TURD ALERT!

The no-budget amateur feature from Canada, Vampire Conspiracy (2005), was picked up by dregs-distributor Brain Damage Films. It opens on a minimalist set with two guys worried about just having screwed a minor. Then something we don't see begins to chase them & one guy acts like a wannabe scream-queen, attacked by what we're not shown.

After that big yawn of a starter, the ridiculous film then starts over, this time for real, with five people who awaken in a rather rather plain maze & begin comparing notes about how they got there. One of the five was the "survivor" of the opening scene, with a vampire bite on his neck.

After lots & lots of moronic chit-chat, it'll turn out a vampire (a Count no less) has them captive.

In stereotypical vampire drag, but without the cape, the Count is reminiscent of '60s & '70s late-nite vampire hosts who would rise from their coffin to introduce Friday night horror movies, regional market "stars" with names like Ghoulardi, Count Gore De Vol, Count Coagulus, Count Norlock, Count Scary, M. T. Graves, Sinister Seymour, Sir Cecil Creape, Baron Daemon, Scarabus, Ghoulardi, The Vegas Vampire, Zacherley the Cool Ghoul, as well as the original Vampira. But those folks were clowns & intentionally absurd. The makers of Vampire Conspiracy apparently thought the same sort of character could be taken as "serious."

The Count likes to play with his food before he eats it, so everyone will "match wits" in a witless sort of way struggling to survive, trying to solve the one-word "clues" written on the floor of the maze. These clues never add up to anything but a childish lecture on human depravity.

Whoever wins their way through the maze is promised riches beyond reckoning, though no such riches exist. Victims are transformed into fanged vampires along the way, resulting in poorly staged & unimaginative bloodletting.

The rest will be dead, eaten, or tossed into another game. In the "surprise" ending which is really only a random ending the outcome is different than expected, but it hardly amounts to a twist, though I'll refrain from revealing it in case someone other than myself is fool enough to watch it to the end.

The idea of restricting the film to changeless hallways leading to other rooms appears to be only one hallway & one room. Very nearly the entire film could've been done as an excruciatingly dull live stage play.

The first time I started watching this turd, I soon decided to give up after the first twenty minutes, among the dullest twenty minutes of my viewing life. But before I consigned the disc to the junk heap forevermore, I looked at some opinions at imdb.

Now horror fans well know it is standard for the smallest of small-time filmmakers to put a trailer on youtube, put up a website to sell their home-made films themselves (in this production company's case, also to advertise their real estate related services alongside their dvds. Could be worse I guess; they could've been offering their lawnmowing services), & finally to sign onto imdb & similar participation sites under various made-up names in order to pretend to be random critics praising their own film. Cuz no one else ever will.

As a rule they're no better at writing stealth spam than they are at making a movie, & most everyone recognizes & scoffs at it for what it is. But the positive reviews I encountered for this one (despite that they all said pretty much the same thing, that's its a more intelligent film than is at first evident from the low production values) I naively believed were legit. So I went back & watched the entire gaw-dawful film & it only got worse.

A fatuous moral lesson not withstanding, nothing intelligent happens in this film, though you can tell from the talky script that the author was trying to be smart, & in posting stealth spam, likely believed his own phonied up reviews.

Continue to the next vampire film:
Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl