This is one of those weird little films that has the power to grow on you. Ostensibly, it should not be all that much as it details the story of three college boys in search of a great stripper as appeasement for joining a fraternity. How quickly we derail from that story(in fact it just about disappears and never resurfaces again) and go to the dark, twisted, removed world of the After Dark Club. This is where the guys are to find their stripper - in this case a very bizarre, strangely erotic, wholly creepy Grace Jones! There we find a sub-culture, apparently unbeknown-st to the police - who either look the other way or fear this bad part of town, of vampirism hidden behind the facade of a decaying strip show. Now, we do get some girls showing us their wares, though this really is not the major point of this film. We do get some genuinely eerie and scary moments as well. We do get those God-awful special effects that are so common in the 80s. We do get Grace Jones and all that that entails. But the primary purpose of this film is to interlace humor with all of that. It succeeds. I laughed quite a bit actually. The guys running the club are hilarious, particularly Sandy Baron who is the emcee and wearing some pink/red lounge blazer like a comedian might from yesteryear in the Catskills. He keeps ranting about he wants to take the act/show/everything to Vegas...his great dream. He of course works for Katrina, Grace Jones, the Egyptian vampire who owns the place. Anyway, we soon get one boy meeting Katrina and the other boy trying to find him and the story runs pretty strongly just from that. Comedy abounds from moments with a strange albino non-vampire group after the boys being assaulted from vampires in the community(the little girl flying and biting the neck of Billy Drago had me in stitches!) to the bizarre ending where we get this great rendition of Domenico Modugno singing "Volare!." Of course that means "to fly" in Italian, and it is that tongue planted firmly in cheek that made this film enjoyable for me. As I said before, there are some truly scary moments as well. The atmosphere is very well-done by director Richard Wenk sans those atrocious special effects. One can definitely see how this was an inspiration possibly for From Dusk till Dawn.
Review of Vamp
