Review: Vampirella (1995)

Taking comic book and comic strip characters and transferring them to the big screen has long been a popular trend, but with varying results. Some have been huge hits, like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. Others have crashed and burned, like The Rocketeer, The Phantom and Tank Girl. Still others have sucked so badly that they were thrown straight to the tender mercies of the direct-to-video market, like The Punisher and Captain America.

Which brings me to the strange case of Vampirella.

Vampirella is a character created by Forrest J. Ackerman (better known as the longtime editor/publisher of Famous Monsters magazine); she appeared in her own black & white magazine from 1969 to 1983. She's a sexy vampire from the planet Drakulon, where the inhabitants drink blood the way we humans drink water. She was unaware of her origins, but fought on the side of good, tackling evil in all its many forms (Satanists, werewolves, demons, etc.) while wearing as little clothing as possible. In the mid-1990s, the character was successfully revived in comic books and thus became a "hot property" for film development.

So how did she wind up in an adaptation so pervasively awful that it not only stayed off the big screen, but was also damn hard to find on video until an "official" release on DVD in 2001? I couldn't tell you. It's something of a mystery. But in the hands of executive producer Roger Corman, who's made his share of fly-by-night (pun intended) productions, and Jim Wynorski, who's probably best known for the Traci Lords version of Not of This Earth (also produced by Corman) and Return of Swamp Thing, but who has spent recent years churning out direct-to-cable cheapies, Vampirella is pretty freaking hard to watch.

Talisa Soto--best known for her appearance as a Bond Girl in License to Kill--plays Vampi, who comes to our lovely little planet from Drakulon in search of the band of bad vamps who killed her dad and split in a spaceship. And Soto's really an excellent choice: She's beautiful, exotic, lithe and, when called upon, capable of acting. My only complaint about her performance is that she can't run very well in high heels. (Then again, neither can I.) At least she can talk with fangs in her mouth: most of the other vampires in the movie apparently suffer from perpetual dry mouth, constantly making weird little smacking sounds as if trying desperately to form saliva just so that they could continue muttering their lousy dialogue. Maybe their fangs were picked up at a garage sale or something.

That wouldn't surprise me. Everything about this movie simply reeks of cheapness. The sets are, at best, minimal. The costumes look strictly off the rack; even Vampi's trademark outfit looks like something they found in the discount bin at The Pleasure Chest. And the interiors of the spaceships would have embarrassed even Ed Wood. (The spaceships themselves are about as impressive-I think I did just as well back in the days when I flew my Cylon Raider around my bedroom with my hand.)

As for the story...as you might expect, it doesn't hold very closely to the comic book. Vampi knows exactly whom she is, exactly where she came from and exactly who she's looking for: Vlad and his intergalactic gang of bloodsuckers. Speaking of sucking, though, Vlad is played by Roger Daltry, longtime lead singer for the Who and occasional fine actor. Unfortunately, Vampirella wasn't one of those occasions. Here, he sings bad vampire rock (as opposed to, um, good vampire rock), leering wide-eyed and running around in a cape like a little kid at a Halloween party who's had WAY too much sugar.

Daltry's overacting almost covers the fact that most of the rest of the cast can't act at all. The other vampires have little-to-no personality, the vampire hunters (who dress exactly like SWAT guys, except they have embroidered crosses on their baseball caps--cute) are even less distinguishable from one another, and even Vampi's main love interest in the movie is so unimpressive that she might as well not bother sucking his blood--he seems pretty dead already.

This movie is a waste of perfectly good videotape. Vampi deserved better. Talisa Soto deserved better. Hell, WE deserved better. Maybe some day, somebody will get around to making a proper Vampirella. Till then, this Vampirella is all we have--and we'd been better off having nothing at all.

(NOTE: Keep an eye out for cameos by Angus Scrimm, the Tall Man from the Phantasm films, as Vampi's father, and director John Landis as an astronaut. Maybe they had nothing better to do.)