Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf

Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf

Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf is yet another example of how titles can be misleading. When I first saw the name of the film, I was excited to see what was in store. Vampires and werewolves? And zombies thrown in for good measure? How much better could an independent film get? But once I sat down and saw the opening footage of the movie, I steeled myself, because I didn't want to be let down, even if I wasn't going to take that much stock in it anyway. There was a nice fluttering trash bag on a stick as a flying bat, and so I figured, "This'll be terrible."

Anyway, Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf has a confusing premise. A woman, whose fiance's life was taken during a car accident, visited a gypsy woman to get a potion to turn her into a vampire. I'm not really sure how this makes up for her dead husband, but it makes sense to her, and she goes about making vampire minions for herself. These include an older, obese, and hairy-yet-balding man whose love of horror spans even past mine,


a g-ma who seems useless to the plot and turns into the Incredible Hulk when she is (un)dead, and a mute who turns on his owner towards the thrilling finale of the film. The minions are, for some reason, barely used and only fulfill enough of a part to cause the plot to advance. A detective and a woman who stumbled on the first attack - a woman who uses her ample curves to her advantage with the detective (and what the director uses to keep males' attention to the movie, with her chest juggling like a circus clown) - become involved with the secret of the vampire, and track her down, finding out her real name and story. An actress named Selena, she attempts to have the detective live forever with her as her husband, since he looks a lot like her dead fiance. Does he really? This 70 year old guy gets all the ladies.

Not for the first time, I'm having a hard time finding things to point out about this indie release. Sometimes it's harder to critique the worse films, because there are more things that flop than there are to really have time to talk about. I also have to take into consideration things like the budget for the film, which I have no idea what it was. It's hard to consistently rate these indie releases, because each film feels different and hasn't been made the same.

While Blood Slaves has one of the more cohesive plots that I've been seeing in the independent films of Bite Night, it still suffers severely from lack of direction. Too many shots and scenes seem irrelevant to the story of the film to really grab the viewer's attention. Combine that with vastly differing volumes in sound and acting and it becomes quite the dull viewing. I have to give credit to both the main detective and the two hookers, who exhibited the best acting in the film, but otherwise the linereading is monotonous and stuttered, as if reading directly from cue cards.


I was quite disappointed with the misleading beginning to the movie, where we focused more on the fat man who later turns into the victim, rather than the detective, which the movie later moves on to. Too much time was spent following a rather flat character in the beginning, only to later turn out anticlimactic. While I'm at it, too many shots were held. We don't need to see the whole walk down the hallway - we'll get it if you cut away to something more interesting.

I was also dismayed by the misspellings in the movie. Personnel is spelled wrong on the door! I hope it was meant to be, because I looked down in shame from it.

The most entertaining thing about the movie for me was the quirky circus-horror music. It was fun, at least for a while - at the end of the movie, the same tune goes on for much too long. I actually had to shut this movie off because it made me so sleepy, but I came back to it. I was mildly entertained until something more interesting happened at my house, and then the movie took a backseat to it. However, it's not a bad independent story - I just wish the filmmakers went farther with it instead of writing an okay story and shooting a crappy film. I could tell the influences were there, especially with the fat man's vast knowledge and love of the classic horror films. But there was just too much that didn't work in the movie. There was only a quick explanation as to what the vampire actually was and why it was associated with werewolves, and even after that I still don't understand why the movie was endowed with "vampire wolf."

If you're interested in vampires, there are so many better movies to choose from. But if you want to watch an indie movie (for any number of reasons), this isn't the worst you could pick out of the bargain bin. And look on the bright side - it actually had vampires in it, even if there is only one or two scenes of actual vampirism.