quasify

I’m massively dehydrated from the gym and the walk after (but, crepuscular ducks!) so have been alternating stimulant and depressant liquids since I got home. This seems like a perfect time for a little vampire movie liveblogging I’ve been thinking of.

The short of it: VC got me to put Nightwatch on my netflix queue the same week Allison was live blogging the sequel (Daywatch) as part of her Piece by Piece series. Coincidence? Those two don’t even know each other! All times below are relative to Nightwatch standard time.

01:30 – Some sort of low-budget Bravehearty/Highlandery/A Knight’s Tale-y war is going down here. I’ve got the dubbed English audio on (this was shot in Russian) which I’m sure is a mistake. Though, since I had the choice of that, dubbed French or dubbed Spanish, it seemed like the way to go.

02:30 – Imagine that the Scots are the Day team, the British the Night team. Or vice-versa. That Day leader dude is crying blood! And lo there was much slaughter and more splashing of the blood. No one wins, call it a tie, Light and Dark will make some thousand year truce.

04:45 – Flash to almost modern day (1992). We can tell it’s not current due to the fact that a seriously fugly sweater has taken center stage.

06:30 – Fugly sweater has been cuckolded and is selling his soul to a surprisingly effective witch to kill his wife’s unborn love spawn. There’s some awesome cinematography and color mapping going on here, as an Anti-Witch Brigade (including a She-Tiger?!?) shows up to save the unborn who is apparently related to the aforementioned War. This child is Special!

11:30 – Modern day. The Child Spawn swims, in horrendous speedo. Swims and bleeds and hears modulated voices in his head. They completely wasted their crane rental on this worthless leaving the pool shot.

13:30 – Cut to a new tough guy character, a vampire tracker/hunter/roustabout. His introduction is visually remeniscient of that great scene from Minority Report where Tom Cruise has his eyes replaced and bites into the rotten sandwich. But replace the sandwich with refrigerated blood.

16:45 – Our tough guy (Anton) scores more blood from a Steve Buscemi looking Russian butcher after a gratuitous meat cleaver-ing sequence. Actually it’s not blood, but a PolyHeme thing. A little exposition clears things up – the Buscemi butcher is a vampire, Anton, a “light other” aka vampire frienemy. So yeah, Anton is going to hunt down the Child Spawn.

21:00 – The voice guiding the Child Spawn sounds a lot like Liv Tyler from Lord of the Rings. The Spawn himself looks like a 12-year old Wil Wheaton. Woah – we see one of Anton’s powers – he can visualize the Spawn’s vascular system as though that was all there was to him, like a full color 3D cerebral angiogram. Suddenly this movie is starting to remind me of work.

25:30 – Great visual of Anton vomiting blood down a tall white porcelain wall. I’m starting to like this guy.

27:00 – A heroin-chick vampire and her bad-boy boyfriend vampire try to eat/bite/suck/masticate the Child Spawn’s neck. Extreme stylized violence between Anton and the three of them – Anton can only see them part of the time – OH MAN HE JUST BLEW THA BAD-GUYS HEAD OFF WITH A MIRROR AND LIGHTBEAM! (The anti-witch brigade is revealed to be on Anton’s team.)

33:30 – We meet Anton’s big boss, head of the City Light Company. It doesn’t look good – our light boy in blue is bleeding everywhere. This slow-mo sweeping stuff off the table is a lot like a Puffy video. Big Boss can put his hand inside Anton’s body aka Neo + Trinity at the end of the first Matrix to de-shrapnelize that mojo-jojo.

38:00 – New element – we’ve got a Vortex of Damnation! There’s cool hand-drawn animation sequence telling the backstory of the vortex. Lot’s of prophecy light vs dark jibber but as before, only the visuals really matter. Here…

41:00 – The lead singer of a truly horrid Russian pop group is a vampire, looking for vengeance for dead bad-boy vampire. Why anyone actually cared about that a-hole is unclear.

45:00 – Anton is The One? Our Russian Buffy Keanu? I thought that was the Spawn? Big Boss is pulling out a stuffed owl to be Chris Tucker’s Jackie Chan, we’ve devolved into Harry Potter and Hedwig & The Angry Inch. Olga the Owl is one of the better Actors in this – and BAM, just as I say that Hedwig transforms into a pycho-naked she-beast. Apparently there was curse involved.

55:30 – Anton’s Vampire BFF is pissed about the whole “b-baller getting his head broke off by a lightbeam thing” so wants to settle it like a man, by arguing about forms?!? This is turning into the first and only entry in the Vampire Bureaucracy genre.

1:00:00 – WE HAVE ACTUAL BUFFY!!! In a background TV playing in Child Spawn’s house. At the one hour mark I’m actively failing to care if this kid gets eaten or not.

1:03:00 – One of the most vertiginous things I’ve ever seen – a minute long scene of a bolt falling from an airplane into the Vortex’s house. Since she’s cursed and all the puppies she touches dies, that’s probably all she wrote for the passengers. Yep.

1:07:30 – Totally BOSS. Anton’s arm just got taken to the dark side (via vampire mosquitoes?) so he hacks it off. The Child Spawn is dead? Naked owl psycho chick dead? Mosquito dead? What the Hell. THE GLOOM RULES US ALL. Oh check it – they’re all alive and have both arms.

1:12:00 – So I’m dense, apparently. Anton is fugly sweater guy. So that means Child Spawn is the kid he tried to have auto-magically aborted back when? One suspects the Child Spawn is really his son and the way-back-witch was lying about the cuckolding. This is getting Days of Our Lives-y, the dinky-dink piano score doesn’t help.

1:19:30 – The Vortex just accidentally killed some old lady and in the process is causing a bat volcano over some power station. Why this matters is unclear. This bit of the score courtesy of a John Williams ripoff artist, waiting on Indiana Jones to roll through.

1:23:30 – Anton is indeed the Child Spawn’s father, confirming my prescience. Thank you very much.

1:27:00 – Anton’s off to kill the Vortex. Or lift the curse. Choice is his. Child Spawn escapes from Keystone Kops Anti-Witch Brigade… Damn fool child, chasing the whispers of the evil vampire temptress. On the roof, of course.

1:30:00 – Let’s do the rest in haiku. Ah fuuuu it’s too late for that.

1:34:00 – The Vortex thinks Anton is nutso, for once I agree. Wait – wait – wait – what? The Vortex cursed herself for super surprise makes-no-sense ending! The curse has lifted!!

1:38:30 – Oh. We got to wrap up the completely BS story line #2 re: Child Spawn. An elevator just shot out of the roof (aka Bill & Ted’s special manoeuvre) for no reason whatsoever. The BIG BAD BOSS just ripped out his own spine to use as a sword. We’re totally back to the beginning battle scene, but now on a rooftop. Anton’s weapon is a lit fluorescent tube, a poor substitute for a light saber, vampires or no. Ergo, he loses. Child Spawn REJECTS THE LIGHT!

DARKNESS RULES!

Rock on.