TURD ALERT!

In the cheezy no-budget Dark Town; aka, Immortal Ecstasy (2004), we get some Babe Lesbian Action, a bit of incest, & a bunch of vampires so out of control in their aggression & speed of converting or killing others they'd have government armed forces down on their house & get themselves exterminated in a flash.

The first hour of the film is dull as two stones knocking together. It's almost interesting that there is a living vampiric head in a bag that infects one person then soon the whole family, but really we only see the head for a second so it ain't much. Then some black youths break into the honky household & hooboy will they be sorry.

It's not until the last half hour that it adds up to anything exciting, in a cartoonish manner, being pretty good at the old fashioned gore FX.

Which is to say, it gets pretty good if it interesting to watch pretty girls lisping bad dialogue through the hoky tooth extensions, dipping their faces into eviserated victims chowing down on flesh, being much more like zombines than vampires.

That such attractive actresses, not all of them completely talentless, could be talked into doing these scenes, is more interesting than the scenes themselves. The desire to be in a film must vastly outpace any unwillingness to be humiliated by grossly silly scenarios.

We now live in days of television game shows wherein pretty girls & hunky guys are hornswoggled into eating raw goat testicals & live earthworms & giant cockroaches in exchange for fifteen minutes of fame & some money.

So a film that can boast only of scenes in which girls eat pretend human meat & get smeared with pretend blood isn't particularly startling.

The one scene that could've been totally off the wall crazy skanky bad-ass (vampire girl playing with a fetus) was so badly designed & hastily played out that if no one had practically stated "this is a fetus" a viewer wouldn't know anything particular had happened.

Now & then there was a gory image or even an acting bit that grabbed my attention if only momentarily. For a while in the film it was a bunch of white vampires (predominantly female) biting and/or eating young black men (& one black woman).

A typical image of a blood-smeared white girl vampire eating a black man's severed hand as if the fingers were pure chocolately goodness is assissted by the fact that the hand & fingers looked so real.

I wondered if the racial division was intentional on the part of the creative team. Like, was it supposed to be a fable of how the white community looks vampiric to an oppressed subclass? To honkies, all black youths are, like the black youths in this film, gangsters; but similarly, to young black men, all white women are vampiric monsters. Or was it just posing as a black male fantasy of gettin' it on with honky vampire babes even if it gets a guy killed?

Apparently it was mere accident of casting. The racial division soon broke down as the clumsy story went off in every direction showing us that sometimes vampires are super strong, other times they are easy to kill even to the point of their hearts popping out of them quite easily when you poke them with sticks.

Sometimes they bite necks & instantaneously convert victims to joining the undead like a rapidly spreading super-virus a la 28 Days Later, elsetimes they just eat flesh, whether dead or living, like a pack of ghouls.

Sometimes they are animalistic with no more reasoning ability than zombies, elsetimes they exhibit varied degrees of self-control or sadistic senses of humor. Sometimes they seem to regard themselves as a united family, elsetimes they kill each other as readily as they kill the living (much as the black youth kill each other out of viciousness as readily as they would like to have killed the vampires).

The only rhyme or reason to any of it is whether it is gory enough for the camera, not if it makes sense within the context of a vampire film. Sexist stereotyping is de rigour for a lot of cheapy-ass horror films but this degree of racist stereotyping is less common.

There was a quickly done ending that provided an interesting plot twist & an effective final image. It provided a minute or two that was elegant & quite weird. This surprised me since so little of the film could be called imaginative, yet it found a captivating finale that made sticking it out to the end worth the struggle.

In all, a very bad exploitation film that verges into blaxploitation. But I've sat through worse. It is worth including on a list of bad movies to watch, for whenever some friends are over sharing that unreasoning desire for a bad movie.

Continue to next vampire film:
Innocent Blood (1992)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl