Children of the Night (1991)

              I’m starting to grow weary of vampire mechanics.  Maybe it’s my own fault, you’re really not supposed to watch this many vampire movies one after another.  I’ve started to keep a checklist in the back of my head: how does this one feel about garlic?  Do just stakes work or do these require beheadings as well?  Are crosses inherently holy or does it depend on the faith of the wielder, that sort of thing.  And although I did not like this movie and have many problems with it I will give it credit for one thing: I did not see the external lungs coming.

There was only one kid and I hated him.

              That deserves its own little section we’ll get to later, let’s first just lay down the backstory.  This was one of three movies produced by Fangoria magazine around this time.  If you haven’t heard of it Fangoria (which still exists and is still published physically every quarter, so genuine congrats on that) is a long-running fan magazine for all things horror, having run since 1979 with a small hiatus between 2015 and 2018.  Before the intarwebs it was a key resource for a couple of generations of horror fans and was immeasurably influential within the industry and culture.  Even as a non-horror fan I was aware of it growing up.

              As stated, it also made an ambitious but ill-fated attempt to put its money where its mouth was and make some movies with a subsidiary called Fangoria Films.  They first released the movie ‘Mindwarp’ in 1990, followed by this one the following year and then ‘Severed Ties’ in 1992. They were not particularly well received and the company eventually resurfaced as a production company putting out a series of direct to video films they acquired and then slapped their name on from 1996 to 2019, which frankly makes a lot more sense from a marketing perspective.  The most well-known of these is likely ‘Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich’ in 2018 because killer Nazi puppets will get you some headlines.

              I find the people involved behind the scenes fairly confusing.  Direction is by Tony Randal, whose previous effort was ‘Hellraiser II: Hellbound,’ which I remember as being flawed but decent, although a huge step down from the original, and who would follow this movie with ‘Amityville 1992: It’s About Time’ before directing a couple of Power Rangers episodes and a good chunk of the Jonathan Frakes starring “Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.”  It’s a weird industry.  The story was co-written by William Hopkins, who has basically done a couple other direct-to-video releases and nothing else of note.  The screenplay itself was written by Nicolas Falacci, who according to IMDB has literally two other credited projects: the 2013 tv movie ‘The Arrangement,’ an Elmore Leonard adaptation he wrote and produced, and the tv show ‘Numb3rs,’ which he co-created and which ran for six seasons and 119 episodes and which I watched the hell out of when it was on.  Like I said, weird industry.

              The plot is fairly thin and not in any way interesting so let’s get that out of the way: two teenage girls manage to wake a sleeping vampire who rises and takes over a small town.  Fifty miles away a schoolteacher is asked for help from his friend, a priest who is related to one of the two teenage girls, who is now a vampire along with her mother.  The priest stays to watch over the two vampires while the teacher friend goes to the town to see what’s going on.  He rescues the other teenage girl and they meet up with the town drunk who is the only other person in town not turned into a vampire.  They escape from the vampires a couple of times before the girl lures the head vampire back to where he was originally resting where they manage to kill him, at which point all of the townspeople turn back into humans.  The bones of this story are fine, if stale.

              The execution, however, is awful.  The first and most obvious problem is with the direction.  Tony Randal over-stylizes this thing to death.  Shots are often from weird angles, the camera is pushed in disturbingly close to faces, spaces are not established and the relations between shots are left unclear so quite often you’re not sure where people and events are in relation to each other.  I’m not entirely sure what tone he was going for; there are certainly parts of the script that are meant to be comedic and many of the sequences are framed or shot as if they’re supposed to be funny but these almost never line up at the same time.  It’s something of a cliché but it’s like someone trying to be Sam Raimi without being Sam Raimi, which almost never works.

              The acting is fairly awful as well and I’m going to blame most of it on the directing.  Ami Dolenz stars as Lucy, the main teenage girl, and she’s almost okay, just clearly directed poorly.  Peter DeLuise, of '21 Jump Street' Fame, stars as the teacher Mark, and he flails around trying to find a consistent tone.  I’ve seen him be fine in other things.  The only one who comes off as decent in Garrett Morris as Matty, the town drunk, who manages to actually have some dignity in the role.  Everyone else in the movie is overly broad and just terrible, especially the kid playing Billy.  Even Karen Black, who plays the vampire mom looked over by the priest, is awful, and just based on this movie I would not have guessed on the career she’s had.

