne Barbeau; and "Black Moon Rising" eventually became a forgettable 1986 caper film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Linda Hamilton.Carpenter enhanced his reputation with the remarkable exploitation flick "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), for which he also composed the catchy minimalist score. "Assault" ingeniously mixed Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo," George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" and film history references galore to create a deliciously stressful exercise in screen suspense. Though a failure at the box office, the film helped establish Carpenter with European cineastes fond of tough American auteurs. A last-minute addition to the London Film Festival in December 1977, the film garnered a huge audience response. London critics anointed Carpenter the major new "find" of the festival. Unfortunately, this critical success did not translate into directing offers, forcing Carpenter to resume screenwriting-for-hire with "Escape" for 20th Century-Fox and "High Rise" and "Prey" for Warner Brothers. Of the three - only "High Rise" was subsequently produced (as the superior 1978 NBC telefilm, "Someone's Watching Me!").Producer Irwin Yablans - whose Turtle Releasing distributed "Assault on Precinct 13" - attended the successful London screening. Then setting up a new production company, Compass International, he offered Carpenter a chance to direct a feature. The project was to be a thriller based on a concept by Yablans called "The Babysitter Murders." The struggling writer-director thought the idea might prove commercial and thus, "Halloween" came to pass - an enormously influential and successful slasher flick that introduced Jamie Lee Curtis to the world and helped establish the grammar and thematic preoccupations of a new horror subgenre. Alongside his most celebrated film score, Carpenter skillfully employed a gliding Steadicam that unexpectedly turned elegant tracking sequences into menacing point-of-view shots. Having more in common with a carnival funhouse than the charnel house air of many of its would-be imitators, the film tantalized with the possibility of cheap thrills on the periphery of each carefully composed widescreen frame. Produced by co-writer Debra Hill, "Halloween" reportedly grossed over $75 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable films ever made.The success of "Halloween" launched a series of inferior sequels (directed by others), as well as Carpenter's entry into mainstream Hollywood production. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association hailed Carpenter with the 1979 New Generation Award for "Dark Star," "Assault on Precinct 13" and "Halloween." Flush with this success, Carpenter began working in TV during the late '70s, starting with co-scripting the innocuous teen romance "Zuma Beach" (NBC, 1978). He strutted his stuff a few months later as writer-director of NBC's "Someone's Watching Me!," a dazzling suspenser starring Lauren Hutton as a career woman being preyed upon by an unseen voyeuristic neighbor. With a nod to Hitchcock's "Rear Window," Carpenter achieved his claustrophobic effects with subtle framing and deep focus compositions. He gained more attention and kudos with "Elvis" (ABC, 1979), a three-hour biopic starring Kurt Russell as the legendary rocker. A trimmed version was released theatrically overseas.Once a leading contender to become modern Hollywood's version of the old genre master Hawks, Carpenter - since moving into bigger-budget productions - found his stylistic strengths and modest thematic interests (e.g. issues of communication and isolation; questioning authority) being sometimes smothered by an excess of production values or poorly served by inadequate scripting. Even a relatively early and low-budget outing like "Escape From New York" (1981) soon dropped its intriguing premise to settle for the conventional heroics required by the plot. Similarly, in "The Thing" (the first film over which Carpenter did not have contractual control), Rob Bottin's impressive special effects stole the spotlight from an ostensibly humanist theme."Christine" began as a promising exploration of America's automobile fetish and its relationship to male youth culture only to dissolve into a spectacle of the eponymous car's several physical metamorphoses and murderous rampages. "Starman" (1984) attempted to retell "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" as an adult love story. Neither Jeff Bridges' Oscar-nominated performance as an amorous alien nor his peculiar, but engaging chemistry with leading lady Karen Allen was sufficient to overcome the sketchy and derivative screenplay, serving as a reminder that characterization was one of Carpenter's weaknesses as a filmmaker. "Big Trouble in Little China" was a lavish but uneven homage to supernatural Hong Kong action flicks. Memorable for Kurt Russell's broad spoof of John Wayne and for a deftly edited kidnapping