Decadent Evil 2 (2007)

Reviewed on May 14, 2008 under Exploitation, Horror |

Produced and directed by Charles Band
Written by “August White” (Brian Muir)
Starring
- Jill Michelle
- Daniel Lennox
- Ricardo Gil
- Jon-Paul Gates
- James C. Burns
Executive produced by Jon Morrey and James Snyder

If you’re looking for some distinction to this movie, here it is: It’s the first movie Charles Band made in Little Rock, Arkansas. No, he hasn’t relocated his base of operations from Los Angeles; in the course of scheduling and running his series of Roadshow engagements a couple of years previous, Band got together with James Snyder, who convinced him to put on a more complete horror convention in Little Rock, and to come shoot a movie there – possibly the first of several. (Snyder is credited as one of the executive producers.)

The movie is also set in Little Rock, as helpfully announced by good-girl vampire Sugar (Jill Michelle) when she and her human boyfriend Dex (Daniel Lennox) pull into a seedy motel. Their reasons for being there are also their two main pieces of luggage. In a big birdcage under a blanket they have Marvin, the rod-puppet homunculus shoehorned into the plot of the first movie to fulfill that Full Moon fetish for miniature monsters. And in the rolling suitcase is the worse-for-wear body of Ivan, the vampire-hunting dwarf who met his end at the teeth of former vampire mistress Morella at the end of the last movie.

Kool-Aid really needs to rethink their product placement campaign.

If you’re watching close, you’ll realize pretty quick that, though similar, this three-foot-tall dwarf is not the same three-foot-tall dwarf we saw last time. In other words, the role is no longer being played by Phil Fondacaro, who has been replaced by Ricardo Gil. You may think that a movie which relies on Phil Fondacaro for its star power is pretty far down the nether side of the bell curve; how much further, then, is one which has lost even that appeal and has to make do with a less-famous substitute?

Not that Ivan is up and around for a while, anyway. They’ve traveled to Little Rock because they’re looking for the current head of the bloodline, on whom the honor would have devolved at the death of Morella. (Note: Morella herself had been transformed into an homunculus, and Marvin’s loveslave, at the end of the first movie; how she may have met her final end between that movie and this sequel is never mentioned.) Only the blood of the head vampire has the power to revive the deceased Ivan, and Sugar and Dex feel they owe the little guy that. Marvin, who was Ivan’s father before being homunculized, also wants his son back.

They’ve made it this far across the country using Ivan’s magic dowsing cross to hunt out the vampire lair (with Dex doing the dowsing, naturally, since Sugar can’t hold a cross), and now that they’re in the right city, they manage to narrow it down to…

Wait for it…

A strip club.

“I get to live forever, AND I get to look like this? Oh goodie!”

Yes, I know, I’ve startled you badly enough to spill your drink, haven’t I? I mean, the odds of another powerful vampire lord hanging out in another tittie bar is staggering. Though I guess it’s a good bit of camouflage; you might expect vampire lords to confine their gentlemen’s club endeavors to larger metropolitan areas. Confining one’s self to a sleazy bar in the hinterlands would certainly throw enemies off the trail, wouldn’t it?

So Sugar and Dex start their explorations there, with strippers whirling on poles in the background. This is, probably, the only part of the movie that evidences its non-Hollywood origins, and the clue is subtle; had this been made in L.A., the strippers would likely have had inflated breasts, instead of the slim “natural look” that dominates here. And the Hollywood strippers would probably have learned to disguise that dead-eyed “I shut off my soul while I’m working so I don’t have to remember that I hate my job” expression. Aside from that, it looks like every other tittie bar in the movies, with dimness punctuated by colored lights and expressionless music punctuated by metronomic beats.

Why yes, I do find it unspeakably depressing. How did you guess?

Dex starts wandering around with the dowsing cross, trying to find the vampire, but loses it quickly when the semi-handicapped janitor Boris (Mike Muscat) bumps into him and sends it through a hole in a floor grate to the sewers below. So Sugar and Dex can only assume that the vampire they seek is someone associated with the club (as opposed to one of the patrons), but which one? I would naturally assume that vampires have some sense that points out other vampires to them, but apparently such is not the case; in fact, later in the movie, we find that a vampire can’t even identify another vampire by the taste of their blood. Who would have thought that vampires would be so invisible to each other? So their only recourse at this point is to get jobs there — Sugar as a stripper (naturally), Dex as the assistant janitor — and start searching for clues as to who’s the bloodsucker, and more importantly, who’s the chief bloodsucker.

