Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 8:0	Budget Medium

Some days reviewing bad movies is a lot more painful than others.

The movie starts with a voiceover that ends with the phrase “I’d better start from the beginning”.  Then we flashback to our hero finding out that his wife was cheating on him. Apparently she was using his credit card to book very expensive hotel rooms for her liaisons.  Rather than filing for divorce our guy opts to take advantage of a late night infomercial’s offer to become a vampire. After being accidentally cremated, he spends a few years in an urn until being resurrected.  Upon his return to the world of the more or less living he finds that things have changed.  The vampires became too numerous and so were hunted to near extinction.  The few pure blood vampires that are left have started hunting the half-breed vampires.  The half breeds are trying to devise a blood substitute. Some other group is trying to kill all the vampires, half-breed or not. During the course of tying these different plot lines together, most of the cast is killed and then the movie just sort of ends.

While it is not really necessary for a movie to have a sequential story with consistent characters, it takes a much better cast and screenwriter than this one to pull it off. Killer Tongue managed to do it, but this mess? Not so much. After a really annoying narrative we start to think it is maybe a spoof movie when the main character, Richard (Jeff Rector - Dinosaur Valley Girls) can’t choose between suicide and becoming a vampire.  In fact, the gist of the infomercial that he watches seems to imply that a lot of people are having a hard time choosing between living forever and dying immediately.  We get a couple of fantasy scenes where he kills his wife and her lover with this new powers and then the vamp shows up at his place to turn him.  Enter Tane McClure (Night Vision, Lap Dancing) in black hair playing a vampire named Lilith. In the course of the next hour, they fall deeply in love. This is a major plot point for the rest of the movie and it hinges on a vampire sitting there listening to our hero babble on about how his wife is cheating on him, how he wants to kill himself, how his life sucks and she falls deeply in love with him.  Then she bites him on the neck and kills him.

Apparently no one recognizes that the marks on his neck mean he needs special attention from the funeral home (e.g., stake through the heart, chop off his head) and he has a normal wake. However, during the wake his wife finds out she has been written out of the will and there is not enough money to bury him. Again, this is supposed to be humorous. And to be fair it doesn’t play out that bad.  His resurrection is handled in a way that is also supposed to be funny.  During the five years he spent in the urn a new player on the funeral home market has made it difficult for the “mom and pop” funeral homes to survive so this one is now selling corpses to groups performing satanic rituals. During this particular exchange the cultists kill the funeral home staff who obligingly bleed on our hero’s spilt ashes.  One of the running gags throughout the movie is odd TV commercials. First for the vampire group and later for the cut-rate funeral homes with an car dealership ad thrown in to round things out. These aren't terribly funny although they are probably the most consistent plot device in the movie.

Our hero then visits exposition guy who explains the other changes that have happened since he died. It was something about too many people taking advantage of the late night offer to turn people to vampires, so the government killed them all, or more accurately said they killed them all. He sends our hero off to a bar that caters to vampires that he also just happens to know about. There he finds out that the are true vampires and half-breeds. There are also a group of unsanctioned cops still trying to kill the true vampires and the true vampires were trying to kill the half-breeds. During his conversation with the half-breed vamps it is mentioned that some of them are the result of a genetic mutation and others from a contaminated blood supply. It is possible that this was supposed to be a joke. "Shaun of the Dead" contains one of the funniest running jokes I have ever seen. Whenever the guys are in earshot of a TV or radio we hear one of the many possible reasons why the populace is turning into zombies. Of course, the guys immediately turn off the device without paying any attention to it. In ReVamped these are presented as plot points which become truly annoying really quickly because every single one of them requires more exposition and occasional attempts to try to tie these multiple threads together. Perhaps it was done intentionally and was meant to be funny but if so, I didn't get the joke.

It is important to have plots and subplots and other things going on in a movie to flesh out the storyline but in this case it just all falls flat. The cop’s family is murdered by vamps (apparently in broad daylight at his daughter’s birthday party) and he has sworn revenge.  Doesn’t really mesh well with the way our hero is playing everything for a lark. The acting is pretty terrible which doesn’t help. Lots and lots of non-professional actors, but also the direction and cinematography are pretty suspect as well.  So when the hero is playing almost on a spoof level and then there is the scene with the cop’s dead family and then we are back to the hero playing it for laughs, it is too disjointed. This is really evident in the big fight scene where the real vamps start slaughtering the half-breeds just before the renegade cops show up. It is horribly staged and I think they used some post-processing trick to make the vamps sort of lurch. It was really painful to watch. The half-pint joke that fails horribly is another good example of what is wrong with this film. It should have been a moving scene. The little girl would not truly understand what is going on. She is living with a group of blood suckers who would view her as being a snack, just a half pint of blood. In the right setting this would have been a poignant scene, maybe have the girl's mother look concerned and give her a hug and have Richard give a guilty little start like perhaps he was thinking about the wrong meaning of half pint as well. Instead it is just one more painful moment in a film full of them.

I mentioned Killer Tongue managed to walk this very thin line successfully but most of the death scenes in that movie were heavily played for laughs. No real attempt to make them serious or of consequence to the main characters actions. While there lots of different story lines and odd happenings in KT, the overall tone of the movie never really changed. Revamped tries to play some parts for laughs, some parts for drama and some parts for action without truly catching the correct tone for any of them. Apparently this is an extension of Rector's earlier effort "Fatal Kiss" which makes it even sadder. Given a chance to correct earlier mistakes, he just makes them all again.

Consider Tane’s character falling for our hero.  On the basis of the aforementioned conversation, she turns against her other vampires to rescue him. Sigh, well I guess that might explain the less than enthralled thralls. Apparently when these vampires turn people they have no control over them. This is rather a variable in vamp lore, so I can let it slide.  But why would she turn against her friends for this guy?  Sure it happens all the time in movies but by the time this happens so much other stupid shit has happened that it is much harder to take. What other stupid shit you might ask? How about Kato Kaelin as the guy bopping Richard's wife.

Oddly enough there is no nudity in the film either, despite Tane’s breast straining mightily against her bustier. Seriously it must have taken a lot of glue to keep these puppies in there. Then there are two other actresses (including Christa Campbell - "Drone Virus", Erotic Landscapes") in the film primarily for eye candy and to “flesh out” a bedroom scene with the main vampire. Sigh.  Basically we get three of the best looking people in the film on a bed together, not naked, and wiggling their tongues at each other. It doesn’t really qualify as funny, just sort of sad.

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