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Top 5 Vampire Movies
- Black Barney
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Lost boys freaked me out as a kid so it gets second place but that’s it. 30 days of night was great until it wasn't.
Where's the Ameritrash love for Bordello of Blood and From Dusk to Dawn ?
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- Michael Barnes
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All of the best things about From Dusk til Dawn are attached to Salma Hayek.
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- Black Barney
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- ChristopherMD
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Let the Right One In - Only seen the Swedish version and definitely an instant classic. The scenes with the father could have all been cut, but other than that its pretty solid. Incidentally, the vampire character was a boy who had his junk cut off as part of the process. I thought it was a neat touch to use a female actress to play up the androgyny of the character. Each time in the movie she tells him "I'm not a girl" he thinks its because she's a vampire and doesn't identify as a human at all but its actually because she's a he.
Underworld(s) - These movies aren't great, but unlike Josh I guess Kate Beckinsale is enough for me. I do actually think they pulled off "urban gothic" better than anyone else has. Really just action movies with vampires and werewolves rather than what I'd call "vampire movies", but whatever.
Captain Kronos - I saw this for the first time in the late 90's. Definitely an instant favorite. I fucking love the camerawork in the woods at the beginning. I saw this when I was really into Buffy TVS and that just made me see even more that Kronos was ahead of its time. Would have definitely spawned sequels or a TV show of its own if it came out decades later.
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Basically for all the reasons Michael mentioned. I remember playing Dracula Unleashed on Sega CD as a sort of sequel to this. The game was fucking annoying but a friend and I went through it anyways because we were BSD fans. Nowadays I find the movie more of a curiousity, but its epic Coppola-ness has yet to be topped in the genre.
Other Mentions:
What We Do In Shadows - Didn't like it at all. A couple laughs, but mostly just not my kind of humor. Enough people I listen to have praised it that I'll give it another shot someday. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.
Byzantium - I've seen basically every Saorise Ronan movie, including this one. I really like the way it builds its own vampire myth. I also like that similar to Right One its about the characters. Its at least as good as Interview and in some ways is a perfect counterpart.
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The last time I saw Lost Boys was at a midnight matinee in Santa Cruz CA (where the movie was filmed). It was surreal and awesome, almost like Rocky Horror with all the locals yelling at the screen over the places they recognized. The train trestle where all the vamps are hanging from is (if the yelling patrons are to be believed) where half the audience lost their virginity. The dues ex machina where gramps busts in and saves the day ... The audience all starts chanting "SAY-THE-LINE! SAY-THE-LINE!" And then he says the line ("One thing I could never stomach about living in Santa Carla...") and everyone goes nuts. A good time.
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I actually liked the American version of "Let the right one in" quite a bit. The episode of Davinci's Demons dealing with Dracula was awesome.
Lost Boys totally holds up. Would probably be PG-13 these days.
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- SuperflyPete
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Last Man on Earth / I Am Legend / Omega Man (same movie, and listed in order of quality/preference)
Lost Boys
Cronos
Stakeland
Not sure of the order in terms of "best" but these are the best. I'm partial to Omega Man (I adored I Am Legend, the novel) because of the apocalyptic feel. Stakeland is FANTASTIC too.
Honorable mention to that Ethan Hawke film Daybreakers for trying something different.
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Dracula's Daughter
Daughters of Darkness
Vampyr
The Return of Count Yorga
As others have mentioned, Byzantium and Only Lovers Left Alive are both very good. Living Dead Girl would be another honorable mention.
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- Michael Barnes
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I liked Daybreakers, I thought that was pretty cool...the guys that did that picture also did Undead, which was a pretty unusual Australian zombie film that has sort of dropped off the radar. Sperig brothers.
Stakeland, I have not seen. I've heard it was decent, I'll have to look at it.
Here's a REALLY obscure one. It's from 1988. Did you know that Kinski actually played Nosferatu again? It's really a pretty bad film, called Vampire in Venice (in some releases it's actually called Nosferatu in Venice). Christopher Plummer and Donald Pleasance co-star. Apparently no less than five directors came in and out of the production. It has some atmosphere, but it's overall pretty bad.
Another interesting footnote-class one is Lake of Dracula, a 1971 Toho production. It's interesting because it is basically a Japanese attempt at doing a Western-style vampire film (usually Asian vampire stuff is very different). It's not bad, it has some cool elements.
OH MY GOD, how could we leave out Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, the joint production of Hammer and Shaw Brothers? Yes, that means gothic horror and kung fu. It's kind of cool that it's Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh working together, both were top-flight talent at both of these production houses. Cushing is in this one. It's actually pretty good, and as a canonical part of the Hammer Dracula cycle it's actually better than a couple of the other later entries.
I also left out Vampire Circus, which is just freaking great. It's one of the weirder and more stylized Hammer entries, and as you might expect it is in fact about a vampire circus. FUN FACT! Lalla Ward, aka the 4th doctor's companion Romana, is in it.
And we've not yet mentioned Nightwatch and Daywatch...I love those movies, I had really hoped that Timur Bembabektov would do more...let alone see another one of those films. I know some people that just HATE these movies, but I love how distinctly Russian they are, I love the folklore in them, I love the anything goes approach. Fun movies that do not make a lick of sense.
There's also Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses, another one pretty much unseen these days...and it is yet another lesbian thing. Cronenberg's Rabid is technically a vampire film.
There's a Turkish Dracula film that I've always wanted to see but I think it may actually be a lost film, Dracula in Istanbul.
OH and Blood For Dracula, produced by Andy Warhol...it's actually really good, VERY camp and very arch but there are some really good scenes in it. The bit where he sops up blood with a piece of bread makes me nauseous. I really like how Dracula is wheelchair bound in it, I think that's cool.
Back in anime land, Hellsing is actually pretty good.
Then there's Planet of the Vampires, Mario Bava's science fiction gothic...AWESOME costumes, big influence on Alien. He also has a vampire in Black Sabbath played by Karloff in a nice little Russian story as part of the anthology, "The Wurdulak".
Lair of the White Worm is sort of a vampire story, I love that movie.
Nadja made some waves when it came out, produced by David Lynch and it had some "vampire vision" sequences filmed with a Fisher Price toy camera...but it wasn't that good if I remember correctly.
I liked Tim Burton's Dark Shadows...the old series is practically impenetrable at this point but House of Dark Shadows is decent.
Never saw Thirst. Really want to watch A Girl Walks Home At Night, it looks good. Maybe after Byzantium. It looks awful, but I do want to see Dracula Untold.
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- Black Barney
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I took these books out at least a dozen times a piece, to the point where the librarian refused one to me one day. She said, "We do have other books, you know," walked me over to the shelf, put a book in my hands and said, "Here, you might like this." It was the first science fiction book I'd ever held.
I studied those books from cover to cover, so I know the kind of place Michael is coming from.
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- Michael Barnes
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People take it for granted now, but it used to be that books like that were kind of all you had to go on until you'd look in TV Guide and see one of these movies coming on. There was no on demand and a lot of this stuff wasn't easily available on VHS.
This is also why magazines like Famous Monsters used to be so important...a lot of these films you just couldn't see so all you had was stills.
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A couple more good flicks I forgot about--Habit by Larry Fessenden and Thirst by Chan-wook Park.
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- SuperflyPete
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Holy shit
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