Cryptz (2002)

Posted on Nov 06, 2002 under Comedy, Horror |

Produced and directed by Danny Draven
Written by Scott Phillips
Starring
- Choice Skinner
- Rick Irvin
- Dennis Wahler
- Lunden De’Leon
- Chyna
Executive produced by Charles Band

As always, please keep in mind that the following is my opinion. We all have them, and that’s fine. You’re welcome to yours, and I’m fond of mine, so if you disagree, please refrain from filling my inbox with inflamed comments on how wrong I am. I just want you to know where I’m coming here, to wit:

I hate rap music. Hate it hate it hate it. And with it, all of the hanger-on genres like hiphop. While you’re at it, throw in just about everything that’s been marketed under the label “soul” since Marvin Gaye died. It’s not just a disconnect with the style, such as I feel for Eastern European folksongs or Mongolian throatsinging; I think that the whole phenomenon is crass and cynical, a factory-made genre in which white executives hoodwink black performers into endlessly reproducing lowest-common-denominator pap while thinking that they’re somehow actively contributing to a cultural art form. It glorifies underachieving imitation for the purpose of loading the consumer up with more, more, and still more of the same. (If you want to believe me a racist, go ahead; I’m sure my collection of Lightnin’ Hopkins blues recordings won’t dissuade you. And for the record, I use almost the same language to describe my equal disdain for modern country music.)

What’s the street word for “hubba”?

So it really came as no surprise when the post-Paramount Full Moon got into “urban”-themed productions, since that same product-moving cynicism characterized their business plan. The commercialism of the whole enterprise was highlighted by the fact that the directors of these movies were such palefaces as Charles Band and Ted Nicolau. (A notable exception, and one of the later such Full Moon movies, was The Vault, directed by African-American actor James Black; especially notable is the fact that this one didn’t try as hard to be as “street”; the black cast was necessitated by the story’s connection to slave history, not by flavor-of-the-month pop culture.)

All of which tells you the dread I had putting Cryptz into the machine — another “urban” horror tale from Full Moon, produced and directed by the very Caucasian Danny Draven. I was expecting yet another half-hearted attempt at market cash-in. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that Cryptz keeps its boat afloat by poking light-hearted fun at the very tropes of “urban” pop culture that irk me so badly when presented straight-faced.

Our protagonist is the self-named Tymez Skwair (Choice Skinner), a lower-class twenty-something who still lives with his mom and fully expects to someday be a double-platinum rapper, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the ambition to even get himself a bill-paying job. His two friends, Fuzzy Down (Rick Irvin) and Likrish (Dennis Wahler) live in the same reality-free dream world, all thinking that they’re the next big thing to hit the rap world and wondering why no one recognizes their obvious superstar talent.

Body hair interferes with one’s aura.

While moping around the streets, they catch sight of a stacked-to-the-brim girl Stesha (Lunden De’Leon), who actually deals tolerantly with their catcalling. She works at an underground club called Cryptz, but declines to tell them where. With Tymez especially smitten, the threesome tries to track down the club by calling their spooky acquaintance, a mystic/martial artist named Truck (Chyna, who, under the name Andre McCoy, was Morpheus’ stunt double in The Matrix).

Truck, eminently knowledgeable in such things, warns them away from the club in no uncertain terms. And when he finds out that Stesha pinched Tymez’s cheek on the street, he instructs him to have his friends duct-tape him to the bed before nightfall. Given the, um, homoerotic overtones of such behavior, they all decide against it once Tymez has hung up the phone. But later, as soon as night falls, Tymez’s cheek starts burning like hell, and he’s drawn by the pain, along with his friends, to a spot in the city where Cryptz is. (The burning attack interrupts the trio watching Ragdoll on TV — fortuitous, as Ragdoll is also the second feature on the Cryptz Double Feature DVD.)

