Monday, February 15, 2010

Lost Classic

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1990)

This is my second Lost Classic column, its been a while. Today's lost classic was made in 1990 and stars David Carradine, M. Emmet Walsh and Bruce Campbell. This movie is one of those movies you expect to pretty cheesy and all that, which it is! But the movie also had a pretty unique plot going for it, something that I haven't seen done in movies that were made around 1990 at least.

The movie is sort of a vampire/western type film. The movie is actually fully scored in the vein of a western. Richard Stone did the music, he also worked on such films as Pretty In Pink, Ferris Buellers Day Off, Platoon, and Witness. You also have some pretty famous b-actors in Carradine, M. Emmet Walsh and Campbell, who hold their own. But I was talking about the plot...

So the movie is called Vampire in retreat because a group of vampires has decided to move away to a small town and starts a new life that does not involving killing humans for blood. They work on making synthetic blood to diminish their want for the real thing (something True Blood also has used, of course 18 years later). You then get a rouge group of vampires who rebel and want the real thing. Since they cant kill the others the usual way they decide to use wood bullets. This is some pretty tricky thinking for a b-movie from 1990!

Anyway the movie does have its fair share of WTF moments, but personally I just think that added to the amusement of the movie. If you want to see a movie that was somewhat ahead of its time with some solid b-actors I think you should go and rent this movie, it was just made available on DVD for the first time recently.