Sunday, February 12, 2023

TUBI CONTINUED… SPACE VAMPIRE (2020) NO STARS

A sexy Space Vampire (Ali Chappell) comes to Earth and slowly (emphasis on SLOWLY) walks around in a skintight black latex catsuit, taking in her new surroundings.  Sometimes she walks around outside in the snow.  Other times she ambles inside a mansion.  When she does finally chow down on a victim, she must wash all the blood off her by taking a shower.  (Nothing is shown, dammit.)  Eventually, she goes home.

Space Vampire was released in 2020.  I don’t know if it was made during the early days of COVID and director Chris Alexander only had himself, one actress, and a camera at his disposal and decided, “Pandemic be damned!  We’re making a movie!”  If that was indeed the case, I applaud him for trying to produce a movie in one of the most trying times in human history.  Sadly, this is one of the most trying movies ever produced in human history.

The music in the opening is really annoying.  It sounds like a dot matrix printer running off an end-of-the-year report while sitting on top of an overloaded washing machine with the drum missing.   During the scenes of the Space Vampire wandering around, the music becomes a series of long, droning sounds that would be the perfect soundtrack to cure insomnia.  

Space Vampire is pointlessly slow and needlessly arty for something called Space Vampire.  (Alexander did a much better job with the whole grindhouse meets arthouse thing the next year with Scream of the Blind Dead.)  Then, there are the shots that are so overly solarized that you can’t tell what the hell you’re looking at.  It almost looks like Alexander filmed his computer’s screensaver and tried to pass it off as scenes for a movie.  

The shots of Chappell sitting on a couch while pink and red light flashes on her go on forever too.  It’s here where you can kind of see what Alexander was going for:  A zero-budget version of Neon Demon.  It’s a good idea, but it totally doesn’t work.

It's hard to screw up a movie called Space Vampire, but somehow Alexander did it.  I guess the problem was it’s closer to Under the Skin than Lifeforce.  Mathilda May would not approve.

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