Female vampires once ruled the world. Now they are overlooked for glittering guys with big hair. It's time to point out why the female of the species should be the center of attention.
Ghost Stories was a short lived short horror story series in the same vain as The Twilight Zone. It aired on the Fox Family Channel in the United States in 1998.
In this story a horror fanatic who works at a video store ditches a girl who's interested in him when his favorite movie star invites him to be in one of her films.
Female Vampire Factor: The movie star in this film is Mindy McCobb played by Kim Cristo.
McCobb represents the late night B-movie scream queens of the 80's and 90's. Joey who is her biggest fan is no longer affected by horror movies and cynically judges how bad they are when she appears at the store one night and invites him to come to the set of her new film where she's the monster this time and not the victim. Joey agrees, forgetting he had made a date with his co-worker earlier.
Once on the set he struggles with the concept of acting especially when his role requires him to be afraid of Mindy who he is madly in love with.
Things eventually change when during one of the takes things get a little too real. The films victim he's supposed to find fictionally dead is actually dead and Mindy who is supposed to be playing a vampire seems to actually be one and is now chasing him around the studio.
The story ends with Joey running around with the dexterity of a drunken toddler tying to escape the studio with the camera eventually pulling back to show that his attempted escape is being shown on the television at the video store he worked at with the girl he ditched and a customer commenting on how corny the film is.
Final Opinion: The "scream queen actress who played in vampire movies is actually one in real life" story is one that didn't get used enough but the few times it did it always worked (Fright Night 2, Blonde Heaven). This is no different. I can definitely recommend this episode for female vamp fans even if there is no fangs.
The Gist: A Vampire heads to a backwoods town where her goal is to turn and control the population.
Female Vampire Factor: First you have your main vampire mistress
She's barely in the movie and most scenes with her just consist of her yelling at her familiar. The majority of the vampirism in the film is done by the townspeople who turn each other.
Final Opinion: So this movie is a comedy making fun of rednecks more than a vampire movie. The vast majority of the film follows a family and the weird things they do in their spare time as they prepare for a festival and a french interior decorator sent by a magazine who is out of place spending time with them. The vampire stuff happens as small gaps in between the main story about the family.
The comedy aspect that actually works in the film is the fact that the backwoods population of this town aren't very smart so most end up dead within 24 hours of being turned. Usually by not knowing the rules of being a vampire and doing things that is known to kill vampires like coming out in daylight, using a tanning bed, working with sharp wood, eating garlic or taking a bath in holy water.
I give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 2 out of 5. It's your standard ultra amateur low budget affair. I honestly enjoyed everything that had nothing to do with the main family. The scenes with the family at least in my opinion were the least funny parts of the movie which unfortunately was where they were trying the most to be funny. The vampire death gags were way more entertaining than the fart and poop jokes that the family scenes were full of.
The Gist: A couple that includes a woman who has an eccentric lifestyle of drinking blood takes in a down on her luck musician who becomes her next blood donor. Unfortunately when she tries to quit the practice her new donor won't take it well.
Female Vampire Factor: The main vampire of the film is Whitney played by Monique Parent.
As explained above she's just a woman with a weird fetish and not a supernatural vampire even though in most scenes she has this weird light that appears over her eyes and she acts kind of creepy.
The girl she takes in Celia (Leslie Danon) is iffy at first about their new arrangement but agrees since she needs a place to stay. Eventually she gets addicted to the process of Whitney drinking her blood as she gets a rush from being cut so when Whitney decides one day that she wants to clean herself of the habit, that news on top of getting bad news about her music career leads to Celia losing her mind.
She then decides to eliminate Whitneys boyfriend who she was always jealous of throughout the film for taking all of Whitneys attention away from her and after stabbing him decides to drink his blood just out of curiousity. She then realizes that she enjoys it.
Whitney after walking in on the scene is initially creeped out by this but Celia convinces her that with him out of the way she doesn't need to change who she is and they can drink blood together.