              None of that helps but it’s all dwarfed by the problems with the script, which is so poorly written in just about every way that I’m frankly scared to go back and watch an episode of “Numb3rs.”  The dialogue is stiff, the characters are paper-thin, none of the jokes land, and every even sideways attempt at satire ends up cringeworthy.  The vampire town is named Allburg, a doctor character is introduced walking down the sidewalk still wearing his lab coat and an actual head mirror strapped to his forehead, a local cop randomly gives a long, rambling monologue to Lucy about how much she hates the locals which is supposed to endear her to us and make us feel bad when she inevitably dies but just made me really worry about an officer who would vent like that to a seventeen-year-old, the final confrontation with the head vampire is won by Matty accidentally hitting some debris while driving a van with a cross strapped to the front, sending it flying through the front of a church to impale said vampire, I could go on, it’s all a jumbled mess.

              But there are two points I really want to drill down into, and the first involves those external lungs.  For reasons that are never explained the way this movie establishes that ‘our vampire are different’ is that during the day the vampires have two different methods to avoid the sunlight: either they secrete a mucus membrane around themselves and expel slime from their mouths that hardens into a cocoon, or they submerge themselves in water.  In both instances they unfurl their lungs from their mouths where it wheezes in and out all squishy-like.  It either rests on the outside of the cocoon or floats on top of the water.  Why this is necessary or why the lungs don’t get burnt by the sunlight is never established.  My guess is that the company that did the special effects, KNB Effects Group, already had the effect developed in-house and sold the production on its use. 

              The water thing is important because the two teenagers wake up the head vampire when they go swimming in the flooded crypt of an abandoned church.  They handwave about a local tradition as the reason they do so but they’re not really interested in justifying it.  While they’re swimming one of them drops a crucifix which sinks down and wakes up the vampire who’s been sleeping all this time with his lungs just floating next to him submerged in the water, which from what I can tell defeats the entire purpose of having the external lungs, but whatever, that’s not the problem.

              The problem is the backstory of the vampire, which the movie info-dumps as such: back in the 1950’s or so, I don’t believe they ever give a specific year, a priest came to the town from Europe and started molesting the local kids.  The locals decided to ‘take care’ of him, but before they could the priest went down into the basement and killed himself and some of the kids.  The town then did the logical thing by simply flooding the crypt and then never speaking of it again, because that’s what grieving parents would obviously do, leave their children’s bodies down in a flooded basement.  We’re then told that actually the priest was a vampire who had turned the children and they were all still alive down there and the priest had been feeding on them for decades until he was awakened.

              I don’t really feel like diagramming all of the ways that this doesn’t make sense.  It’s kind of established that sometimes the vampires only partially turn people so they can feed on them, but this doesn’t explain how the vampire could feed on the underwater children for decades without them running dry.  After the vampire is killed and everyone reverts to normal the children are seen leaving the church, all laughing and happy and not at all traumatized by their watery hell existence.  I’m not sure how a vampire could have functioned as a priest at all, much less during the daylight and to the extent that he could be trusted around the town’s children.  If he was down there still feeding why did getting a cross dropped on him cause him to suddenly go on a rampage?  It’s all so tediously not thought through.

              Worse than all of that, though, is the romance between the teacher and the explicitly established seventeen-year-old virgin.  Well, I call it a romance because that’s what the movie intends for it to be but what it really is is a teacher thinking that a traumatized minor is pretty sexy, all things considered, and deciding at the end of the movie that they’ll be dating now.  I’m not particularly exaggerating.  There’s a brief conversation between the teenagers at the beginning to establish that Lucy’s a virgin because she just hasn’t found the right guy yet, there a conversation between the teacher and the priest about how Mark dropped out of seminary school because he fell in love, although it didn’t work out, there’s a conversation between Mark and Matty while Lucy is sleeping about how he really, really should hit that, and then at the end Mark kisses Lucy on the side of the head to wake her up after the final battle and they end the movie walking down the street holding hands.  That is the extent of their relationship but the movie firmly establishes at the end that they're dating now.  1991 was a long time ago.

              There are entire swathes of this movie that don’t work in any way, shape, or form.  I will say it’s almost exactly 90 minutes and moves fast enough that it doesn’t waste your time, it has some striking imagery and a couple of jokes that almost work, and even if it’s completely superfluous the whole external lungs thing was very memorable, the producers were right to buy the sales pitch.  This movie is streaming on Tubi and if you really need to see everything one of the head producers of “Stargate: SG-1” was up to in the 90’s (the DeLuise family is all over that show) you could possibly do worse.