Tales From the Crypt, Bordello of Blood: Reviewed by Darkmoon

Release Date: 1996

Rating: R (Full Grown Vampire Hunters Only)

Starring: Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, Chris Sarandon

Score: 4.3

The Basics: Dennis Miller is a Private Eye. He's also pretty broke, and desperate. When he's hired by a hot little religious girl to find her brother, he gets stuck in the middle of a vampire story. There's a bunch of stuff having to deal with an uber-powerful vampire chicklet, some power hungry Religious leader, and I think Corey Feldman has a couple of scenes... but really, nothing to write home about.

The Details: If you watch any movies attached to a TV series, time and again you will come upon one phrase: "This worked really well as an episode" or something similar. The basic meaning is that the movie would have worked better on the small screen, since it was really not a servicable big screen affair. In the case of the Tales from the Crypt movies, both movies fell prey to this problem, but since Demon Knight in no way relates to Vampires, that's a movie for another section. Today I'm talking Bordello of Blood.

This biggest problem with the film is just the simple fact that, for an hour and a half, it's a slip-shod boring affair that only picks up a couple of times, and would really have benefitted with a two-part episode treatment on TV. Stretching it out to cinematic length makes the weak premise weaker.

Basically, much as I said above, it boils down to Dennis Miller being a bum, fighting vampires, and saving the day. The scenes Dennis is is are all Dennis being the funny guys, which he's good at. But he's in a lot of the movie, being the star, so not a lot of time is devoted to the vampires. The vampire ffects in the movie aren't that fantastic anyway, so when Dennis and the vamps are onscreen together, having Dennis upstage them is no big loss for the film... but it's a big loss for us. I know when I watch a vampire flick I wanna see really cool vampires. These vampires are boring and dull (which is redundant and yet very true--they are both at the same time, and so much more).

The movie isn't unwatchable. It's just not campy enough, nor funny enough, nor cool enough to be compulsively watchable. It's a little dot in the history of vampire movies. Something to see then move on. It also goes to show why Tales from the Crypt only got two tries at doing movies, then gracefully bowed out.

So... I guess this movie was good for something.