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Sorority House Vampires from Hell (1998)

Hey! It's the '90s again! If you didn't like the '90s, not a chance you'll like Sorority House Vampires from Hell, because it's steeped in '90s. Bimbos, 90210 references, Keanu Reeves references, surfer-speak. The filmmaker, Geoffrey de Vallois, much like his name, draws upon European influences to craft a catalogue of the phenomena of his age, showing the social awareness of the French New Wave.

So, as you might guess, this is a Buffy cash-in, except in this film the blond, ditzy heroine is named--oh no, wait, she's named "Buffy" too. The plot is that there's this demon in a UFO. I didn't know he was a demon until I read the back of the box. But he's a demon. In a bold move, the filmmaker only shows us the inside of the UFO, showing his film is all about what's beyond the surface. Wanna see the inside of the ship? http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2658/4085492994_1babc0c33f.jpg Those CGI tentacles are the demon, I guess. And I forgot to mention the UFO is full of busty, naked chicks who sometimes dance and sometimes get penetrated by the CGI tentacles. It's good to be a UFO demon.

And this demon's plan for world domination is to awake the only two vampires on earth, Vlad and Natalia. Vlad is the comic relief and mostly does accident-prone slapstick in a single room. Natalia is a scrawny, pale broad who makes zombies by biting people on the neck. She has to make nine zombies before some comet passes, she tells us.
Here's Natalia: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2548/4085493036_ce66c3dbbd.jpg

So Natalia begins gradually turning the busty, fit sorority girls into zombies one-by-one while inside the sorority house some lame hazing commences. The hazing sequences parallel the efforts of Natalia in cinematic rhymes making one wonder, "Who are the vampires in this world really? Do we not suck self-esteem from one another to build up ourselves?"

The runtime is a full 90 minutes, so it's padded out with a lot of wacky comedy. Like rednecks with laser guns trying to shoot a man wearing antlers.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2731/4084733973_d7cf7795a5.jpg
An impromptu fashion show.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2681/4085492906_3e89ed0b88.jpg
An impromptu infomercial. An impromptu music video. Subtitles, self-conscious references to subtitles, surfer dudes who speak so righteously jargon-heavy they require said bogus subtitles, an over-the-top New Ager who, naturally, is also a vegetarian and environmentalist and who gets in a lengthy conversation about the value of religion with Natalia. And, strangest of all, many references to the current economic state of the US in 1998. de Vallois's social consciousness is clearly doing for American cinema what Godard was doing for French cinema with his Dziga-Vertov Group films of the '60s; he is calling for revolutionary action, by comparing his vampire queen to the profiteering oil companies sucking our earth dry.

There are also lots of penguin plushes:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2696/4084734029_0793f9e0ba.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2557/4084734045_6049633722.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2596/4085492974_03bd9e5aab.jpg - Me too.

The film culminates with Buffy, whose total lack of expressive powers reveal her to be the doom-filled personification of this generation's indifference, attacks the vampire queen who has already killed Vlad herself and become human again and the UFO demon turning to his back-up plan of Y2K.

You know what the problem is with a lot of these ZANY shot-on-video releases? It's not the production values or the amateur actors and directors. It's that it's generally a bunch of people together amusing themselves by making a movie, but not worrying at all about amusing the audience.

Sorority House Vampires from Hell looks like it was a lot of fun to make, but it's not really all that fun to watch. It made me laugh in a few places, only twice with well-earned jokes (one involving a Monty Python reference, oddly enough). This is toward the end of the film, when they've built up some steam and in-jokes. But mostly the zany, anything-goes approach is tedious. I have to admit they found some pretty cute girls with nice tits, though. Not that it helps much. This film is way too tongue-in-cheek for its own good.

And I leave you with this:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2441/4084733997_8ab33b0145.jpg - Here the director has symbolically removed the tops of his actresses' heads, making a point about the mindlessness of youth. His care to keep the soft, be-pantied rump and purple-bra-cupped breasts in shot reveal much about his cinematic style.

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