JOHN CARPTENTER'S VAMPIRES

Directed by John Carpenter

Starring James Woods & Daniel Baldwin

Columbia Pictures

It was only a matter of time. A matter of time that is, before veteran horror master John Carpenter, the brains behind Halloween, Escape From New York and The Thing, would give in and take on the most enduring of all movie monsters--vampires. After dreaming up such characters as Michael Myers, Snake Plisken and Starman, there's no way Carpenter's career could have been complete without at least one film about bloodsuckers. The resulting effort is John Carpenter's Vampires, a piece of joyful, over-the-top, gonzo trash film-making that delights in wallowing in its own bloodbaths. Every vampire film boasts its own interpretation of the sacred "rules" of vampirism. In Vampires, James Woods' master slayer, Jack Crow, snarls "Forget everything you've seen in the movies. It's not like vampires go around seducing everyone with cheesy, Eurotrash accents. They don't turn into bats. Crosses don't work. You want to kill one, you take a wooden stake and drive it right through...his...heart!"

Crow is the fearless, hard-boiled leader of a Vatican-sponsored vampire hunting team that patrols North America (there is another team stationed in Europe). The movie opens with Crow's crew standing outside an old, dilapidated mansion in New Mexico that Crow believes is infested with a vampire "nest." The team loads up, arming themselves with high-tech crossbows, metallic lances and machine guns. Crow, his face a weather-beaten mask of intensity, glares into the camera. The group's tag-along priest blesses them over the Holy Bible. The team then storms the mansion and the resulting melee is chaotic and bloody, consisting mostly of vampires getting harpooned and dragged outside by a Jeep winch, where they burst into flames and are reduced to a pile of ashes. It's a crummy job, but somebody's gotta do it.

The group heads back to their motel for a drunken party and all seems good until Valeck (Thomas Ian Griffith), the oldest and most powerful vampire on Earth, bursts out of the ground looking like an undead Fabio. He has lightning-quick speed, superhuman strength and grins maliciously as bullets rip through his body. He promptly heads over to the motel and coldly and efficiently slaughters the entire team, the only survivors being Crow and his best buddy Montoya (Daniel Baldwin).

It appears that Valeck has spent the last six hundred years searching for a mystical cross that has the power to give him and his troupe of bloodsuckers the ability to walk in daylight, and now he's on the verge of finding it (how it has eluded him for one week, let alone six hundred years, is anyone's guess). In the meantime, Crow and Montoya rescue a prostitute named Katrina (Sheryl Lee) who was bitten by Valeck but not killed. It will be another 48 hours until she is fully turned into a vampire, and during that time she shares a telepathic link with Valeck that will allow Crow and Montoya to track the vampire master and destroy him.

The whole affair is utterly ludicrous, but it succeeds because it so gleefully revels in its own absurdity. While so many horror films these days desperately try to copy the Scream formula, in which teen stars act hip while being terrorized (Disturbing Behavior and Urban Legend come readily to mind), it's refreshing to watch a horror flick that isn't afraid to rely on excessive campiness. While Vampires never quite reaches the level of ingenious nonsense as, say, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, its clever blend of Dracula and The Wild Bunch makes for an embarrassingly fun ride. Much like the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez vampire spaghetti western From Dusk Till Dawn, Vampires doesn't have a shred of seriousness to it. Which is more credible--the sight of Daniel Baldwin cauterizing a wound with the barrel of a freshly shot machine gun or James Woods trying to stuff a dozen decapitated heads into a pillowcase?

Speaking of James Woods, how invaluable is he to a project like this? Sporting his grim been-to-hell-and-back look, Woods is filled with an inner intensity that boils out onto the screen. Clad in a leather jacket and Ray Ban sunglasses, unflinching when an entire building blows up behind him, Woods brings the necessary mix of swagger, cool bravado, fearlessness and tightly-coiled anger to the role of Jack Crow. It's a good thing, too, since the supporting cast does not add much. Thomas Ian Griffith makes for a striking, if rather dull, villain, leering savagely but saying little of interest. Daniel Baldwin has a solid rapport with Woods and brings a rugged toughness to Montoya, but he can't shake his comical "Baldwin brother" reputation (he's the portly one) and brings utterly no credence to his silly romantic subplot with Sheryl Lee's Katrina.

Over the last two decades, the heavy praise lavished on John Carpenter by his cult following has given the director a bit of a reputation as a Hollywood "visionary." In truth, he is little more than a competent filmmaker, capable of producing solid genre pieces. But Carpenter is dead-on in his interpretation of the material for Vampires. Understanding the maniacal and often