This is Where the Battle Begins…”, because it certainly was no secret that I hated this movie. And that’s putting it lightly. I absolutely detested this movie. I wanted to put my fist through the screen.
I’ll give you a quick synopsis of the plot: a vampire kills a human…and gets chased by an angry detective, a racist doctor, and a man trying to get revenge on a pimp who died because of the vampire. And somehow all of these characters’ lives intermingle at some point. If you just scrolled through the Wikipedia plot summary, that pretty much sums it up. And if I had only seen that and had no experience with the source material, I might have been more inclined to give this movie a chance and just see how it turned out. But alas, that is not the case.
The premise for this movie is just appalling. I know that it is a comedy. And yes, I know that The Howling did the same thing too. And maybe this was intentional because they saw how badly it would go over if they tried to make it as a serious drama. But seriously, are we even talking about the same characters? And that ending! Yeah, that’s kind of the only saving grace here. I do not care how you look at it, it is just stupid. And even though they tried to make this character into some sort of hero, you could tell that the filmmakers were trying to make him seem heroic because they didn’t want to offend their audience. And that’s fine for some movies. But for a horror comedy, you have to be funny. This movie wasn’t even remotely funny. Now, I suppose you could look at the first ten minutes of this movie as a way to get into the mood. But after about the first 20 minutes, I honestly stopped being able to believe that this movie was made seriously. It was completely ridiculous. And this movie was all about how ridiculous it was, which was kind of what I hated about it. So the movie’s biggest problem was really in its premise. As for other problems, it just didn’t deliver on the promise of how ridiculous the premise was. The acting was decent, but some of the acting choices in this movie just weren’t believable. And also, I felt that some of the characters’ motivations were pretty flawed. And while it was a pretty cheap looking movie, there was actually a story in there that you could tell with your eyes. And I will admit, it’s not all that bad that the storyline actually exists in the movie because it made the film much more watchable than it could have been otherwise.
All in all, this movie was more aggravating than annoying. I just don’t see the point of this movie. It wasn’t offensive enough for me to laugh at, but it wasn’t funny enough for me to look forward to seeing again. The bottom line is that this movie was just awful. And all of the performances were done pretty well by the actors. The biggest problem with this movie was really that it just didn’t feel like it had enough originality to it. It felt like a pretty derivative movie to me.
Video
The transfer for this movie looked pretty great. This was an older transfer, which looks pretty decent. It certainly looks better than the transfer of The Howling. However, I noticed one glaring issue with this transfer that I hadn’t noticed with other transfers. And that was that it is in 1.78:1 instead of 1.85:1. I have no idea why. Either way, the picture itself looks pretty great. This transfer is pretty good, and I doubt there are many issues with the transfer aside from that, and even that is an easy fix. There are no visible problems here.
Audio
The audio for this movie sounded pretty great. I mean, it sounded pretty good for a movie that’s in English. The dialogue, score, and sound effects all sounded clear and pretty accurate. The surround channels do make their appearance in this movie at times, but for the most part, the audio is kept contained to the center and front speakers. The surround channels really don’t do much for this movie, and they didn’t in other movies either. The audio did sound pretty decent. It was pretty much just what you would expect from an English movie made in the mid-nineties.
Extras
We start off this disc with a pretty standard special features set of extras for a DVD. We have no special features here, which is probably because the movie is over 20 years old. I’m pretty sure this disc didn’t even exist at the time this movie came out. As we move along in this review, I’ll try to mention the special features that exist on this disc.
Final Thoughts
While this movie was not terrible, I will have to give it a pass. It is pretty poor. The premise was basically just stupid and it lacked any kind of believability. I also didn’t like the fact that some of the characters were so annoying that you wanted to punch them. And I especially didn’t like the ending of the movie. This movie was pretty much horrible. This is the kind of movie where you know the main characters have to live happily ever after in the end, but I guess that they just had to kill off the human and let the vampire live so that they could keep this story going. I guess they were hoping that horror movies wouldn’t catch on and that the vampire would get around to getting his turn to live in the future. Then again, it might be that they were planning on the main human character being revived by some weird alien creature that lived on his face or something, but instead it turned out to be the vampire that could come back to life again. Who knows? Probably the director. So while it wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible.
The Video: The transfer was pretty decent. There were no real problems with this transfer. The picture was pretty accurate to the film, but the image really wasn’t very sharp.
The Audio: The audio was pretty good. It was kept mostly contained to the center channel with the surround channels only showing up at times for the surround channels. The surround channels never really sounded great and didn’t add to the movie.
Final Thoughts: The quality of this release is pretty good. But there are no special features. I will not recommend this DVD to anyone. If you must own this, I guess you could pick it up for about $10 on Amazon or something like that.
Fans of horror movies know that director Wes Craven is one of the masters of the genre. In the 80’s, he helmed the most profitable horror film of all time (The Last House on the Left), and then went on to produce horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream (the first two films in a franchise that made over $1 billion). His first film is called Swamp Thing. This film focuses on a small town being terrorized by a swamp monster, and the local police and military are forced to team up with a plant-man-turned-soldier, Dr. Stephen Grant, and a black-widow-type female cop, Detective Amanda Toad, to put an end to the swamp monster that is slowly devouring all of the townsfolk. This was just released on DVD and I decided to put in a quick review of this movie.
The Plot
This film stars Powers Boothe as Lieutenant Colonel John Mulder and Adrienne Barbeau as Detective Amanda Toad. This movie was filmed in the small town of Chester’s Mill in North Carolina. This town is the most popular gathering spot for people of all ages and walks of life. That’s because this town is full of weird and unexplained occurrences that seem to never end. It seems like there is some connection between the town and some dark force in the land that is slowly corrupting the town’s citizens. But what is it exactly? That is the mystery that you must keep watching this movie for. And that mystery keeps you guessing right up to the end of this movie.
The thing is, I don’t really want to reveal any spoilers. I’m going to do my best to stay away from spoilers. But I will say that there are plenty of
