• Written and directed by Kevin VanHook
• Starring
  • Casper Van Dien
  • Tony Plana
  • Kevin Grevioux
  • Jennifer O’Dell
  • Alexis Cruz
• Produced by Karen Bailey and Kevin VanHook

Every time I watch one of Kevin VanHook’s movies — so far I’ve seen Voodoo Moon (2005), Death Row (2006), and this one — I find myself wondering what, exactly, is missing here? These action-horror flicks, which usually premiere on as SciFi Network Originals before being released by Anchor Bay Entertainment with added gore for an R-rating, should be the promised land for genre movie aficionados: recognizable cast members, high end (for D2DVD) production values, and solid high-concept hooks. Yet somehow, they invariably come across as deficient, as if a cinematic gene were missing. The elements may all be there, but they never gel into an entertaining whole, even by lowered B-movie standards.

In the present instance, we’ve got another take on the vampire genre (because Lord knows, there’s nothing we need so much as another incremental reinterpretation of the vampire mythos). The main twist is “South American vampires.” Actually, it’s “South American vampires vs. Casper Van Dien.” What it really wants to be is “South American vampires vs. bad-ass Casper Van Dien,” but I don’t think anyone could pull that off. Van Dien plays Captain Hawkins, aka “Hawk,” leader of a commando team in a vaguely Amazonian country (shot in Puerto Rico) for no reason we ever really find out, because whatever their mission is, it quickly gets derailed when they come upon a rundown plantation in the jungle, full of fresh corpses lying in pool of their own jugular blood. And vampires, the kind that rip throats right out (no dainty little puncture wounds here), leap around as if they were attached to a wire rigging, and look like they smell bad.

“You know, this was a lot easier when I was Tarzan.”

So there’s the first couple of entries in the obligatory list of rules of What Hurts Vampires that this movie plays by: Daylight? Not at all. Wooden stakes? Very much so — in fact, the stake doesn’t even need to remain in the body once it pierces the heart. Crosses? Nope. Garlic? Nobody ever tries.

Several members of Hawk’s team are killed in the fracas, leaving Hawk, his longtime best friend Grieves (Kevin Grevioux), a huge black man with a voice that makes James Earl Jones sound like Chris Rock), and Juarez (Alexis Cruz), who as the latino of the team is of course small and scrappy.

Six months later and stateside, Hawk finds out the following:

1) His commanding officer, Colonel Weaver, is played by Lynda Carter. (Okay, he already knew that, but we find it out.)

2) Grieves is already back down in Amazonia-Madeupia at the invitation of the local government, to help control the vampire problem.

“Why do you think I prefer red shirts?”

3) By the most amazing of coincidences, Hawk’s ex-wife Laurie (Jennifer O’Dell) is in right about the same place. She’s an entomologist doing field research, see. And Colonel Weaver knows about this because Laurie is her goddaughter. It’s a plot that makes absolute sense as long as the entire globe is populated by few than three hundred people and is roughly fifty miles square.

Because Hawk is OF COURSE still bearing a torch for his ex, he pleads to be sent down as part of a back-up team for Grieves, which is exactly what the Colonel was counting on. Which means we’re set up for our three big plot threads, which will stay mostly separate right up until the last twenty minutes:

- Grieves and his team are not terribly effective in wiping out the vampires. Seriously, it must sting to have your asses handed to you by Ray Park playing twin vampire acrobats. (Remember when Ray Park was going to be the Next Big Thing? That was before everyone realized that, minus the greasepaint and with hair on his head, he looks waaaaay too much like David Schwimmer to be taken seriously.) Grieves is bitten but not drained of blood, because the local vampire community figures he could be an asset on their side, and after a quick bout of single combat, he becomes First Citizen of the bloodyfaced vampire posse. (Including, by the way, former Miss Puerto Rico Joyce Giraud. Who hisses a lot.)

“You know, they have laser treatments that can take care of that.”

- Laurie treks through jungle on beetle-hunting trips, and becomes friends with local innkeeper Javier (Tony Plana), who’s reluctant to scare the senorita with the local vampire lore that’s bubbling to the surface more and more. In fact, she first meets him as a crazed local teenager holds a wooden stake to his throat, claiming Javier is a vampire! Ha, ha, boy, those local superstitions, huh?

- Hawk and his team (including Juarez, naturally) trek overland, making a detour toward Laurie’s position before meeting up with Grieves. Thanks to some arbitrary bureaucratic regulations, the area encompassing both Laurie and Grieves is a no-fly zone, meaning that Hawk’s team has to land well outside the area and slog it in on foot, killing vampires along the way. (Ooh, look! A shiny nugget of pure bullshittium! Care to pan for more?) Not only that, but the forest canopy is just so dense that there’s no way for their military cellphone equipment to penetrate it and contact either Laurie or Grieves — even when they’re out of the jungle on the river, on a boat piloted by Danny Trejo. (Why yes, there IS more bullshittium here. And it’s not just for decoration, it’s apparently the power source for the entire plot!)

“…Actually, it feels kinda good.”

With some hyphenate filmmakers — writer-directors, writer-producer-directors, or even writer-producer-editor-directors as is the case here — the finished film reveals an individual who, for instance, exhibits master of plotting and dialogue but can’t compose an image, or any other number of combinations of skills and deficiencies. But Kevin VanHook as the superpowered hyphenate on this movie shows a remarkably well-balanced skill level under each of the hats he wears: All are sorta almost good but not quite. The editing and cinematography seem just as arbitrary and stapled together as the script, with entire scenes so disjointed that it feels like half of the coverage was lost on the way back north to his editing suite. Motivations are never more than sketched in, and even the reason for the increases is vampire attacks is borrowed wholesale from the Modern Hollywood Socially-Relevant Cliche Collection. (In case you’re wondering, the main vampire habitat in the Amazon is shrinking due to deforestation, forcing the vampires to encroach on human settlements. Remember, kids: If it’s evil, then ultimately it’s the fault of white Western capitalists, every time!)

So, which of these two has been kicking vampire heinie, and which has been all damsel-in-distressing?

I suppose there are viewers who would enjoy this more than I did. (Sci-fi keeps giving VanHook money to make movies, so they must attract a certain number of eyeballs.) But I find it hard to believe that most viewers don’t click the TV off during the closing credits and say, “Somehow, I thought that’d be better.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 20 humans and 24 vampires (and yes, I know, that means that some people end up being counted twice)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Tony Plana (Javier) played “Amaros” in the DS9 two-parter “The Maquis”