Fist Of The Vampire [2007]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Let's talk about fame for a second. When a lot of people think about fame they think specifically about the biggest actors, musicians, etc. but they tend to forget that there are certain communities that have their own famous people and if you don't follow those communities, you won't know anything about the big figures in it. You could be someone who doesn't follow sports and walk by one of the most famous athletes in the world without knowing it. That being said, sports is a community people have heard of but there are even communities unheard of by most people. This is all to say that we watched an interview with the director of this movie where he talked about actors in this movie like they were famous and we weren't sure if he was completely delusional or if they really are famous, just in specific communities we are unfamiliar with. Of course, no one in this movie could act at all so who knows where these people might actually find their fame.

The curiously named "Fist Of The Vampire" is a movie intended to combine a bunch of things the director apparently likes: fight clubs, crime, vampires, metal music, and girl-on-girl scenes. A trio of vampires - nu metal, leather lesbian, and the one who looks most like a vampire and is actually the director using a pseudonym - run a fight club and also dabble in drugs. These concepts are really bizarre because vampires for the most part seem to not really need money. If they had some in the bank when they died, they probably have enough interest to be fine and they don't need to pay for things like food or healthcare. Either way, they are being watched by a DEA agent who enters the fight club as a fighter for reasons unclear and a cop; at the end they have a shoehorned in romance. Random murders and fights happen for most of the duration until the final battle. We find out that the DEA agent is a boy from the beginning of the movie who watched the vampires kill his parents.

This movie is fantastically poor quality but not so poor as to diminish the enjoyment of it. The sound is a little off. The green screen use is just the right kind of bad. The acting is uniformly bad but in unique ways (the DEA agent's boss has a particular over-enunciation tendency that makes his performance a joy). There's bad CGI gunfire and explosions but practical blood effects. The beginning of the movie is set in 1977, which is shown by added lines to the footage like it's abandoned film from the 30s. The movie is punctuated with a diverse music selection from knockoffs of Evanescence, Slipknot, surf rock, and other styles that saw popularity in the mid-2000s. All of this combines to make it a real adventure.

It's definitely worth a watch and was even enough for us to contemplate watching other movies by the director. Especially because in the interview with him, he made it sound like this movie was in improvement over the two that came before it. 

We want to know what worse is.

Spoon Rating: 6