Everyone get ready to shake their butt to the Monster Mash for the sixty millionth time, as that ‘vampire trend’ everyone warned you about in 2008, having clogged up the film industry’s arteries for three years now, begins manifesting itself as a massive uncontrollable death-rattle coronary before – with any luck — finally spasming out and flat-lining. The Wrap reports that the new project clamoring for our attention is “Blood Wars”, and will involve a “radical reinvention of vampire mythology”, whatever that means. Unless the next twist on the vampire ‘mythos’ will be, hopefully, to disappear forever, there is no way that any part of that statement can be true.
Not much detail has emerged on the project but its plot, involving a human/vampire relationship between vampire overlords and their human slaves, seems derivative of the already-derivative “Daybreakers”, and it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for a project that’s so calculated and cynical. Given the relative inexperience of everyone involved, it seems like “Blood Wars” might be a cheapie knocked out fairly quickly, though Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s well-known production company, ironically named Imagine Entertainment are on producing duties. The ‘story’ is based on one by Chad St. John and Blacklight Transmedia with Dalan Musson writing the script.
At this point, though, it’s hard not to feel like Jane Fonda at the end of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” where the actor chooses assisted suicide in favor of going back into the demented dancehall of despair, itself a pointed commentary on Nixonian malaise. Of course, if that Sydney Pollack classic was to be remade today, Jane Fonda would probably be a vampire. Everyone in that dancehall would be a vampire. There would probably be a postmodern character played by Topher Grace commentating on how funny it was that everyone was a vampire.
“Blood Wars” does at least have a modicum of originality in its favor by boasting a script not based on an existing property, insofar as any film starring bloodsuckers these days can be considered ‘original’. Needless to say, it joins a list of vampire-based projects longer than Errol Flynn’s penis: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”, a remake of “The Hunger”, a remake of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Midnight Mass”, “Bite Me” and “Nocturnal”. The remake of the vampire-heavy “Fright Night” also lands in late August.
Vampirism, of course, has been used as a metaphor for a lot of things, usually seen as a crudely veiled cipher for sexual intercourse. It’s refreshing to see, then, that the studios have stopped pretending to hide their hand and have begun doing to movie-going audiences what Count Dracula has been to doing to Mina Harker, what Angel has been doing to Buffy, and — most importantly — what Edward has been doing to Bella for some years now, in earnest.