Michael Madsen called. He wants his shirt back.

This mystery story is the one element which quite possibly makes the sequel better than the original, or at least lends more palpable structure to the story. Is it Janos (Jon-Paul Gates), the club manager who talks with the cadence of a Ren Faire groupie and keeps a locked refrigerator in his office? Is it Burke (James C. Burns), the head bouncer who reacted so suspiciously to Dex’s initial investigations? Is it Lena (Jessica Morris), the blonde fatale stripper who was the unchallenged Queen of the Lapdance before Sugar came along?

Interspersed with their Scooby-Doo-like investigations are a few scenes of a vampire preying first on one of the strippers, then on one of the patrons. And no, that doesn’t give us any more clues to the vampire’s identity; as Sugar helpfully informs us, a powerful enough vampire can assume a monstrous form at will, and that’s the latex face we see sucking blood from victims

(Okay, it’s a mystery, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good mystery. By the halfway mark, I was certain who the head vampire was, barring inept screenwriting. I was right.)

Ivan does eventually get revived in time for the last twenty minutes, and Ricardo Gil doesn’t do badly stepping into Fondacaro’s shoes. I mean, he’s not any less believable as a kick-ass vampire hunter who doesn’t top three feet. However, in half of his scenes, the crepe beard affixed to wrap around the actor’s goatee is visibly peeling away from his face. Maybe someone should have sprung for a second bottle of spirit gum.

“Whaddaya mean I’m not Phil Fondacaro?? I’m wearing his undershorts, ain’t I?”

The whole production feels tight, in more than one way. Shooting locations are limited to the motel room, the club (including the manager’s office and the respective restrooms), a lingerie store, and the auto salvage yard where the head vampire likes to take his victims. And because necessary characters in each scene are either confirmed vampires or suspected of being vampires, we only see them at night. That gives the sets a semi-deserted, impoverished feel, even tough Little Rock locals gamely showed up to be the subjects of lapdances. Maybe my attitudes would change if I ever became the head of a vampire bloodline, but I tend to think that I wouldn’t confine myself to small, seedy holes to hide in.

The larger tightness, though, is in the story; while the concept and outline are serviceable (given, you know, that this is a vampire stripclub movie), the script simply begs for a subplot. And the fertile soil is there: We’ve got a good vampire girl and a human boy in love, straddling their two worlds. Shouldn’t there be some conflict or friction there? Shouldn’t Dex worry about Sugar slipping more and more into the “human are cattle” attitude displayed by every other vampire he’s met in the course of two movies? Shouldn’t Sugar start to feel that Dex is holding her back from experiences that she and a vampire lover could experience together? Instead, we just get a couple of quick laughs when Dex is disgusted by the sight of Sugar sucking blood from a transfusion bag.

In fact, the closest thing to a subtext we have here is in the final vampire attacks, which, unconsciously or not, capitalize on the “vampirism as rape” implication: Female victims, their clothes ripped off, screaming, with mascara running down their faces. I’m pretty sure that Charles Band wasn’t consciously trying to link both the exploitative and the supernatural elements of the story to the idea of violent sexual assault, but the upshot of the association is that whatever titillation the viewer may have garnered to this point is overwhelmed by a wave of sick guilt. Not the best prescription for escapist exploitation fantasy.

“To get to that blonde, you’re going to have to go through this blonde!”

As with some other previous Full Moon sequel, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the main impetus for the sequel wasn’t the fertility of the conceptual material or the popularity of the first installment, but simply the fact that the gimmicky rod puppet had been paid for. But Marvin’s limited technical side still manages to sideline him from the main action (though he does get a trip out of the cage as realized by a low POV steadicam shot that calls to mind the opening scene of Puppet Master (1989)), and now that Fondacaro no longer plays the role of Ivan, the only two points of novelty for the franchise are pretty paltry. In other words, though this installment may have been a marginal improvement over the first one, I’m in no hurry to see if the slight upward trend continues in a Decadent Evil 3.