Visual Vengeance: Date With A Vampire (2000) and Blood Craving (2002) – Shot-On-Video Horny Vampire Madness

All Images Courtesy: Visual Vengeance

Boutique label Visual Vengeance has been doing the wild, unexpected work of unearthing some of the most obscure “gems” of the straight-to-VHS era and restoring them (as much as possible) for blu-ray, with extensive special features. Many of their releases feel pretty surreal, to exist at all; it’s wild to see a shot-on-video film, which got only a tiny VHS run and has a mere 22 user-rating votes on IMDb, get a lavish blu-ray with a quantity of extras rivaling or exceeding a Criterion disc. And yet here we are, with their insanely stacked new blu-ray of Date With A Vampire, which also features a second vampire film by the same filmmaker, Blood Craving. Both films are short features: the 88-minute runtime listed on the back cover is a combination of both, with Date With A Vampire running 58 minutes and Blood Craving running half an hour. The two films, both directed by Jeffrey Arsenault (who in 1993 directed the legit vampire cult classic Night Owl starring John Leguizamo), share a common subject matter, but are decidedly different takes on the vampire tale, with Date being more or less a softcore-porn movie that also has some vampire chills, and Blood Craving being more of a horror-focused outing. Both are no-budget DIY works of trash cinema, and neither are what you would call “good,” but if you’re a connoisseur of 90s/early-2000s straight-to-VHS microbudget madness, you might dig this truly unhinged special edition that Visual Vengeance has put together, particularly with its surprising amount of special features.

THE FILMS:

DATE WITH A VAMPIRE (2000) is described on the back cover as a mix of horror and softcore erotica, but it leans very heavily towards the latter. The very loose plot basically involves a man and woman who have come back to the woman’s house – a spooky turn-of-the-century manor – after meeting in a bar, for what seems like an ordinary hookup. But she is an ancient vampire looking for her next victim, and he is now her prisoner. There’s also a monstrous vampire lurking in the basement, and some other odd goings-on. But… plot is not the driving factor in this movie. It takes about half of the movie’s one-hour runtime for any plot to start happening at all; before that, we just get the setup of the titular date, and then two lengthy sex scenes and a shower scene, more or less back to back. That first half-hour really is just softcore porn, with no vampirism to speak of, and only the vaguest hints of anything spooky going on. After that, the plot does somewhat get moving, although it remains quite loose. We get some intrigue and twists and turns with the vampire story, as all is not quite what it seems. And we get a totally disconnected and somewhat arbitrary B-story, as a young woman looking for a place to crash happens upon the house and sneaks in to explore, only to find the hideous and monstrous master vampire that lives in the basement.

Once the plot kicks into gear and the movie starts exploring other things besides just sex scenes, there is some micro-budget horror fun to be had here. The last fifteen minutes in particular are pretty cool, as the vampire story gives us some twists and reversals, and the subplot with the monstrous vampire in the basement provides some lo-fi creature gore and stylized green Fulci lighting. There are definitely some positive qualities to this part of the movie in particular, which fans of shot-on-video schlock should have a good time with. Basically, though, Date With A Vampire has enough substance to make a good half-hour short (like the other film on this disc) and it’s padded out to the shortest possible feature runtime with sex scenes; a tactic for which mileage and patience will definitely vary.

 

If you’re a fan of DIY films of the shot-on-video era, though, there is something endearing about the production; at least the horror sequences that are shot with some ambition and creativity. The whole thing has the distinct feel of a group of friends getting together to try and make a movie with no money, some props and makeup from Spirit Halloween, and some green lightbulbs from Spencer’s Gifts screwed into some table lamps to create some Fulci-inspired atmosphere. The “let’s get the gang together to make a horror movie” quality is pretty charming and fun in the film’s best moments – particularly the last fifteen minutes, which is when the film approaches a level that could be called pretty good. It’s a neat little relic of an era when consumer-grade camcorders made filmmaking easier and more accessible to anyone with ambition, but still tricky enough that it took some impressive ambition to pull it off, and cell phones hadn’t yet made literally everyone an amateur videographer.

As is often the case with these kinds of homegrown films, though, the ambition to make a movie well outweighed the skill of the people making it. The production of Date With A Vampire is amateurish, and pretty rough. Audio seems to have been recorded with the on-board mic on the camera, meaning that it can be very hard to make out what people are saying, and scenes vary greatly in the loudness of dialogue from one to the next. Most of the low-budget elements are either forgivable, or parts of the charm, but the movie’s long sex scenes contain some pretty inexcusable (or hilariously inept, depending on your mileage) amateurish “flourishes.” In particular, two of the sex scenes are far longer than the porny Casio-keyboard-saxophone-setting stock music tracks being used, and so the tracks loop multiple times. But these aren’t tracks that seamlessly loop to go on forever – no, the music track simply ENDS, there is a beat of silence, and the SAME track starts up again. And it isn’t even a winking, deliberate joke, it’s just incredibly amateurish audio design. In one of the sex scenes, the stock music track loops three times, taking it to a The Room level of ineptitude.

