Teenage Space Vampires (1998)

Posted on Feb 07, 2008 under Horror, Kidvid, Sci-fi |

Directed by Martin Wood
Written by Martin Wood and Alon Kaplan
Starring
- Robin Dunne
- Mak Fyfe
- James Kee
- Lindy Booth
- Jesse Nillson
Produced by Cris Andrei
Executive produced by David M. Perlmutter, Lewis B. Chesler, Vlad Paunescu, Peter Locke, Dana Scanlan (and Charles Band, uncredited)

The most obvious precedent to this movie is the original Invaders From Mars (1953). It wasn’t particularly well made or insightful, but it worked because it was sincere, and managed to anticipate the gripping paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) for a juvenile audience.

There’s no reason that Teenage Space Vampires couldn’t have done the same. The production strictures common to Kushner-Locke’s Canadian-Romanian co-productions (tight budgets, mandated location shooting at Castel Studio, a cast made largely from Romanian actors struggling to seem like Americans) didn’t preclude a movie with an honest emotional core. Even the camp implicit in the title shouldn’t have been an impediment; after all, it’s not as if “Invaders From Mars” doesn’t bear some strong camp connotations. (Or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” for that matter.) In short, there’s no reason that Teenage Space Vampires couldn’t have been a much better movie than it turned out to be, and that’s a damned shame.

Hubcap — of the Chariots of the Gods???

As is standard to the subgenre, the action takes place in the idyllic California (cough) town of Knollwood, where teenaged Bill (Robin Dunne) is awakened in the middle of the night by lights in the sky. A thunderstorm, yes, but he also sees a disc-shaped something in the haze. Of course, he’s predisposed to noticing stuff like that; his bedroom is plastered with posters from Full Moon releases.

The next morning, while delivering newspapers, he finds a metallic disc in a neighbor’s side lot. (It’s cunningly disguised, though, by being on end. Also, by being smaller than would accommodate anything but a crew of squirrels. Though we later find out that it’s TARDIS-like in the interior. Though nothing ever comes of that.) And his best friend Kevin (Mak Fyfe) excited him further by telling him that, according to the paper, a team from SETI is supposed to be setting up in town that day for, oh, no particular reason.

Cheap Botox is never worth the savings.

In the meantime, we also get some local exposition (courtesy of a history class) about the abandoned diamond mines on the edge of town, which yielded a record-breaking gem a hundred years ago before a cave-in killed a dozen miners and closed down the mine. They say the ghosts of the trapped miners still haunt the shaft…

It doesn’t take long before Bill and Kevin start noticing weird stuff, like the neighbors closest to the saucer acting surlier than normal. The SETI team shows up — a trio of grad student-aged enthusiasts (James Kee, Liviu Lucaci, Bianca Brad) — and confirm that weird power readings are coming from the saucer. Then people start disappearing.

And really, nobody much cares.

Wait — THAT’S the S.E.T.I. logo? What’s the matter, no one thought of using Spock ears instead?

For all of the backstory established in the first half hour — the mine, the diamond, the history of UFO activity, Bill’s love/hate relationship with his cheerleader older sister Katie (Lindy Booth) — very little of it is exploited; instead, more plot clutter is introduced. The main antagonist is a bug-like space vampire, Lord Vlathos (Cosmin Sofron in a better monster suit than we’ve come to expect from these Pulsepounders! releases, but played like a Power Rangers villain), who is the only one of the vampire horde who has to stay out of sunlight. The rest of his minions wander around, biting other locals on the neck at seeming random and “bugging out” whenever the mood seems right. (Funny how the vampires leave bite marks in classic style — two little puncture wounds — which don’t resemble at all the ragged mouthful of choppers they can manifest when convenient.) Vlathos’ right-hand man is Mr. Danvers (Richard Clarkin), the history teacher on whose land the saucer landed; and Danvers’ added position as soccer coach really doesn’t explain why he cares so much about the championship game which is supposed to take place on the same day as the lunar eclipse which will allow Vlathos to suck all of the light of the sun and the moon (because those are different things?) into the huge extraterrestrial diamond and thus cause darkness and… Nope, it doesn’t make any more sense when I summarize it than it did while I was watching it.

**“I am the dork — of doom!!!“**

It seems almost that the writers were spending so much time and effort on the complexities and technicalities of their arbitrary justifications for what’s going on (while still never actually making sense of it) that they forgot to make the story matter. The emotional core of this kind of story has to be paranoia, but paranoia is exactly what’s missing. Instead, the audience is left so emotionally uninvolved that we spend our time either noticing that the championship soccer game was a concession to the Eastern European shooting location which couldn’t convincingly pull off an all-American football match, or giggling at the condemned mineshaft which has nevertheless been left open and unfenced for a century with nothing but a “keep out!” sign to guard against mishap and liability.

“It’s amazing what one can accomplish with a Dark Overlord Correspondence Course!”

By the end, a movie which probably started off with more story capital in the bank than most of the other Kushner-Locke kidvids had squandered it like a drunk at a blackjack table.