Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Imagine you’re a filmmaker.  And then without warning, the idea hits you!  It’s the one you’ve been waiting for, the one that’s going to set you off, the one that’s going to change the world.  Your idea goes something along these lines:  You’re a black guy with a have a pretty bad attitude.  Mostly because you’ve been infected by a vampire that renders you half vampire.   But you know Kung-Fu, you wear a awful lot of black leather, you hate the vampires so much that you hunt them relentlessly, and, this is the kicker, you carry a real long ‘blade’.  And thus, ‘Vampire Assassin’ is born.

 

I’m not going to take too much of your time here.  Writer, producer, director and star Ron Hall has crafted a creation so Gawd-awful comically bad that it creeps into ‘almost good’ territory.  The ‘CG’ special effects had to have been made on an old Commodore 64, the primary antagonist, Slovak, as played by some cat named Mel Novak, has an acting style which seemed to be based on impersonating Bob Barker, impersonating Bella Lugosi.  Somehow, Ron Hall lured the legendary Rudy Ray Moore of ‘Dolemite’ fame into this tragedy as a kind of Whistler character, but forces him to ‘act’.  Dude, if you get Dolemite in your movie, he better start making some dirty rhymes and fast.  The most ‘praise’ has to be heaped on Merry Everest (I think that’s who played the ‘love interest’. The credits didn’t say what or who did what).  I’m assuming she’s Mr. Hall’s girlfriend as she couldn’t have read her lines any worse if they had just stuck a script in her hand and told her to go at it. 

My favorite scene, though, was when a vampire had our hero in a dire predicament chained to a metal table.  Hero dude observed that this vampire had no fangs (he had a meat cleaver, so I guess he intended to chop him up and lick the blood off the floor or something).  The ‘vampire’ explains that some of them have a genetic mutation, which

oft times lead to no fangage.  I’m assuming the fang budget ran a little low, and Slovak wasn’t giving his up.  Priceless.  Oddly enough, however, the few staged kung fu fight scenes weren’t all that bad.  Go figure.

 

Poorly shot on digital video, which I know can be a viable medium for good movies, this glorified home movie did manage to get LionsGate to release it.  The same LionsGate that released Academy Award winner for best picture ‘Crash’.  Oh, and that guy on the box cover who looks like a cross between Allen Iverson and Ludicrous?  He’s not in the movie.  Thanks LionsGate!

 

DVD was barebones.