A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)

              This is a bad movie, and worse than that it’s stupid while thinking it’s doing something clever.  It does exactly the thing I've been worring about and uses the existence of vampire movies and the flexibility of ‘vampire as metaphor’ to jump off into examining other ideas while not bothering to lay a halfway decent foundation as a vampire movie in the first place.  It’s a sequel in name only, requiring the audience to know about the original mini-series of ‘Salem’s Lot,’ not something easily assumed in the media landscape of 1987, but not be so familiar with it that they’re distracted by all of the ways this ignores or contradicts everything established by that mini-series.  Instead of a small town invaded by an outside force that ends in the town’s fiery destruction it presupposes a rural village settled by European vampires who have managed to keep their existence secret for hundreds of years. 

              It also has the main character learn about the existence of vampires then immediately and wordlessly bone a 17-year-old looking vampire he hasn’t seen in over twenty years so the screenplay really isn’t putting a lot of work into any logic here.  It uses the all-purpose vampiric whammy to just jump over any holes in the script in a way that’s becoming increasingly annoying in these movies.

              Let’s go ahead and walk though this in stages, starting with the marketing.  The movie poster shows a silhouette of Kurt Barlow from the original mini-series and the theatrical trailer name drops Stephen King twice in forty seconds.  Then there's the title itself, which isn’t technically a lie because the main character of the movie is returning to the town after visiting as a child but is absolutely promising a sequel to the original that it in no way delivers.  It sells the audience for this movie an absolute bill of goods and they knew exactly what they were doing.

              The primary force behind this movie was Larry Cohen, something of a mainstay of the b-movie horror genre of the time.  He’s the person behind the ‘It’s Alive’ franchise, ‘Q: The Winged Serpent,’ ‘Maniac Cop,’ and ‘The Stuff.’  It’s very likely you’ve heard of at least one of these.  Some of his movies have the reputation of being pretty good, so I’m not entirely sure what happened here.  He had turned in a script for the original mini-series when it was being developed that had been rejected and this apparently stuck with him because when he was approached years later by Warner Bros about making another low-budget horror movie, most likely after the relative success of ‘The Stuff,’ he proposed a sequel to the mini-series, for which they still had the rights.  Once again stealing directly from Wikipedia, here’s his quote on the topic: "The intention was always to bring a sense of humor to the picture in playing with the established elements of vampire movies. Audiences recognize aspects of the mythology and know what they mean, but I don't like vampire movies particularly. In fact, I find them very tedious. With A Return to Salem's Lot, I tried to revamp the vampire legend by making vampires the most persecuted race in Europe."  This says a lot both because he admits he dislikes the very kind of movie he’s making and how the final product reflects almost none of his stated intentions.  It’s not funny and the vampires aren’t persecuted.  It’s another example of a filmmaker taking the shell of an existing property and shoving their own original ideas inside in order to get them made, and while I understand what he was trying to do I don’t think he succeeds on any level.

              The movie opens with our main character, Joe Weber, played by the usually dependable Michael Moriarty, as an anthropologist of some description filming a human sacrifice deep in the jungles of vaguely South America.  The point of the scene is to establish that Joe is unfazed by the literal murder in front of him because he’s too interested in studying it, and his dismissive attitude to the horror expressed by his colleagues shows him as an asshole as well.  This makes sense to the overall plot and it’s a necessary scene to justify some decisions he makes later in the movie but it alienates him completely from the audience because he’s such an unrepentant monster.  The next few scenes establish that he has a delinquent son he hasn’t seen for three years and a very bad relationship with his ex-wife.  After returning to the states and having the kid dumped in his lap, he makes the random decision that they should drive to Maine and live in the old cottage left to him by his deceased ‘aunt’ Clara who he briefly spent some time with when he was fourteen but hasn’t seen since.

              I’ll point out that this all happens in the first ten minutes in a jumbled whirl of exposition and quick scenes so anyone sitting in the theater waiting for some kind of follow-up to Ben Mears and company would likely be just as confused as I was when I watched it.  This isn’t helped when they arrive at the town of Salem’s Lot to find it mostly empty of people except for a couple of random weirdos, along with shots of seemingly vacant houses with ADR layered over the top of assorted voices remarking on Joe returning to the town and bringing his boy.

              The next few scenes are Joe and his son (who has a name and an actor but doesn’t factor into the plot other than giving something for Michael Moriarty to occasionally remember exists and become upset about, he’s a terrible character not played terribly well and I’d just as soon forget about him) starting to fix up the abandoned cottage, meeting the local law enforcement, and being pointed in the direction of the local head of the town, Judge Axel.  Also Joe finds ‘aunt’ Clara’s tombstone, which makes no sense in the context of the movie because not only is Clara not dead the entire town has been vampires for centuries so what the hell is the point of erecting a fake tombstone for the benefit of no one?

              The next set of plot points rather encapsulate a lot of the problems with the script, in that they seem to have thrown a bunch of scenes together in the edit and then figured out how to connect and justify them all with ADR and scene inserts.  The existence of the vampires isn’t a secret or a big reveal for the audience, at around the seventeen minute mark it gets dark out and the vampires rather casually emerge from their coffins to start strolling around the twon.  This is all completely unrelated to Joe and his son and is given no extra emphasis, it’s just the next scene that happens.  I guess you don’t go into a vampire movie to be surprised that vampires exist but normally when you have a POV character you tend to follow the, y’know, point of view of that character, but what do I know.  That night a random bunch of punk ‘teens’ drive into town and are set upon by random town vampires.  The head constable tells one of them to first go to the church, then to Joe’s cottage.  This makes no sense but is later backwards justified as part of the plan for the town to reveal itself to Joe, which sure.  The surviving ‘teen’ shows up at the cottage raving about being attacked, and it’s very important to establish here that she doesn’t use the word vampire or describe anything weird about the attack.  Joe takes her to the judge’s house where after some pointless dialogue a woman shows up that Joe recognizes as his ‘aunt’ Clara and then the ‘teen’ is dragged off and Joe miraculously realizes the town is full of vampires.  Somehow.  Despite no one showing any fangs or displaying any supernatural abilities.  Guessing there’s a Satanic cult would have been just as baseless a guess but a little more believable.

              Joe is given a tour of the vampire town and they explain the premise of the movie: the vampires have been in the town for hundreds of years, having emigrated from Europe (they pound this point home several times), they mostly drink blood from a herd of cows except for special occasions such as weddings (we’re shown a wedding happening at the same time as Joe’s tour; it’s between child vampires, which is questionable in several ways because either these are vampires who are hundreds of years old but are just now getting married or they’re relatively recent vampires who got turned at that age but have since found love, and then you realize that the vampires in this movie are explicitly sexual so they are very much implying that these kids are going to bone, which thanks for that, movie), and that the judge wants Joe to write a chronicle of the vampires as an established anthropologist so that in a couple of hundred years they can go public to the world and be accepted.  It’s implied but never specifically stated that they somehow brought him to the town at the age of fourteen so that he’d one day return to write this study for them, which makes none of the sense.

What follows is where the movie lost me for good, because while the threat to his son can justify a lot it doesn’t include the next scene, which is where he meets the vampire girl he had a crush on when he was fourteen and she was supposedly seventeen and literally less than thirty seconds after clapping eyes on her for the first time in, what, twenty years? they are instantly smooching and then quickly banging, while a whole gaggle of vampires just downstairs discuss amongst themselves how this was all planned.  Leaving aside everything creepy about centuries-old vampires picking one of their own to set up the future seduction of a fourteen-year-old it doesn’t exactly say great things about said vampire, she apparently didn’t have much going on for the last couple of decades. 

The next day Joe wakes up, collects his son, and we get the one and only line in the movie that implies the vampires are using the ol’ whammy on them when Joe, as he gets in his car to go back to the cottage instead of getting the hell out of town, wonders aloud to himself “What’s the matter with me?”  And that’s it, that’s all you’re going to get for the rest of the movie for any of the weird stuff that Joe does.  For a while he just wanders around the town talking to people and asking random questions while the movie seemingly kills time figuring out what to do next.  He waffles back and forth several times between sticking around while writing the vampire bible, as he refers to it, and trying to flee with his vampirifying son and it’s never clear from scene to scene what is motivating any of his actions.

The next half hour is taken up with the following things, in no particular order: he bangs the vampire lady again which instantly results in her getting pregnant and visibly showing, which either does or does not take about two weeks to happen, the timeline of this movie is never even gestured at, they establish that such half-vampire children are called ‘drones’ and are the vampire’s daytime servants, a Nazi hunter named Van Meer wanders into town (played by director Sam Fuller in probably the only genuinely fun part of the movie), Joe witnesses a class taught to the vampire children full of what he describes as “anti-human propaganda,” and I will remind you that even the children of the town are centuries old vampires as established by the wedding so this is just to shove in some social commentary we’ll dig into later, Joe expresses vague concerns as his son stops sleeping at night, begins to crave blood, and in case the audience wasn’t following allow states aloud his intentions to turn into a vampire, and a very sloppy escape attempt that ends after Joe bashes a man to death with a rock.

Eventually the movie decides the third act needs to be entirely stupid and Joe, Van Meers, and his son all decide there haven’t been enough actions scenes and so flee to the church at night as a prelude to a vampire massacre.  Remember, this was a town founded by and inhabited for centuries by vampires, but they have a sanctified and fully functional church in the middle of town, which the movie justifies by having one of the characters mention that it’s kept up for ‘appearances.’  Again, this is a town in the real world of 1987, with electricity and running water and therefore some connection to the outside world, which is known to the neighboring communities even if it has a bad reputation.  The next morning they wake up and Joe and Van Meers start going from house to house staking vampires in their coffins while the son is lured outside by a vampire played by baby Tara Reid … somehow, even though it’s broad daylight.  Eventually Joe rescues his son and kills the head vampire Judge Axel in a barn and escapes the town in a bus while tossing off the idea that rather than wait for the authorities to come and kill them the vampires are going to choose to all die together and the movie ends with some shots of cows.

