- Directed by Ulrich Edel
- Written by Karey Kirkpatrick and Larry Wilson, based on the novels by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg
- Starring
- Jonathan Lipnicki
- Richard E. Grant
- Jim Carter
- Rollo Weeks
- Alice Krige
My sister took my son to see this for his third birthday; he came home giggling about vampire cows. So when we all sat down to watch it, I at least knew that I wouldn’t be freaking out my kids by watching a vampire movie with them.
Blond urchin Jonathan Lipnicki of Stuart Little is Tony, an eight-year-old American boy transplanted to Scotland when his father takes a job designing and building a golf resort for Lord McAshton (John Wood). Despite the fact that he’s inexplicably put up with his family in a big-ass castle (are there really empty castles sitting around for temporary housing?), Tony’s sad and lonely; the kids at school despise and beat him for being American (“You won the revolution! You laugh at haggis! You unleashed Adam Sandler on the world!”), two of whom just happen to be grandsons of his father’s employer. And to top it off, he has nightmare. Well, maybe not horrific nightmares, but certainly distracting dreams, showing a whole bevy of vampires collected at a cliff’s edge, holding an amulet aloft to catch a strange ray of light emanating from a comet passing near the moon. (Got all that?)
His growing interest and belief in vampires gets its reward one night when one literally falls into his bedroom window. Young Rudolph (Rollo Weeks), who’s been nine years old for the past three centuries, has been on the run from a vampire hunter in bat-form, and the hunter’s merciless searchlights have drained him of energy — so much so that, when Rudolph attempts to attack Tony for his blood, he falls flat. Tony befriends him (only a kid would do that — if a vampire tried to attack me and stumbled from weakness, I’d be looking around for the nearest wood I could whittle), and the two bond as fast friends.
The vampire hunter Rookery (Jim Carter) is something of a character; imagine a cross between an ageing British biker punk and a parody of the gadget-enhanced cool of Blade. Yes, he is the heavy; this is one of those movies where the vampires are good but misunderstood (they drink blood from cows when possible, even) and the vampire hunters bad.
Through Rudolph, Tony meets the rest of the immediate family: Mother and father (Alice Krige and a very humorless Richard E. Grant), sister and brother. It seems that the jeweled amulet that Tony’s been dreaming about is a mystical object with the power to lift the curse of vampirism; unfortunately, it was lost during the comet’s last pass three hundred years ago, thanks to Rookery’s ancestors. And there are only a few days to find it, before the comet comes again.
All of this is very fine, you say, but what about the vampire cows? Clue in, dude; remember I said that the vampires go for cows instead of people where possible? Well, what do you think that does to the cows? (What’s not clear is why the world isn’t overrun with flying, red-eyed, fanged vampire cows by now.)
Your next question, very likely, is as to my motives for reviewing this one. It was a recent theatrical release, and big-budget family movies are usually outside my scope, even when genre-related. (No, don’t expect any entries in the Casper series to show up around here any time soon.) So why?
Those exploring my site may run across the posted reader letter from someone vehemently opposed to my treatment of the child actor star of Space Raiders (the letter, along with my rebuttal, is available for perusal here). I thus review this movie to show that there is indeed such thing as a good child actor, of which Lipnicki is an example. Certainly he’s no Orson Welles, but he carries his scenes well (and he has many to carry), with a skill for physical humor and a demeanor that’s enjoyable without being cutesy. Rollo Weeks also does well, lending an appropriately Peter Pannish quality to the young vampire Rudolph, although it’s a less successful performance — owing mainly to the exaggerated antiquated lines he’s given. But hell, not even Richard Grant is able to pull those lines off well. (So there, Joseph.)
Unfortunately, the movie suffers from a lack of attention to explaining the backstory, which wouldn’t be such a crime except elements of the backstory directly impact the resolution of the plot. If vampires can all be cured by the comet, how did vampirism start in the first place? If these vampires are living near the McAshdown lands, how can they not know that one of their numbers was an ancestor of the McAshdown family? Why isn’t the land overrun with vampire cows?
There’s also a weird reticence in following some hints about vampires to their conclusions. These ones sleep in a crypt beneath the cemetery and dress like the goth crashers of a Renaissance Faire; Grant gives a line about how vampires love decay and damp. Yet we have to shy away from anything remotely scary — this is a “fun for the whole family” flick, after all. It’s a strange truce, and I don’t know that any movie could pull it off; it’s hard to successfully portray vampires with so little tooth.
Add to this some noticeably lackadaisical special effects (the CGI flying cows look as obvious as moviegoers have come to expect, and I’d expect better bluescreening for Rudolph’s flying sequences in a CGI-enabled movie), and what we end up with is a big-budget version of the better direct-to-video kid-vid we’ve had since the early ’90s.
In the end, it’s a not-terribly-memorable confection — better than a lot of children’s movies, but nowhere near the all-ages appeal of something like The Iron Giant. But I bet you’ll see sell-thru copies on the rack at Wal-Mart for years to come; at at least as long as The Little Vampire is filling that particular rack, nothing worse will take its place.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 2
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 0
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 2
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Alice Krige (the vampire mom) played the Borg Queen in First Contact, as well as an uncredited Romulan commander in the TNG episode “Face of the Enemy”
- Tommy Hinkley (Tony’s dad) played a journalist in Generations
