Meadhall of the Comitatus

It’s been an ages-long dispute: which are cooler, zombies or vampires? This is a polarizing issue, and one that deserves some serious consideration. Right now, all we have are opinions, but some day, some way, we may learn the truth. To further the cause of this clearly very intellectual and highly-important discussion, I shall endeavor to add not-inconsiderable evidence in the form of, perhaps, an overabundance of zombie movies and vampire movies under review for the Academy of Too Much Goddamn Free Time.

And the “zombies” from People Under the Stairs don’t count, since they were mostly zombie wannabes. Opening salvo goes to a Chilean vampire flick, Eternal Blood, which was roughly a trillion times better than The Hunger made for probably an eighth of that movie’s budget. On with the show!

Nothing says "mysterious" like a creepy priest standing in the middle of traffic.

Premise: 2/5

This is wicked silly, and the whole reason I decided to snatch up this movie in the first place. It’s about some goth kids–M, Carmilla, Elizabeth, and Martin–who spend most of their time playing a vampire role-playing game called “Sangre Eterna.” In the course of the movie they find themselves going to a “vampire party” (more a goth rave than anything) where the head of the party, Dahmer, tries to seduce the group into joining him with free drugs, booze, and maybe a little something more. M is the only one who’s not interested in what he’s offering, and makes this know when he goes a little apeshit and tries to beat the piss out of Dahmer. I suppose seeing him murder a guy in the bathroom might give M second thoughts about getting to be buds with him. On the other hand, he just comes off looking like a crazy asshole in front of his friends before being thrown out on his ass.

The rest of the movie revolves around some family drama that adds nothing whatsoever to the plot, Carmilla’s professor creepily leering at her any chance he gets, and M starting to do a quick 180 on how cool he thinks vampires are when possibly confronted with the real thing, and what he aims to do to free his friends from Dahmer’s spell.

It’s really not that bad, honestly, but the premise loses a point because there are too many scenes of really nothing at all happening. There’s a couple of cute misdirects, mainly at the beginning and at the climax, so that’s good. The problem is there’s too much padding in the movie. Lots of scenes of walking around, riding buses, drinking, smoking, and the aforementioned family drama scenes that make no sense and add nothing to the plot whatsoever—they seem to exist just to eat up more film time, and that really, if you’ll pardon the pun, sucks.

I swear I'll never eat meat on Fridays again! I swear!

Cast: 2/5

I’m gonna give it to you straight: none of these actors are any good. Maybe it’s just that I watched the thing dubbed and the voice actors are among the lamest I’ve heard in any professionally dubbed movie. I think they were hired solely on their ability to speak clearly, which, while it’s nice to be able to hear things, means that they are otherwise completely wooden or almost cartoony. Aside from that though, M gets the most face time in this whole movie, and it’s seriously FACE time. There’s not a lot of dialogue weighing this movie down, so the camera’s usually focused on M’s face to convey what’s going on in his head, and he’s a damn horrible emoter. You’ll see him trying to get an intense look, or be all deadly serious, and it comes out as confused or stoned. I can’t knock ‘em too bad, though, since for an amateur cast they still whup the shit out of anyone in Zombi 3 or Zombie 4. And Elizabeth is hot, so that’s a plus. Hot goth slutty girls? Works for me!

Finger lickin' good. Oh, and the bloody fingers thing she's doing is nice, too. (Sorry, was that uncalled for?)

Technical Bells & Whistles: 2/5

I mentioned before that this is a low-budget movie, but overall I’d have to say that most of it looks really good and is cleverly filmed. I wasn’t expecting Spielberg, so I can safely say this is a generally good category for the movie given what they had to work with. There’s a few things that REALLY bugged the hell out of me, though, and made me feel a bit embarrassed every time I saw them. The first problem being, their wire-fu looks like ass. When vampires are leaping and soaring around, or hurling people every which way, if you can’t make it look wonderful, don’t show it to me in the loving slow-mo that saturates almost every activity in the movie. There’s a vampire pouncing around late in the movie with his ass high in the air and it started giving me Pumaman flashbacks. Yeah, it’s like THAT. Oh, and while I’m sorta on-topic, slow-mo and quick jarring cuts aren’t so cool that you need to underscore EVERY activity in the movie with it. Slow-mo walking through a church is not fun to watch, and quick jarring cuts between frames of two people pretending to be vampires on a bus is gay-looking. I’m sorry, but sometimes you just have to put your toys away. And finally, I hope you LOVE blue-filter cam, because you’ll be seeing it a hell of a lot. “But Oz,” I hear you saying, “this movie’s about vampires, right? How else will they do the night footage they so desparately need?” Well, You, my general rule of thumb is, streetlights exist. House lights exist. And yes, even club lights exist. You wanna film it dark that’s fine, but do we need moonvision even in a house? Can’t they just, I dunno, turn on a little light—hell, even a dark colored light would be nice to mix things up, anything but another blue scene! Half of the movie’s monochrome, for fuck’s sake!

In addition to crosses, wooden stakes, silver, and garlic, vampires are also susceptible to being kneed in the junk. Do you know anyone who isn't?

Popcorn Factor: 3/5

Despite all the filler, Eternal Blood keeps up a fast pace all movie long, even with all the slow-mo fluff and “plot” padding, so that’s a huge plus. It features some comely vampirettes doing their thing. There’s some decent violence once the action kicks in. But what I think I liked the best about the movie (well, ok….second best, hot vamp girls always win) was the goofy role-playing game setup for the main action, even if it disappears as soon as they start hitting the raves. Somehow, the RPG setup which was attempted so earnestly even in its outrageous silliness kept me in good humor throughout even the most filler-tastic parts of the movie. This would’ve gotten 4 stars if the vampire RPG actually taught the kids some rituals or something that turned them into vampires, but maybe I’m the only one who thinks that would’ve been hilarious (I’m thinking back to the Dungeons & Dragons threat from the ’80s).

And allow me one moment of gamer nerdiness…when they’re rolling dice in the game during the first part of the movie, they just grab every die type you’d find in a standard set and just let ‘em fly. I can’t think of any rhyme or reason they’d do that except to show that they’re really playing an RPG, and I can’t help but find that charmingly goofy.

So, should you see it? Maybe. If you’re already into vampire movies and want to see another take on the themes than you get in either the Dracula or the Dusk ’til Dawn type movies, you might well get a kick out of this. You’re going to have to forgive the rough edges on the movie, but otherwise I can’t find anything super hate-worthy about this flick. If you’ve got a taste for something a little off the beaten path and have a bit of patience, you could do worse than Eternal Blood.

I learned that, in Chile, proper first aid for a nasty wrist wound is taking the pants off of the victim. I don't know what that's about, but I guess it works.