All of which is frustrating and nonsensical and is exactly not the kind of movie to watch when you want a sequel to ‘Salem’s Lot,’ and these aren’t even the worst parts of the movie.  As evidenced by Larry Cohen’s quote he had no real interest in making a vampire movie and it shows.  Everything I tore apart in the previous paragraphs are such a mess because the plot, the characters, and the internal logic of the supernatural elements were all by far secondary to what Larry Cohen was really interested in.  In many ways I have the same problems here that I did with ‘Blood of Dracula:’ someone who made a vampire movie in part to make fun of vampire movies not from a place of fondness but of condescension and mostly to say other stuff.  While Paul Morrissey didn’t really have much besides nihilism and cynicism on his mind boy does Larry Cohen have some stuff to say about American society.  Not a whole lot of it is smart or coherent but he really wants to say it.

‘Blue Velvet’ was released in 1986.  It was not the first movie to posit that the image of the suburbs might not match the reality but that was the big takeaway at the time.  I’m not going to argue that that was the main point of the movie, I’m not even sure that mentioning that movie in the same vague area as this one is even fair, but if that message really impressed you in David Lynch’s film well guess what, you’ll be blown away by the same message here.  I have no evidence that Larry Cohen was inspired to make this movie because of that one but it wouldn’t surprise me.  This entire movie is a blunt, not-very-accurately aimed hammer swing at small town conservative America.  The big message of this movie is that Larry Cohen is no fan of old-school Republicans. 

Some of this conveyed relatively subtly.  There’s the isolation of the town itself and the pride it takes in its heritage and traditions.  They boast to the outsider about their rules, continually refer to everywhere else as ‘the outside world,’ make a point of mention their European heritage, the citizens are all very white, and the demographics of rural Maine help a lot with all of this.  There’s the fact that the head of the community is a judge, local law enforcement has that unearned swagger that clearly conveys they’re far more interested in making sure people stay in their proper places than enforcing any kind of laws.  There’s an emphasis on family, on the proper order of things.  That’s all relatively fine.

Then there are times when the script slams the text up against the screen and points to it to make sure the audience is paying attention.  The classroom scene, which I will keep pointing out is nonsense because the vampires are all hundreds of years old and probably remember the history they’re being taught, opens with the pledge of allegiance, they very specifically say they came over in 1620 with the rest of the pilgrims, one of the kids is admonished after they use the term ‘drones’ because “they don’t like to be called that,” Cohen is practically banging on the other side of the screen to get your attention.  In another scene Joe mentions he’s surprised at how much money they vampires have and they point out that living for hundreds of years and owning land adds up, which fair enough, but then the judge all but turns to the screen and winks as he states, “And not a penny from the government.”  In the final confrontation in the barn the judge yells at Joe about being forced to show his ‘true face,’ which you’re the head of a vampire clan that’s hundreds of years old, why the hell do you care that you had to whip out the vampire mask?  Then he dies when he’s impaled by an American flag.  I usually don’t mind when movies forgo subtlety but come on.

There’s also stuff that’s just goofy.  The makeup effects are way worse than the television mini-series filmed eight years previously.  Joe’s final strike against the vampires is setting fire specifically to their coffins, so there are shots of vampires desperately pulling flaming coffins out of buildings when it was never established that coffins are more than just convenient ways to escape the sunlight.  Poor baby Tara Reid dies by lying down in a flaming coffin, screaming all the while.  Vampires have enhanced strength except for when five or six of them have their hands on Joe, then he can throw them around like rag dolls.  Joe and company haul around bottles of holy water from the church, which apparently still has a functional fountain despite no one being around to service the place, but never bother to carry any crosses around with them.  The judge makes a point of showing Joe that garlic has no effect on them and they show up in mirrors just fine, which never factors into the plot in any way. 

This movie made me genuinely angry.  Both when I was watching it and even more when I thought back over it.  After a limited theatrical release if was issued on VHS in 1988, then burn-on-demand DVD in 2010, which I had forgotten was a thing, then Shout! Factory released in on Blu-ray in 2021, which I am grudgingly thankful for.  A number of Larry Cohen’s films have been on the periphery of my interest for some time, especially ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’ and ‘The Stuff,’ but now I’m looking forward to finally watching them a whole lot less.  Maybe he was going through some things when he wrote the script, maybe the shooting was a lot more chaotic than reports suggest, whatever the reason this is a jumbled mess of a movie that isn’t a good vampire movie and is an equally bad message movie about whatever the hell he was trying to say.  I really liked the original mini-series and was genuinely curious as to how they could possibly do a sequel to it, and it turns out the answer is that they couldn’t.