Decadent Evil

Title: Decadent Evil
Rating: 1.5/5
Genre: Horror
Starring: Debra Mayer, Phil Fondacaro
Director: Charles Band

Particularly after the the first part of my double-barrelled return to the world of reviewing, as you read this you may begin to wonder about the comparatively low score but this is a case where it is justified. I love a decent vampire flick as much as the next guy – in fact I probably like them too much – and this is anything if a bastardisation of the genre filled with sparkling pansies and ogrish women, but this mere fact alone does little to upgrade it from one of the lowest breeds of film. This is a film that didn't just miss the bullseye but damn near failed to hit the dartboard, and with an opening segment set in a strip club it wouldn't be too difficult to mistake this for a bad porno (if not for the acting which even Ron Jeremy would be ashamed of).

The plot is hardly original; some woman decides to leave her coven in Eastern Europe for the land of opportunity, the opportunity here being to start her own clan and claim true immortality by feasting on 10,000 souls so that her legacy can never be extinguished. In order to achieve her aim she enlists the help of two young strippers – Sugar and Spyce - to seduce her hapless victims and lure them to their doom for their power hungry master. Except they do not stand unopposed; between them and their reign of bloody terror stands one lone vampire hunter; one man who will stop at nothing to end their tyranny.

Well, when I say man I really mean dwarf, which would be my first point of three which is too silly and moronic to deem this anything but awful (which is certainly not a put down to the actor himself who is the main reason for me making it to the end). Secondly, lets do a little maths here; it was stated that both her disciples were less than a year old, and in that time she had accumulated 9,999 souls. That would mean she would need to have taken the life of well over 28 people a day, and do it all unnoticed. Hooray for plausibility. If were going for arbitrary numbers why not have them make sense? And yet both these factors are ultimately trumped by the inclusion of Marvin, a 2 foot plastic reptilian monkey; a model so pathetically poor it was one step away from a child's toy complete with a hand at the top of the screen moving it about, shiny faced and incapable of actually moving any body part beyond being moved up and down vertically by strings.

Some of the lines of dialogue made me question whether the actors could read or whether they were just making it up as they went along. More often than not the strippers paused and looked confused as to what was happening after each painful delivery and even the poor violence and nudity can't compensate for this atrocity. Everything was shot in a red light which means most minor blood spurts are barely noticeable, and combining smoke and overwhelming darkness with nudity just works against one another, failing to provide either atmosphere or something that's actually interesting to watch. I mistook this for a 70s film and thought that the standards were low, but the fact that it was released in 2005 makes this impressively awful. It looks to me like 'Uwe Boll' might have some competition on his hands; uglier actresses and one less dwarf and soon we might even see him dethroned.