MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
I don't know the genesis of the above poster, showing VAMP's star Eddie Deezen flinging open the coffin of a hot blonde vampiress, only to find her covered in bath-suds. However, it's cleverer than anything in the movie. And while the vampire-babe in the poster is certainly not based on the appearance of fifty-something costar Britt Ekland, the bit with a girl covered in suds is the sort of sexploitation that Ekland could have performed in her 1960s prime.
So three young guys come to Hollywood hoping to make movies, Kyle (Deezen) and his two buddies, Dope One and Dope Two-- whom I refuse to distinguish from one another since the writer and the director (Ernest Farino and the notorious Fred Olen Ray) did not do so. The three schmucks take a brief meeting with a low-rent producer, Pendleton (Jay Richardson), simply because he's Dope One's uncle, and he sends them off with a pat on the head. While in the glamor capital of the world, the Two Dopes get the idea to buy some glamor at a Beverly Hills brothel. Although Kyle has a steady girlfriend back home, he allows himself to be talked into going along.
The brothel they choose, however, is that of Madame Cassandra (Ekland), and she has three sexy pros in her entourage (Michelle Bauer, Jillian Kesner, and Debra Lamb). However, all four femmes are vampires, the only other occupant of Cassandra's cheap-looking bordello being a gay major domo. After some pleasantries, the Two Dopes go off with their bedmates. Kyle however resists being seduced for vague reasons, and he manages to get away. The next day he realizes that the Dopes haven't come back to the motel room, and yadda yadda: stuff happens and eventually Kyle teams up with Uncle Pendleton to infiltrate the brothel and defeat the evil lady vamps, in order to save the Two Dopes.
I commented in my review of HAUNTING FEAR that usually director Ray's main concern with his narrative was as an excuse to have his stock company players strut their stuff, and that's true here not only of Richardson and the three young sexy things, but also of guest stars like Robert Quarry and Dawn Wildsmith. Writer Farino was mostly an FX guy, and only wrote three movie-scripts, this one, a tough-cop flick I've not seen, and WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD, which according to this blog holds the record as Ray's worst film. Clearly Ray depended on the sexy women to sell the film, and he provides ample footage to justify that "high" concept. The girls, Deezen and Richardson are the film's only assets, as well as maybe one or two jokes that actually land, as opposed to the dozens that are terrible.
On this blog I've sometimes stated that such-and-such a movie had a good idea that went unused. That's not the case here; Ray and Farino have no ideas beyond "vampire brothel=lots of sex scenes." If anything, they deliberately screw up their own parameters. All we know about Madame Cassandra-- technically the focal icon of the story-- is that she set up her operation in Beverly Hills and immediately got some sort of protection from the local cops. The whole idea of doing so implies that the vamp-hookers are going to prey on customers while the cops cover up the disappearances. Yet the movie opens with scenes of two hot vamps chowing down on a couple of officers. And toward the movie's end, Cassandra has killed (offscreen) the chief of police with whom she made her contract. Such actions seem not only counter-intuitive, they kind of imply that the hot vamp babes weren't able to draw in enough regular johns to satisfy their blood-hunger. In a similarly stupid scene, Cassandra mesmerizes Kyle so that he can't run away. Then she natters with one of the hookers, the one who intends to fang Kyle, until Kyle regains his senses and escapes. I can understand filmmakers thinking they're smarter than their audience when they serve up schlock. But it takes a special level of incompetence not even to be able to get schlock right.
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