Vampires! A Quick Look At The Famed Hollywood Monster

Last night, in celebration of Halloween as we were avoiding Trick-Or-Treaters, my fiancee and I decided to throw in a couple of our favorite vampire movies. Blade, Underworld, Blade II. I like vampire movies. I'm sure 90% of the world population - regardless of how religious they might be - indulges from time to time in the thought of immortality and invincibility. If they didn't, the concept of the vampire would not be as popular.

I just really have got to know one thing: why is it in every vampire movie, vampires hiss? They hiss when they're startled, they hiss when they're beating someone up, they hiss before the bite, they hiss when they die. Maybe I'm just picky about how humans portray the shape-shifting living dead creature, but they're always hissing. Okay, bats hiss. Great. They also squeak. I don't hear any Hollywood vampires squeaking. Why not? Bats squeak more than they hiss. Cats hiss more often than bats. But vampires aren't cats. They're...bats.

Bats.

The best portrayal of vampires I've ever come across, I'm sorry to say, is not a movie, it's a book called The Last Vampire (Book 1) by not-so-well-known author, Christopher Pike. In the book, he talks about a 5000 year old vampire, the last of her kind, immortal, lonely, invulnerable. She was created as a vampire by a demon, not a bat, summoned through an ancient Hindu ritual. The story itself is by far the absolute best read, going into the psychological aspects of immortality, invulnerability, and intense loneliness. Being so old, she's indestructible, walks around in daylight, doesn't kill people or turn them, and lives her infinite existence as any of us would if we were that old: resigned to fate. If you want an action packed, heart breaking story, I recommend this highly.

Best Hollywood vampires? Kate Beckinsdale and Gary Oldman. I've watched a lot of these movies, I've studied them inside and out. Kate is the best female of the species: hard-ass, butt-kicking, sexy, but not invulnerable. She's one of Hollywood's best weepers, also: when she cries, I cry. Gary Oldman is just terrific: cold, calculating, intelligent, lustful. Bela Lugosi was good for his time, dark, brooding and calculating. Gary Oldman was better. Too bad the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula sucked, it could've been really good. Replace Wynona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, and it would've had more potential.

Blade is a good movie. Blade II was better. Wesley Snipes is high on my list of favorite actors. But, Blade is not his character. What I mean is, Wesley is great with the action, he's great with script, but he's better when he's not so stiff. Murder at 1600 was better because he just looked more relaxed and comfortable with the role. In the Blade movies, he looks to me to be so on edge, so stressed. I don't know, it just doesn't fit with me. He acted more like the Terminator than he did a vampire hunter. Blade II, he seemed to relax a bit. I like the second movie because of the idea of a mutant vampire strain, and the look of the mutant vampires. Very interesting and thought provoking to me. I don't remember that possibility ever being tackled before in Hollywood.

The idea of the vampire, as old as it is, has been served on a platter, chewed up to an incoherent pulp, regurgitated and spat back out at us as viewers for the past 70-ish years. And every year, a new "improved" vampire flick is thrown in our faces, not because the stories are good, but because the visual effects have just gotten better. Vampirism is a dead horse, and we're just beating the crap out of it to see what else we can come up with. My fiancee and I have had this discussion, and with our combined forces, can't come up with better story lines, because there aren't any. To almost every idea we've had, a "seen it," "been done," "we have that movie" has followed closely behind.

Our advice to Hollywood: leave the horse and move on. Isn't there a video game out there that you can turn into a movie?