Commitment is vital to a good horror story. As with good comedy and good romance, it’s one of those things an audience can sense as soon as it’s off. Be tongue-in-cheek, be self-aware, be irreverent all you want, but go all-in.
It’s commitment that’s perhaps the best thing about Vampires of the Velvet Lounge, a campy, often bonkers horror-comedy from writer/director Adam Sherman. There are moments when the film’s budget shows, and moments when its script and its pacing get rocky. There are even moments when it feels primed to go off the rails, but it’s a story told with confidence and many, many buckets of blood, and that makes the ride worth it.
The title vampires are a trio of beautiful women, led by the legendary “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory (Mena Suvari), who run an absinthe bar in present-day Savannah. The modern world is sometimes frustrating for Elizabeth and her fellow vamps, Joan (India Eisley) and Helena (Sarah Dumont), but the vast digital expanse of the online dating world has been a boon, allowing them to lure unsuspecting victims to their lair under the guise of a rendezvous with a beauty.
It’s a strategy that makes the centuries-old women harder to detect, but it’s not impossible. Cora (Dichen Lachman), an ex-soldier turned vampire hunter, is on Elizabeth’s trail, and eager to stake one of the most infamous bloodsuckers who’s ever lived. On the weekend of a lunar eclipse that might make the vampires even more powerful, Cora plots her next move with the help of her partner Alexis (Rosa Salazar), but they’re not the only ones paying the bar a visit. A trio of middle-aged men looking for a good time (Stephen Dorff, Lochlyn Monroe, and Tyrese Gibson) are also in town hoping to meet up with these hot women they’ve met online, setting up a blood-soaked night for the ages.
As with a lot of low-budget, shot-on-digital efforts released in the indie world right now, it takes a moment to warm up to Vampires of the Velvet Lounge‘s visual sense. The strings are showing just a little bit in the visual effects, and the cinematography sometimes goes flat in terms of both composition and color. Throw in a predictable early plot setup and it’s easy to feel, for a few minutes anyway, like you’re about to watch a film you’ve seen done better somewhere else.
Then Vampires settles into its rhythm, and you realize this is a film which, flaws and all, understands exactly the kind of movie it needs to be. Sherman’s script, though sometimes clumsy, is packed with enthusiasm for certain genre conventions, from the film-noir-inspired voiceover of the tortured vampire hunter to the scenery-chewing evil of Suvari’s Bathory. The strings are showing, sure, but so is the camp, and over the course of Act One the latter cleanly wins out.
In Sherman’s world, vampires aren’t just immortal beauties full of blood-sucking fury and sadism. They’re also bickering, fumbling, occasionally in over their heads even in a world where they can talk themselves out of pretty much any bad situation. You can feel the kind of malaise that’s settled over these women in their centuries-long quest to just keep drinking blood regardless of technology or circumstance, and it especially shines through in the tension between Elizabeth and Joan, who may or may not be regretting her lack of humanity at this stage of her afterlife. Then there’s Cora, who’s so self-serious that she’d make Count Dracula himself tell her to loosen up a little, adding even more of an arch tone to the way these characters are sketched out.
It’s all meant to play with this sense of heightened reality and extreme emotional poles, and while it sometimes stumbles in that effort, it works more than it doesn’t.
This is thanks in no small part to the cast, led by Suvari, who’s giving it everything she’s got as a legendary vampire frustrated by the company she’s keeping and the evolution of her place in the world. Her Elizabeth is gleefully villainous, and when she gets the chance to play opposite clueless humans, she’s having a ball. No one else in the film can touch her, but everyone’s trying, particularly Dorff, whose turn late in the film is one of its campy highlights.
But the real draw here, the thing that convinced me this was a film I wouldn’t just enjoy, but enjoy again? It’s the blood, and lots of it. Too often with horror films at this budget level, you get the sense that filmmakers are attempting to pull back on overt gore elements that might seem cartoonish to some viewers, in favor of something more subtle that never quite lands. This is not that film. From the opening sequence to the final chaotic battle, Vampires of the Velvet Lounge is a bloodfest of the best kind, a movie willing to positively drench itself in fake crimson goo for our amusement. It adds to the camp value, and if you’ll permit me, to the vamp value.
All of this means that, even when the film’s clumsier tendencies and limitations are quite visible, Vampires of the Velvet Lounge is just fun. It’s a wild ride through a blood-soaked underworld where the vampires are hot, the hunters are cool, and the commitment to the premise is palpable and quite rewarding.
Vampires of the Velvet Lounge opens in select theaters March 20.