Cryptz is indeed an underground club (filmed, by the way, in the basement of the building where Draven shot Hell Asylum), guarded by the biggest bouncer this side of Gamera. It’s kind of a sparsely-attended place, but that’s what you expect when nobody knows you’re there — and anyway, the extremely athletic pole-dancer distracts from everything else in the room. (Seriously, she was treating it like it was an Olympic event. Beats that namby “beach volleyball,” anyway.) Tymez calls Truck to admit that, nope, he ain’t duct-taped to the bed, and Truck advises him NOT to accept any “private dances.” Which, of course, is when Stesha pulls him into another room for a private dance.

DAMN!

Are you ready for the horror? The image that will stay burned in your mind long after the rest of the movie fades from your synapses? Here it is:

Stesha ties him to a chair, takes off her top and shows us her implants.

I’m a red-blooded heterosexual American male. I understand the appeal of the perfectly shaped breast, and thus the monolithic patriarchal pressure there is for women to enhance and reshape themselves in order to appeal to the baser instincts on which videos like this one bank. But, brother, these ain’t those perfectly shaped breasts. These resemble nothing which has ever graced a woman’s torso without a surgeon’s dubious aid. They just plain look unnatural, misshapen, and about as cuddly as a soda cracker. It takes a lot to make the pole dancer (who apparently had nipples but no actual mammary glands) to look good by comparison, but this did it.

Thank goodness she sees something that makes her put her top back on: Tymez has a tattoo on his chest that he picked up from a design his grandmother had once shown him. Leaving him trussed to his chair, Stesha goes for the house mother: A spooky Jamaican woman named Miss Kulada (Ty Badger) who cut out her own tongue in a voodoo ritual. And here’s where things spiral out of control for our homeboys.

From the left: Tymez, Fluffy, and Likrish (who obviously unleashed the fart the other two are smelling).

See, Cryptz is run by a cadre of vampires who use familiars like Stesha to bring in fresh blood. And worse for them, the tattoo on Tymez’s chest is an ancient voodoo symbol of power which the vampires have been searching for, and which will give them all those powers that will bring about a complete vampire apocalypse. All they have to do is cut it off his chest. Oh, and suck out the friends’ bodily fluids.

Good thing that the kick-ass Truck is tracking down the whereabouts of Cryptz at that very moment, huh?

The biggest compliment I can pay this movie will sound bizarre: It has great filler. Like all of the movies that Draven has directed for Full Moon, it’s a thin script padded out to nominal feature length (about 70 minutes). HorrorVision and Hell Asylum both used montage sequences to extend the running time, which was done skillfully enough to add to the atmosphere, but it was still pretty visible filler in both cases. Here, though, the main filler is dialogue. And not simply the bitchy sniping that passes for banter in too many low-budget flicks. Tymez, Fuzzy and Likrish keep up a stream of streetchat that actually sounds natural, and contributes both character and humor besides. Granted, all three are idiots (and while Tymez and Fuzzy are treated light-heartedly, Dennis Waller’s Likrish comes across as an exhaustive Chris Tucker impersonator), and not really what you might consider “worthy of survival” in a horror flick, but at least they’re not as odious as the mean-spirited Gen-X whiners that have become the norm for movies in this genre and price range.

This is why they keep the lighting low in these clubs.

The big misstep, though, is the inclusion of Tymez’s McGuffin tattoo. Not that the story didn’t need to ramp up from the simple scenario of three bonesheads being hopelessly outmatched against a club full of vampires, but adding a world-threatening apocalyptic subplot extends the scope of the story far beyond the movie’s resources to show us. It demonstrates a deep uncertainty for the story that had been told us to the point; a miscalculation, because we’re not more likely to care more about the fate of the entire world if we haven’t been able to muster any sympathy for the three main characters.

Be that as it may, I can’t help but think that Danny Draven is a filmmaker who needs to be cut loose with an honest-to-goodness budget one of these days. Given what he can manage to whip up in eight days on the chump change that Full Moon tosses his way, it’d be an interesting ride.