09/22/09 - Vampire Hookers

Vampire Hookers (1978, 88 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080080/

Another Tuesday means another epic thriller from the local cinema. And by epic thriller I mean garbage horror movie. But it's all in good fun and with good company so it's still enjoyable.

Vampire Hookers is, not surprisingly, about vampires that are hookers. The head vampire is played by John Carradine and named Richmond Reed. He's the only actor I'm going to mention as everyone else was pathetic. Anyway, the story itself is really about some sailors on a break from duty. Some strange things occur and they're caught up in a showdown with Reed and his group. It ends in the cheesy ending that is typical of such a film with the sailors escaping only to have a quick cut to one of the sailors and see that he's been turned into a vampire as well.

As mentioned above, the acting is atrocious. It was a sad day for Hollywood when some of these actors got paid for their performance here. Yes, it really is that bad. Lines like "Awesome!" are delivered so poorly it's a pain to watch. Carradine seems to enjoy himself though and his "acting" is worth a few laughs just for this simple fact. The hookers themselves are only there for eye candy and corny one-liners and they're subpar on both accounts.

The one thing the film really has going for it is pacing. For the most part. At 88 minutes there really is quite a lot of stuff going on most of the time. The story moves at the appropriate pace and I never really was bored with what was going on with the characters. However, there is what seems like a twenty minute sex scene just thrown in the middle and it gets boring pretty quickly. It's almost as if the filmmakers realized they didn't have much nudity in a film called Vampire Hookers and decided to throw it all in one go. But taking this away, the film is remarkably enjoyable for the horrible acting and I think a big reason for this is the flow of the film.

Overall, I gave this film a 3/10. It's worth quite a few laughs but the acting is just about the worst effort I've ever seen. Ever. I cannot emphasize this enough in my opinion. Yet somehow the film manages to have good pacing and be pretty watchable for the most part. It never really flat-out fails anywhere.