Well, so-called erotic thrillers. In all honesty, I haven't seen that many owing primarily to the fact that I'm not going to pay for those premium cable movie channels, but the few that I have seen often employ very liberal definitions of both the word "erotic" and "thriller." In fact, though I've seen one or two that were erotic, I don't think I've ever found one to be especially thrilling, no matter how hard they try to convince me that watching an insurance claims investigator staring at Shannon Tweed through a window is edge-of-your-seat stuff. No, most of them are pretty boring when it comes to the thrilling aspect. And as for eroticism, since most of them feature women with grotesquely swollen fake boobs, it's about as erotic for me as watching some twisted little kid (or grown adult, for that matter) rub a couple of Barbie dolls together. No thanks, baby.
So what causes me to give the odd saucy feature a chance when I would be better off just watching some crazy old hillbilly sex film from Something Weird? I don't know. Bad judgment, I reckon, not that watching hillbilly sex movies is exactly a sign of better judgment. Some people make a hobby out of reviewing erotic thrillers, a task best gone about with a healthy sense of humor since you'll need that far more than a rapidly firing libido. I'm not really interested in becoming an expert on the world of erotic thrillers, partially because I would get tired of constantly typing "erotic thriller." Is there another term for these movies?
Anyway, we proceed with the knowledge that when it comes to these skin flicks, we are on unstable ground. If we're going to review one here, let's say simply for diversity's sake, how could we possibly make things even worse? I know! Let's watch an erotic vampire film! Yes, the erotic vampire film. Almost as popular with no-budget filmmakers as the "serial killer on a spree" film. Both genres usually think they are smarter than they actually are, which is a bad assumption since most of them are dumb as toast. I've seen a lot a vampire films, and I've hated just about all of them, all for the same reasons.
I hate that all the vampires have silly "gothy vampire" names like Galen and Tristain and Validek. Who the hell has names like that? Just once I'd like to see a vampire named Chuck or Steve. I hate that they all have dialogue that sounds like it came straight out of a morose middle school student's fanfic. I hate that the vampires are all rock 'n' rollers and Goths and parade around in leather pants and leather overcoats and those patent leather thigh-high boots that are only worn by comic book super heroines and hookers. I'm sure not every vampire feels the need to dress like Marilyn Manson. Some of them probably want to dress like that dude from The Darkness, or like Bruce Springsteen. Now really, what's scarier? A vampire who adopts the predictable "black leather goth rocker" appearance, or one who comes at you in a shiny spandex "space robe" or a pair of faded Levis and a work shirt?
But more than any of that, I hate that vampires are so often portrayed as whiny, bad poetry-reading (again, of a quality best ascribed to moody high schoolers who do weird spacing and line breaks in their poems) wimps. Even Dracula often gets portrayed this way, Bela and Chris Lee not withstanding. Look, the man was a Romanian warlord who scared the goddamned Turkish army away, which is not an easy thing to do. Apparently it requires lining your borders with the severed heads of your enemies. You don't do things like that if you look like some frail delicate flower from the pages of Propaganda magazine. Give me a vampire with muscles, for crying out loud! And please spare me the pathos. If I have to sit through another "woe the lonely darkness of my eternal soul" speech, I'll go crazy. I always liked Keifer Sutherland in Lost Boys because he really dug being a vampire, which I think would happen pretty often. If I had to be a monster, I'd be a vampire, but one of those vampires who just grows fangs when he vamps out. Not one of the ones that turns into a weird looking bald dude with contact lenses and blue skin. I know if I was a vampire I might be freaked out at first, but I'd eventually get over it and discover the benefits of things like eternal life, flying, hypnotism, and the ability to turn myself into a bat or some mist. And I certainly wouldn't waste away my nights dancing to bad techno music in warehouses that have been converted into industrial dance clubs. I'd be too busy doing things scaring the leader of North Korea and other cool vampire things.
Anyway, it would beat being a wolfman.
