(1997)
Dir - Ted Nicolaou
Overall: MEH
Stepping away from the main Subspecies arc, Charles Band and series director Ted Nicolaou's Vampire Journals takes its cue from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and its subsequent film adaptation by Neil Jordan. It features a sorrowful undead protagonist who narrates his own tale, mourns his cursed lifestyle, travels to Europe, and runs into conflict with a coven of fellow undeads who operate a nightclub. Nicolaou's screenplay has plenty of differentiating qualities to only resemble some of the plot points in Rice's Vampire Chronicles as opposed to being an egregious knock-off, but being a Band production, it unmistakably comes off as the B-movie counterpart. The blood-suckers here are of the prissy and romantic variety, which is a far cry from the monstrous appearance of Anders Hove's Radu and his Mummy. Male or female, they are also largely indistinguishable from each other, each one looking like they belong in a Goth rock cover band, (pale skin, long black hair, entirely black wardrobe, etc). The story is pure melodramatic schlock, with grandiose performances, Dutch angles, and sweeping musical accompaniment, but Nicolaou still knows how to utilize his Budapest locations for maximum Gothic window dressing.
(1998)
Dir - Ted Nicolaou
Overall: MEH
Returning to the main arc and also tying it into the previous year's off-shoot Vampire Diaries, Subspecies 4: Bloodstorm is just as competently mediocre as the lot of them. Andres Hove's Radu gets lazily resurrected, (again), after being obliterated by the sun the last time that we saw him, and Denice Duff is still unwillingly under his spell and cries helplessly, yet of course finds herself heeding his call. There are some new characters with thick accents, and one of them is a scientist vampire who is hellbent on getting that pesky bloodstone from Radu; a bloodstone that now has more super abilities attached to it. Everyone rolls their Rs and pompously delivers their dialog, constant director Ted Nicolaou still insists that his camera man shoot everything in heavy darkness and with Dutch angles, and the story barely inches forward in its linear trajectory. These films could be edited together to make a just as agreeable eight-six minute one, but producer Charles Band was never one to pass up the opportunity to stretch things out to the breaking point. So adherent on Gothic vampire tropes are these that they are not so much like picking one AC/DC album to listen to while ignoring the rest and still getting the point. They are more like going to see an AC/DC cover band once and getting the point. So pick your Subspecies movie, laugh at the macabre melodrama, admire the scenery, and try not to get too bored.
(2023)
Dir - Ted Nicolaou
Overall: MEH
Two and a half decades after hanging the hat up on the Subspecies series, producer Charles Band, writer/director Ted Nicolaou, lead vamp Anders Hove, and his unwilling cohort Denice Duff lock horns for the throwback origin story Subspecies 5: Bloodrise. Wisely, the team did not merely pick off where they left off by resurrecting the beheaded and burnt up Radu for yet another redundant round of chasing after his self-proclaimed soul mate. Instead, the narrative goes back centuries earlier, laying out the details in Radu's transformation from cursed mutant infant, to holy crusader, to doomed blood-sucker. Duff plays an entirely different character; Radu's "Master" who stole the sun from him, betrayed him, and meets her end at his grubby elongated fingers, thus implanting his obsession with the character that Duff would play in the other installments. Silly liberties are taken with the already cliche-ridden undead mythos that the unearthed franchise has carved out for itself, plus it is never explained how Hove looks like a decrepit fossil of a vampire here when he was a spry yet still monstrous one with dark hair in the 1990s. That said, this is arguably and alarmingly the strongest entry out of any of them. Shooting switched from Romania to Serbia, but various locations are utilized and the film looks great for a digitally shot cheapie. The performers bring their melodramatic A game, there are boobs and gore to appease the sleaze fans, and the providence exploring story moves at an engaging quip for a change.
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