Just a few days ago I was talking about how good indy cinema can be in my review of At Dawn They Sleep. Well, I guess there truly is balance in the universe, for the second part of my indy-vampire-double-feature review package allowed me to see just how low independent cinema can go...

I knew I was in trouble from the opening shot, when a hand-written title card popped up on screen...out of focus. Really. I mean, I’ve seen some shabby work in my day. For instance, the title screen for Goblin, an abysmal 1993 video-lensed production wherein the monster costume disappears halfway through, looked like something created on a PC’s “Paint” program; and Multiple Maniacs has its opening titles scrolling by off-center, crooked, and printed on a piece of butcher paper. Nevertheless, this had to take the cake. I mean, no matter how bad all those were, they were all in focus, right? Right.

Anyway, as bad as the focus of the title (Underground Vampires, by the way, though it leaves off the “s”) was, the focus of the narrative was worse. In the beginning, some man (I would find 30 or 45 minutes into the film that his name was Ashley) asks a woman if she will “go to the fair” with him. She agrees to “go to the fair,” and, a great romance now born, we move to some unrelated footage of the two walking around some building, followed by some footage of driving, followed by a very rough edit with some static in there, followed by some camcorder footage of a carnival.

There’s some more random shots of things and then the man makes a remark to the woman that he’s going to visit his family for a while, which leads to some extended sequences of people standing by the beach, eating dinner, playing cards...

It was at this point that I seriously began to wonder if I didn’t have someone’s home movies by mistake. You may take this to be a joke. You make take this to be exaggeration. Don’t. That’s not to say I blame you. I mean really, the world is full of people who deal excessively in hyperbole; but know this: I am not one of them. When I took this job, I vowed never to use such statements facetiously (same with “I could make a better movie than this!”). And when I say it now I say it in all truth: I seriously considered the possibility that some aspiring filmmaker had produced a film by the name of Underground Vampires and, while burning it onto disk for me, decided to transfer his home movies as well and had then switched the disks by accident (I mean, the thing was unlabeled). If I didn’t see more action soon, I’d pop the DVD out and write our dear Head Vampire a missive...

Well, I guess I got what I deserved, and it came in the form of a little rubber bat that flew at Ashley’s girl while she was sleeping and bit her on the hand.

After a brief digression involving an old man playing an accordion (the time code on my DVD player informed me that it lasted more than three minutes, all of which I fast-forwarded through and would have demanded returned to me had I not), a story begins to drift through the foggy mists of the director’s recycled home videos: Ashley’s girlfriend disappears, which leaves him rather perturbed. He discusses this at length with a variety of friends, one of whom seems predisposed to expound constantly on various crackpot theories that quickly induce still more use of the fast-forward button. (Similarly, this disk has no chapters, and I have grown tired of fast-forwarding to get these screen-grabs, so that’s it for them. Everything in this movie is so deliriously banal anyway that it really doesn’t matter...)

Ashley finds a video of the girl having sex (in the interest of perpetuating the tedium, anything naughty is exactingly obscured) with another man and eventually asks her psychiatrist if she has any ideas where the girl could be. Nope. None.

There’s a scene with three girls having a slumber party in a house (again, everything is kept much too clean). The other two try to scare their friend by putting in fake vampire fangs, but she has the last laugh when she exposes her real, slightly less-fake ones and bites each of them.

Meanwhile, some other girl is breaking up with her lesbian girlfriend because she doesn’t think she’s gay after all; she was just trying to find herself. She gets thrown out of the Asian lesbian’s apartment, the Asian girl gets bitten by a vampire, and the other girl ends up meeting Ashley and the two form a relationship. Then she gets turned into a vampire and just lies in bed in a delirium; and then Ashley’s sister becomes a vampire; and soon there are more vampire women lying in various couches and chairs in Ashley’s apartment than I could keep track of, particularly since they all look the same; and then there’s some nonsense with a hypnotist; and then I think his old girlfriend comes back and some people die and some find religion and get saved; and then the end credits start rolling by horizontally on a computer screen; and I snap the disk in half and slit my wrists with the jagged ends.

What is happening in this movie? Even after the home video footage gets itself under control (it doesn’t so much stop as eventually morph into random shots of house shingles, gutters, pine trees, and moons—sometimes still frames clearly recorded off a TV), the “movie” is still all over the place. Ashley’s quest for his girlfriend is completely forgotten halfway through the movie, and he passes the time until he meets the failed lesbian by having more boring conversations with anyone he can meet up with. The height of the tedium comes during a conversation with his sister, who has “just returned from Japan” (not that that has anything to do with anything), wherein the two stand around for minutes on end discussing information we already know while the footage is intercut with footage of what I presume was their ping-pong game earlier in what seems to be a failed attempt at making the scene more interesting. Here’s a tip: Cut the footage!

The enjoyment factor certainly wasn’t raised by the fact that many characters are indistinguishable from each other. The film contains so many different young women that the protagonist knows (or doesn’t know) that I completely gave up trying to keep track of most of them. Were the three girls in the house appearing later in the movie and I just couldn’t tell? I have no idea, since no character is ever introduced; they just kind of wander in and are occasionally accompanied by some home movie stuff that gives no one any bearing as to their character besides their relatives.

Acting ranges from okay-for-a-no-budget-flick to downright awful, with characters stumbling over and flubbing lines and, in one instance (I doubt it even as I write it, and yet I’m sure I heard it...) someone having his next line whispered to him from off-camera. The actors certainly aren’t helped by the dialogue, either, which contains innumerable howlers. In addition to the opening show-stopper of a conversation about “the fair,” the failed lesbian comes up with some vicious remark about her lover not knowing courage, for she didn’t just get over a life-threatening bout of bone cancer, and, in an exquisitely ridiculous scene, a beautiful woman in her early twenties walking up to a guy on the subway and saying, “I don’t usually do this, but you seem like a nice guy, and I was wondering if you were seeing anyone.” I have no idea what planet this girl is from, but it’s certainly not Earth; nevertheless, I’m up for a visit.

What else? Quality? Basically non-existent. Most of the film is shot hand-held and is plagued by muffled dialogue that I think was just recorded with the camera’s mic. During the few instances when music pops up, it completely drowns out the dialogue, which is, in the end, I guess a bit of a blessing, though the music is of the “industrial” cat-in-a-hot-oven variety, so it’s really not all that great of a trade-off.

What else? I don’t know. I can’t express the pain of this viewing experience, even with the benefit of some liberal fast-forwarding included. (Some may say it was unfair of me to fast-forward at times, but I will make the following counter-arguments: (1) it took a great deal of strength to keep from just turning the thing off, and, were I not doing this for this site, I would have; and (2) if you were faced with a three-minute extended accordion solo, what would you do?)

I have never, I say, been so confused in my life; throughout the film’s interminable 93-minute running time my mouth was consistently open so wide with perplexed incredulity that a naive onlooker might have thought I was practicing for a career as a fluffer. Underground Vampires isn’t a movie, it’s a home video run amok. Avoid it like the plague, which would be a preferable alternative.

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