So erotic thrillers are usually bad. Vampire films are usually bad. Mix the two together and you have a front row seat to some of the ripest dialogue ever written, if nothing else. Embrace the Darkness II tells the involving story of a young woman who gets turned into a vampire and spends most of her time in a dance club owned by a couple of well-tanned fellow vampires. I guess the ancient legends never got around to addressing things like tanning salons and "Glow, by J-Lo." The head vampire is reformed erotic thriller staple Catalina Larranaga, who has put her naughty past behind her and is looking to build a legitimate acting career on the ol' Hsu Chi model. Well, good luck to her. I think I saw her in a commercial for Office Max or Office Depot. I don't know why all those places have to have their logo in the same font and color. Some day, someone will open an office supply store with a blue and green color scheme in one of those futuristic typefaces, and that'll be that.
If it seems like I know a lot about Ms. Larranaga for a guy who claims not to know very much about erotic thrillers, it's only because she falls into my healthily large category of "guilty pleasure." If I don't watch that many of these films, the ones I do watch often star her, and she's actually kind of worth paying attention to. To get the obvious points out of the way, yep she's hot. But she's hot mainly because she's not a blonde and has no silicone jiggling about and defying gravity. Plus, honest to God, she's a good actress, though that's not so much on display in this film thanks to the "Yea, though we be creatures of the night" style of dialogue she has to spout. Anyway, she has the chops to make it as a real actress in B-movies, though so far her only genre role was in a giant snake movie called King Cobra.
Oh yeah, here her name is Lizzie, because you know, Lizzie Borden and all.
Her plaything is, I suppose, the partial answer to my vampire prayers. Though the actor's name is the thoroughly vampirey Tristen (Tristen Coeur D'Alene, to be complete), his vampire character's name is simply Jack. Good ol' Jack the Vampire. And he's also pretty buff, which is a nice change. Unfortunately, he wears leather pants and a shiny long Matrix overcoat with no shirt (or with a mesh t-shirt from time to time), so he needs to work on his wardrobe. I always figured the best way not to attract the attention of vampire hunters would be to not walk around looking like a vampire. This Tristen fellow seems to be channeling Russell Crowe's voice, though the acting talent and charisma got lost somewhere along the way. Still, as far as beefcake actors in erotic thrillers go, he's not awful and has a better haircut than most of those guys.
The pretty young thing they take under their wing is Renee Rea as Jennifer, who hasn't been a vampire long enough to be issued a cool vampire name. She's not exactly a good actress, but she's not exactly bad either, and she's at least cute and has a silicone-free torso. Together, the trio of vampires hang out in their private goth club, which they keep private so they can invite in good looking "food" while avoiding the proliferation of fat chicks in white face powder insisting you refer to them as Cassandra that tend to pile up in most real goth clubs. It seems to me to be a bad idea to do all your vampiring in the same location night after night, but what do I know? They're at least careful about not killing their victims or turning them into vampires, because they don't seem to want to share their stuff.
Most of the movie consists of scenes of people dancing to generic techno music, then going into an uncomfortably chilly looking back room to have sex and get bitten. In between, awful vampire dialogue abounds, including the inevitable scene where Jennifer hesitates at saying "vampire" and results in Lizzie rattling off the dozen or so names she knows for nosferatu. There's also a grizzled vampire hunter, a Van Helsing of course, who looks like he was hired because he was the bum closest resembling Chris Kristoferson in the Blade movies. I always get Chris Kristiferson mixed up with Christopher Cross, and it would have been better if they'd tried to hire a guy who looked like Kriss Kross, those kids that made ya jump, jump!
Eventually, since we need some sort of conflict, the happy triangle will be torn asunder by the fact that Lizzie is sort of a vampire snob while Jennifer and Jack are basically nice people who just want to dance to bad music and wear uncomfortable outfits. Low-budget vampires sure are lucky they always live in Los Angeles. It'd be a real pain to wear those assless leather pants if you were a vampire in the northern Denmark. Anyway, the vampire hunter also shows up to talk with a Southern accent and be earthy.