sequence, the film eventually succumbed to an overdose of special effects. The commercial and critical failure of this project sent Carpenter temporarily back to the world of low-budget filmmaking.He next directed "Prince of Darkness" (1987), a likeably goofy return to low-budget horror and a knowing tribute to the works of British fantasy screenwriter Nigel Kneale (best known for the "Quatermass" films). Absurd but compelling, the film told the story of Satan's return to Earth couched in the terminology of technological sci-fi. "They Live" (1988) presented professional wrestler Roddy Piper in an initially subversive consideration of the dark underpinnings of the "Reagan revolution" before degenerating into all-too-familiar fisticuffs and shoot-outs. Nonetheless, budget restrictions seemed to reawaken some quality that had been fading in Carpenter's filmmaking. Shorn of production bloat, his films had again become fairly dependable, if unambitious, fun.The $40 million "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" (1992) boasted state-of-the-art invisibility effects from Industrial Light and Magic but was undermined by poor casting - it was a Chevy Chase vehicle - and an indecisive tone. Carpenter briefly returned to the small screen as executive producer, segment director, composer and host of "John Carpenter Presents Body Bags" (Showtime, 1993), a horror anthology telefilm. Playing a ghoulish, pun-happy morgue attendant, Carpenter introduced three horrific stories: "Gas Station," "Hair" and "Eye." He helmed the first two, while Tobe Hooper directed the third. The effort was generally deemed well-crafted but uninspired. "In the Mouth of Madness" (1995) was an enormously entertaining trifle about a skeptical insurance investigator (Sam Neill) pursuing a hugely successful horror writer, whose books literally create a world of their own. The film benefited from a terrific cast that also included David Warner, Charlton Heston, Jurgen Prochnow and John Glover. The film's pleasures were undercut by an annoyingly obscure last third and a silly ending. Carpenter's remake of one of the beloved films of his youth, "Village of the Damned" (1995) opened to mixed reviews and tepid box office.The sequel that no one demanded, "John Carpenter's Escape From L.A." (1996), arrived 15 years after its predecessor on a wave of hype. Carpenter, Kurt Russell and Debra Hill collaborated on the screenplay and Hill produced. Though a stylized cipher, "Escape from New York" character Snake Plissken may have been the most memorable character in all of Carpenter's films. Russell was still convincing in black leather as the reluctant mercenary sent into a nightmarish futuristic Los Angeles, where the terminally politically incorrect are consigned. Though budgeted at $50 million, the film was deemed "cheesy" and "crappy" by much of the press, but these words were delivered with affection. The cast featured such exploitation icons as Peter Fonda, Bruce Campbell and Pam Grier and the film opened to healthy box office.By the mid-1990s, John Carpenter was a hardy survivor of the vicissitudes of the movie business. One of the few young genre auteurs of the 1970s to continue to work in genre fare (unlike David Cronenberg) - and work regularly (unlike George Romero and Tobe Hooper), he has remained busy producing, helming and penning works for film and TV. Carpenter had difficulty, however, rediscovering and packaging his strengths in a modern commercial cinema that encouraged the presentation of action as overblown visual spectacle. A consummate craftsman, Carpenter delivered solid entertainments that always boasted at least a few outstanding sequences. Unfortunately, while his career continued, there was little evidence of artistic growth. Carpenter's name figured prominently in advertising as a brand-name assurance of a certain level of quality, but he had clearly failed to live up to the promise of his early work.As the 1990s came to a close, it became apparent that Carpenter was more content with living off past successes rather than breaking new artistic ground. He began directing films with his name directly in the title, like "John Carpenter's Vampires" (1998) and "John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars" (2001) - both of which failed to benefit from this new approach. While "Vampires" - a mildly entertaining, though one-dimensional horror-western about an ill-fated band of vampire hunters - pulled in over $20 million at the box office, "Ghost of Mars" - a futuristic sci-fi thriller about the discovery of an ancient civilization on Mars - failed to make it past $10 million, signaling perhaps Carpenter's fading influence with the masses. Meanwhile, former musical front man Rob Zombie directed the remake of Carpenter's original "Halloween" in 2007, turning the horror classic into a muddy, bloody and pointless mess. Carpenter nonetheless served as a consulting producer.
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