 

Date With A Vampire is definitely not a good movie. It has its moments of fun shot-on-video horror that I did find endearing, but basically it is the elements of a pretty decent half-hour erotic-horror short, with another half-hour of bad softcore porn shoehorned in to expand the runtime. It isn’t without value, but it’s definitely for SOV-trash obsessives only.

 

BLOOD CRAVING (2003) on the other hand is quite a bit more fun and interesting, and I suspect it’s only the B-feature on this disc because it’s a half-hour short and not a feature film. This one is, for starters, a straight-up horror short and not a glorified softcore porn filick, which is definitely a step in the right direction. And it gets right down to business, with mysterious goings-on, an opening kill, and noirish vampire intrigue. It’s about a group of vampires in a city where some kind of plague is killing their kind. They have captured a reluctant recently-turned vampire to use as a guinea pig to try and find a cure, but he seems determined to escape and kill his captors.

 

Unfortunately, after a strong start Blood Craving starts to lose steam in the back half. First, there is the very bizarre choice that in the middle, the movie grinds to a halt to cut to an interview that the director once shot between a film journalist and actress and scream queen Caroline Munro (Maniac, Dracula A.D. 1972, Slaughter High, The Spy Who Loved Me). The justification is that one of the characters is watching it on TV, but director Jeffrey Arsenault badly abuses this justification, presenting the almost ten-minute interview in its entirety, occupying about a third of the runtime of his half-hour short. Credit where credit is due, it is a very interesting interview that horror fans will likely really enjoy. But still, one does not expect a sneaky special feature to pop up in the middle of a film. I can only imagine it was done so the opening credits could include that “and featuring Caroline Munro.”

The ending to Blood Craving is also fairly incoherent, to the point that I am genuinely unsure what is supposed to have happened. Watching the special features somewhat explains this: this short was shot to be a feature-film sequel to Arsenault’s 1993 cult classic Night Owl (his debut film, and by far his most successful and well-regarded movie, which was shot on actual film and has a blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome). This sequel was supposed to heavily lean on recycled clips from the original movie, in Silent Night Deadly Night 2, Boogeyman 2, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo fashion, but somewhere along the way, Arsenault realized this was a bad idea, and decided to cut the footage into its own self-contained film instead. It… doesn’t work.

 

However, while on the whole it doesn’t work, Blood Craving does at least have some fun moments, and a strong enough opening. And it does once again have that charming “let’s get the gang together to make a horror movie” DIY vibe. It’s not good, and I would have trouble enthusiastically recommending it, but if you enjoy shot-on-video trash, it can be fun, and might be worth a look.

 

THE VISUAL VENGEANCE BLU-RAY:

 

Neither film on this set is very good, but Visual Vengeance have produced one hell of a stacked special edition for them. It is genuinely impressive how much love, care, and special features they put into a blu-ray of these two trashy SOV movies that only run 88 minutes combined; more special features than plenty of Criterion Collection releases. Both films have commentaries by director Jeffrey Arsenault, which are quite interesting, if a tad dry (although a story on the Date With A Vampire commentary about how the old house in which they shot was genuinely haunted really livens things up). Both films also have brief interviews with Arsenault about the production.

 

Date With A Vampire in particular has a bunch more special features as well. Two of the actors are interviewed: the actors from the totally self-contained basement-monster B-story, one of whom (Joe Zaso) was a major veteran of the 90s shot-on-video East Coast horror scene. There is also a lengthy interview with the screenwriter, who also was a prolific veteran of SOV horror (Kevin J. Lindenmuth, Vampires and Other Stereotypes, The Alien Agenda series), as well the location manager (aka, the guy who owns the house they shot in). A bunch of trailers round out the extras, and the disc comes packaged with a poster, a bunch of stickers, and a slipcover.

All in all, a far swankier special edition of Date With A Vampire and Blood Craving than anyone in their right mind would have ever asked for, but an impressive treasure-trove of insights into this particular era of SOV horror. Definitely not a disc I would recommend to most people, but if you’re a lover of SOV trash and enjoy looking behind the scenes, you just might enjoy this one!

 

- Christopher S. Jordan