Todd’s Movie Blog

I saw recently that one of the new shows this season is another angst ridden teen vampire show called The Vampire Diaries.  Just what we need, another psuedo-horror soap full of emo-music and whiny teenagers complaining about the burden of being a vampire.  What ever happened to vampire’s being oh, I don’t know, evil.  What happened to cool, deadly monsters like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.  Not to say a vampire on film can’t be a little introspective, Jonathan Frid on the old show Dark Shadows is an excellent example.  He didn’t like being a vampire but he didn’t whine about it, he bounced back and forth from looking for a cure to locking himself in his tomb to protect his friends, when he occasionally succumbs to his darker impulses and went pure evil.

I think the last decent vampire I saw on film was Gary Oldman’s romantic, tortured and very nasty Dracula from the nineties. The vampires in the Blade movies?  Oh please, two words, Donal Logue, scene for scene one of the worst vampires ever.  Van Helsing?  Meh, Richard Roxburgh started out okay, but as the film went on he got almost as whiny as Angel on Buffy used to get.

And don’t me started on those so called vampires from Blade II or 30 Days of Night.  The last thing I want to see in a vampire movie are a bunch of vampires acting like blood sucking zombies.  I shudder to think what will happen when producers decide that the teen vampire craze has run it’s course and start doing whiny teen werewolf or even worse teen mummy movies.  Oh the horror!

The Shark has jumped itself.  What am I talking about?  Back in the nineties Jon Hein popularized the term Jump the Shark, meaning a show has hit it’s peak and is now going down in terms of quality, referring to the episode of Happy Days where Fonzie, in his leather jacket and on water skis, jumped over a shark.  Jump the Shark started out as a website where fans voted and discussed when other shows did something similar; The Conners win the lottery on Roseanne, the entire cast moves from Milwaukee to LA on Laverne & Shirley, or Spock jams with Space Hippies on Star Trek. But all good things must come to an end.  While surfing around Wikipedia the other day I came upon an article about Hogan’s Heroes that referenced it had never Jumped the Shark.  Curious I went to the Jump the Shark website and got redirected to  TV Guide/Jump the Shark.  My only thought was the irony of the Shark having jumped itself.

Rob Zombie is coming out with a remake of Halloween II.  After making his less than enjoyable remake of the classic Halloween, he is now remaking the sequel.  There is a certain irony in this.  While his remake of the original film did nothing to improve on that awesome piece of horror, and in many ways completely destroyed any suspense or scares the material contained by including too much back story on Michael Myers and not letting the film build up slowly to a climax, his remake of the sequel will definitely be an improvement on the original.  Why?  Because while the first Halloween was a well crafted suspense filled horror film that utilized a gradual escalation of dramatic tension due to your not knowing when the killer was going to strike, the sequel was an uninspired, by the numbers slasher film with a huge body count of people getting killed with increasingly graphic gore laden methods in an ill advised attempt to emulate the Friday the 13th movies.  Anything Zombie does will be an improvement on that.