Meadhall of the Comitatus

While settling myself down with a list of movies that I’ve got lying around but never got to yet, I got a totally unexpected and early visit from the Necronomicon.  It kind of snuck up on me like Santa Claus—only a cosmically evil and abhorrent Santa, the kind that delivers presents no one wants.  Which, come to think of it, may still actually be Santa.  And just like with so many of Lovecraft’s nerd-heroes, satisfying my curiosity within the pages of this Necronomicon (hereafter to be referred to as the “Necromoniken” by unappealing talking boobs) ended up being a terrible, terrible decision.

Here's just a taste of the awe-inspiring special effects you'll be seeing in "Blood Angels." That's supposed to be a bat. Flying.

Premise: 1/5

What a title!  Sounds kinda sultry, kinda gory.  Is it about vampires?  Is it one of those off-kilter fallen angel trying to bring Armaggedon movies that comes up once in a while?  And most importantly, does it star LORENZO LAMAS?  You’d be forgiven for asking the first two question.  If you really asked the third question, not even God can help you.

But if you’re like me—and I know I am—you’ll be wanting to know just what this movie’s about.  Well, to the great surprise of no one at all, Lorenzo Lamas has a bunch of girls chained up in his attic.  Only, for the purposes of this movie and not his personal life, these girls are vampire “thralls,” the self-acknowledged “white trash of vampires.”  They can’t do any of the really cool stuff vampires like Lamas’s “Mr. Jones” are known for, like flying, and turning into a bat.  And I guess flying some more.  Really, I think eternal life, super senses, and super strength would be pretty neat things to have, so flying wouldn’t exactly be a deal-breaker.  Nonetheless, they are still chained up in an attic, so I guess that does suck (ha?  see what I did there? . . . I’m sorry).  That being the case, they go about effecting an escape from Casa de Lamas, and run off with a book they stole from him (the Necromoniken, if you couldn’t guess) that will let them perform the “ritual of Belial” and turn them into full-on vampires.

Somehow, this ritual involves a rave (which is more “Coyote Ugly” than “Blade”) on the winter solstice, and raising the “psychic energy” meter up high enough to create a sparkly CD that, in turn, somehow starts to summon a shitty looking dragon kind of thing from poorly CG-ed holes in the sky.  How this would help anyone is beyond my ability to guess, but it doesn’t really matter because the movie’s really about grrrrrrrrlllllll power, and sisterhood, and Lorenzo Lamas being a douchebag.

I suppose I should've mentioned this movie would rather be called "Charlie's Blood Angels."

Cast: 1/5

There’s just about nothing good to say here.  A couple of the girls are cute enough, I guess, but the acting is uniformly horrible, if not overtly painful.  And then there’s Lorenzo Lamas.  If you haven’t had the “pleasure” of seeing this guy “act,” you’re really in for a “treat” here.  I hope the excess of quotation marks get my message across.

Do you want to know the worst part?  It tries to be “quippy.”  The dialog sounds like it’s written by someone who suffered massive head trauma, removed 85% of his brain, and then woke up deciding he could write like Joss Whedon.  The puns, the quips, the “hysterical” one-liners fly like feces and ejaculate from an angry pack of monkeys.  I’m undecided as to who the most hateful offender is—Lorenzo Lamas himself, or a “comic relief” nerdy Asian guy who says “yo” a lot and calls himself “Dough Boy” to sound like he’s street.  I would happily murder either one of them, vampire or not.

The one guy who’s kind of amusing in this whole sorry affair is Richard Ian Cox, who plays Lamas’ sidekick Rennie (really?  really).  His “comedy” is actually funny in parts, and he does a pretty entertaining “lapdog loser” routine, with a payoff that involves his master telling him he can have one of the characters all to himself—his plastic fangs and ridiculous slurping/licking noises as he’s trying to puncture their neck, as well as the fact that he has to keep repositioning himself for a good biting angle to compensate for having a big-ass spike through his chest actually made me laugh a little.  But if I’m asked to admit to enjoying even a fraction of a milisecond of this movie in a court of law, I’ll perjure the hell out of myself.  This is just between you and me.

Lorenzo Lamas would like you to believe this is "hot" but it is most definitely "not."

Technical: 1.5/5

The good news is, this movie didn’t hurt my eyes or my ears that much.  The bad news is basically everything else: bad CG, bad puppetry, bad stunt work.  I guess some of the gore special effects are pretty okay, though nothing that hasn’t been seen before.  The problem with the gore scenes is that they almost inevitably end up being a punch line or launch pad for one of the miserable and unfunny “jokes” the movie is riddled with.  Seriously, it’s like opposites day all the time on the set of “Blood Angels.”  The scary or horror-y stuff is the most (unintentionally) comedic, and the most horrifying and painful moments are the “comedic” ones.  I should also mention that the makers of this movie have apparently gone to the Uwe Boll “school of cinematography and being the only real genius, not like that fucker Michael Bay”: about twenty minutes to a half hour into the movie we get to start seeing flashbacks to scenes we just saw in the movie, sometimes several in a row.  How cool is that, huh?  Oh, right, not really cool at all.  My “favorite” (again with the quotations!) flashbacks involve characters flashing back to things they weren’t there for and couldn’t possibly have seen!  I began to wonder if there really was only 40 minutes of movie here, with the other 50 or so being dedicated to just flashing back to the rest of it.  To paraphrase Yakov Smirnoff: “Blood Angels!  What a movie!”

Lorenzo Lamas in . . ."Immortal" Kombat!!!

Popcorn Factor: 1/5

I guess some things happen in this movie, and some of them are sort of entertaining.  Most of them, though?  Not so much.  It’s got the kind of bad acting that’s not quite bad enough to be funny, “funny” moments that make smashing myself in the nuts with a hammer seem hilarious, and more flashbacks than you can shake a flashback made of other flashbacks at.  It tries so hard to be cool, but it’s probably even less successful at this than its own obnoxious (but ironically so! *hrrkkk*) wannabe “Dough Boy.”  You can, and should, give this one a pass.

An AOL joke would be so late '90s, so I'm not going to make one here.

Three things I learned from “Blood Angels”:

1. Becoming a vampire gives you superior kung fu.

2. Girls just wanna have fun.

3. If I hear “That’s what sisters are for!” or “We’re sisters, aren’t we?” one more time, someone’s going to die.