Needless to say, there aren't exactly a lot of scares in this movie. A couple too-close shots of a guy's wobbling scrotum is about as scary as this movie gets. The story is painfully dull and a perfect example of why all these erotic thrillers are so uninteresting. They never push the envelope, not like the old drive-in movies that were often less explicit but far more interesting simply because so many of them were so cracked in the head. This movie, like just about all others of its ilk, does everything you expect it to, or slightly less. This is the sort of thing that gets written in someone's sleep, and even if the movie is just an excuse to show lots of naked people, my response is that there have been other movies with just as many naked people but much better stories. I mean, you have vampires in bad S&M gear. Can't you have them do something more interest than dance and sit on the couch when they're not having sex? You know, they can fly and stuff, and turn into wolves and bats and, if the old Bela Lugosi Dracula film is accurate, armadillos. Shouldn't the night come when one of the characters says, "You know, I'm actually not in the mood to dance, have sex, then sit on the couch tonight. You wanna go freak out some stoners or something?"
Yeah, I know. Who watches an erotic thriller and complains about the plot? The same sort of guy who complains about how bad the writing in Playboy has become.
Still, some of it is worth watching just for the dialogue alone. It's really quite awful and overwrought. As I said, Catalina Larranaga is a decent actress with her clothes on or off, but there's not much she can do with this stuff but roll with it and collect her paycheck. Like the dialogue in any erotic thriller than yearns to be taken seriously and as something more than just nudity on parade, it's laughably ham-fisted and overblown in its attempt to seem semi-intelligent. Hey, points for trying, but in the end it still sounds like something out of a teenage girl's vampire diary.
And the dialogue alone isn't hilarious enough to carry one through the sheer boredom of the "dance-sex-bite" pattern that the film follows. The only real example of interesting "erotic vampire" movies I can think of would be the films of Jean Rollin because, frankly, the man is completely cracked in the skull. Though he often has even less plot than Embrace the Darkness II and has much worse actors, his films are inventive, experimental, and full of psychedelic insanity. He's willing to take a chance, and though you can easily discount his films as pompous, pretentious, or flat-out crappy, at least he's trying something unique.
Speaking of the sex scenes, there are indeed quite a few of them, all surprisingly explicit in what they'll show. You expect full frontal female in these movies, but I was a bit surprised by the number of male genitalia on display here. Don't know if this is common or not, or if it was just this film's attempt to be more daring since wieners somehow equal avant garde art these days. Want to make your arthouse movie seem serious? Show someone's penis. Actually, even what they show of the women and the simulated friskiness is more explicit than what I thought you could do in these movies.
The people are attractive, but really, it does get tedious after a while. The sex scenes, while hot at first, are all pretty much the same thing over and over, with the exception that people are wearing fangs and occasionally drip blood out of their mouths. Which is another thing - vampires always drip blood out of their mouths. Why is that? I've been pretty lusty about some of the food I've eaten, but I've never writhed around and drooled out creme brulee or chewed up bits of filet mignon. But vampires always have to pull away from their victim with blood dripping out of their mouths and smearing their face. If they like blood so much, maybe they should make an attempt to keep it in their mouths instead of getting it all over the place. I've had some nasty cuts in my day, and I know you can suck on a wound (I never knew exactly why we do this, but plenty of people do), even a fairly bloody one, without splattering it all over your face and drooling it all down the front of your new frilly Renaissance shirt. I mean, I don't want sound like a mom, but come on. You think after thousands of years, a vampire would learn how to keep its food in its mouth.
Things like vampire manners are more interesting than this movie. I guess erotic thrillers just aren't my thing, even when they contain vampires and a guy faking Russell Crowe's voice. There are at least three titles in the ongoing saga of Embrace the Darkness, but I don't think I'll rush out to find the other two. I really only watched this one because it had Catalina in it, and she makes it worth it. That woman is just beyond description. And the rest of the tits and ass are all right as well. If you're just looking for a movie that will let you touch yourself in special ways and special places, then I suppose this is OK for that. It's saucy enough. As far as vampires go, you'd do better with Hammer films, Bela Lugosi, or that scene in Kungfu from Beyond the Grave where Dracula swoops down out of nowhere and flutters around like a moth, much to the annoyance of Billy Chong. And if you want better erotic vampires, well let's see. Jean Rollin is a lot more insane and interesting. You're better off with him, though some may argue that you're never well off with Jean Rollin. And to be fair, his vampires often have even sillier outfits than the vampires here.