Bordello of Blood (1996)
Last night JP came over and we set out to watch Bordello of Blood, #70 on the Top 70 list, and John Carpenter’s Vampires: Los Muertos. Jon Bon Jovi is the main character in Los Muertos. The movie is a loose sequel to the first John Carpenter vampire flick. And much better, I might add. There was the usual vampire silliness but it was definitely less campy than the first one. Plus, Bon Jovi was just dishy as the earnest and self-sacrificing vampire hunter. His highlights were impeccable.
However, we were only able to watch about 15 minutes of Bordello of Blood. It turns out that it is some kind of Tales from the Crypt movie. It stars Corey Feldman. He thinks he’s all that. Angie Everhart (the former swimsuit model) is the main vampire chick. She works in a bordello were all the girls are actually vampires. She likes to humiliate men. Dennis Miller is in it. It was pretty darn clear that it would be humor of the lowest common denominator. After one particularly egregious scene, we just turned it off.
So that brings me back to an earlier post. How much of a movie must I watch in order to be able to cross it off the list? Given that, in my opinion, Bordello of Blood doesn’t deserve to be on a vampire best of list of any kind, I decided to create the Bon Jovi Exemption. It turns out that Los Muertos actually wasn’t on the list. Therefore, should a film be too offensive/stupid/etc to be watched, I can call the Bon Jovi Exemption into effect and substitute a different vampire film for it. So there you go. Bon Jovi Exemption in effect.
Bordello of Blood (2002) is probably one of those movies that only fans of vampire films will enjoy. Not because it’s particularly bad but because it’s pretty mediocre all the way through, so unless one is committed to the genre, there’s not much reason to watch it. Actually, the other audience is probably those who have an aesthetic appreciate of Bon Jovi. Don’t we all.
Derek Bliss and the dishy Father Rodrigo come up with a plan.
Bon Jovi plays Derek Bliss. I kid you not. That really is his name. He is a vampire hunter who works with the Catholic Church as James Wood’s character from the first movie did before him. He has a long board in the back of his jeep that actually opens up to contain all kinds of cool anti-vampire equipment and weapons (I did tell Dale about this, of course, but I think he was annoyed that anyone would ruin a perfectly good surfboard in that way). Bliss is trying to get a team of hunters together to get rid of a big nest of vampires in Mexico but every time he tracks down one of the names on his list, he discovers that a vampire had killed him just moments before. After the slaughter of all the priests at one church in particular, Bliss realizes he must hook up with Father Rodrigo, the only survivor of the slaughter, Sancho, a 16 year old boy who gets a permission slip from his mother to join the hunt, and Zoey, your typical “free spirited” red-head who was infected with the vampire virus a year ago but has since then been taking an AZT-like medicine, that you can only get in Mexico City, to keep from turning. She’s learning to live with her condition, you see.
Vampiric hijinx ensue. It turns out that Una, our head vampire, is after the same relic that the vampire from the first movie was. She actually gets her hands on it but can’t make the ritual that will render her invulnerable to the sun to work. Father Rodrigo has secrets, an old man who shoots a mean bow and arrow joins up with them and has all kinds of dreams, an amazingly capable and no-nonsense nurse, who runs the clinic in this TINY little dead beat town, seems to have come up with a curse for vampirism (don’t know why the rest of the world doesn’t know about this….), Bon Jovi complains that he would rather be surfing, one of the team members makes a fatal error (never agree when a strange woman wanders up to you in the middle of the night and suddenly starts trying to have sex with you without saying a word. That is just wrong), the old man makes sage comments about how crosses no longer work on vampires because people no longer believe in them, and so forth.
JP and I both really liked the film. It was fun, ya know? We were both very sad that the sound track did not have Wanted: Dead or Alive on it but perhaps Bon Jovi was trying to distance himself from his pop star past and get into acting?