The movie ends with the narrator of the film explaining that Whitney and Celia are now a couple and she is their new roommate replacing Whitneys boyfriend Jim. She then reveals herself to be famous 90's B movie vampire actress Julie Strain.
Final Opinion: The initial emotion I had as I was watching this was disappointment since the cover hints at it being a vampire film but instead the film fell more into a "Fatal Attraction" style suspense. As the film went on I started to get past that and the last act of the film almost made up for that disappointment as Celia in her loss of sanity did seem to develop blood lust and was the most vampiric thing in the film.
I'll give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 2 out of 5. Not just for Celia but it gets extra credit for the final scene easter egg that calls back to the actual vampire film Morgana (aka Blonde Heaven) where Julie Strain and Monique Parent play actual vampires which came out 4 years before this. On a side note if you want to check out a film where Monique Parent is the main vampire she also dons the fangs 9 years after this in the movie Blood Scarab.
The Gist: Vampires and witches form a truce as zombies and the mad scientist creating them become a bigger threat to them than they are to each other.
Female Vampire Factor: There's a lot less vampirism in this one being that the zombie thing is the focal point of the first act and there is no supernatural anything in the last.
There are a few rehashed femme vamps from the first two films and randos in weird montages but that's about it.
Final Opinion: This film is best compared to a completely mixed up rubix cube. I will go as far as to say this is worse than the first two in the "not sure what's happening ever" department.
On top of that every scene seems to be be cut up and spliced together with different angles and effects to a dizzying degree. Think of Micheal Bay Transformer fight scene style editing but during regular conversations and with color filters and different lens types for added nausea. The movie even stops to have a real music video for a rap group called "The Zombies" about 15 minutes in and another random video of a girl dancing an hour in (side note: the rap isn't terrible and the lead rapper (below) does technically count as a female vampire since she gets turned a scene later before biting a girl then completely disappearing from the film with no explanation).
But its ok. The movie eventually brushes all of this and the previous two movies away as fever dreams of people in comas in an asylum run by a crooked doctor who was planting the ideas of vampires, zombies and witches in their heads. Yep, everyone is just crazy people playing out fantasies in a mass hallucination (but the story doesn't start making sense after this reveal either). Oh and we find this out through a random one off appearance by porn legend Ron Jeremy whose only purpose is to explain this.
I give this one a Vampire Beauty Rating of 1 out of 5 since this is basically the point it's no longer about vampires so it's not even watchable for that let alone the fact that it's capable of causing seizures and motion sickness.
The Gist: A coven of witches go on the hunt to kill vampires as revenge when a vampire bites and turns one of their own.
Female Vampire Factor: There are many shown sporadically throughout the film. Many of which come from rehashed scenes from the first film. As far as new material there is an older blonde who targets the police captain
The witch who was originally turned by the lead vampire.
A girl who is turned while having sex with the lead vampire who goes on to bite her roommate.
and quite a few various rando vamps who become stake fodder during scenes where the vampires are being hunted down by the witches.
Final Opinion: Well this film is slightly better than it's predecessor but that's not saying much. Unlike that one which barely gives you a story this one kind of tries but only after about an hour in. Basically it's about one of the vampires from the previous film and what happened to his daughter who disappeared after he turned (Spoiler she's now one of the witches). That moment of plot clarity is short lived though as after some slight plot it goes completely off the rails again. Basically most of the film is just a collection of random scenes of stuff just happening. It's mostly scenes of witches talking in riddles and then scenes of the same cops from the original cussing at each other. Your ability to know which of this stuff is actually related to the plot is based on if you can piece together how the scenes relate to each other through figuring out what the characters are talking about. This is made more difficulat as the important stuff is never actually seen on camera and mostly just referenced in a vague way by the characters during conversations.
I give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 2 out of 5. In this case the witches are way hotter than the vampire women (the main one in particular)
