To Die For

Watched July 21, 2013

1988
Starring: Brendan Hughes, Sydney Walsh, Amanda Wyss, Scott Jacoby.

Basically Dracula in LA. Excellent vampire death scenes with face melts.

The VHS that we watched has some pretty great trailers for movies I had never heard of: Ginger Ale Afternoon and Headhunter, they both look genuinely bad.

Jen and I were talking so much during the beginning, I had to watch it again to check out the plot points that I had missed so this write up wouldn't be a total joke. For some reason based on the cover I thought this was a horror comedy, but now I'm pretty sure I've been looking at so many movie covers I just got mixed it up. This one is the classic Dracula story but set in modern day L.A.

We meet Kate (Sydney Walsh) at a fancy yacht party. She was dragged there by her boyfriend, but she has no interest in him. Instantly, she attracts the eye of Vlad (Brendan Hughes) and they wander off and make out. She agrees to leave with him, which is so unlike her, so she goes to get her coat. When she gets back, he is gone, and she's pissed. There is a guy at the party who was drinking champagne out of his shoe, he also leaves and is in the parking lot doing coke, alone. While Kate is waiting for Vlad to show, a crazy hairy monster that looks more like a lumpy werewolf than a vampire, attacks the coke guy and kills him.

 Kate leaves the party sad and alone. When she gets home, her roommate Celia (Amanda Wyss) is waiting with exciting news. Celia just got engaged to her doctor boyfriend!

The next day, Kate wakes and prepares a breakfast of a muffin in a bowl with a packet of sugar on top, drenched in milk. What!? Luckily, she's too busy to eat it and runs out the door to her job as a real estate agent.  She just got a new client, who she hasn't met, who wants to see some houses at night. That night it turns out that Vlad is her client. Sydney is extremely attracted to Vlad but won't succumb to him for some reason. Instead Vlad seduces Celia and bites her. Celia's fiancé gets really pissed when he's dumped for no reason. Celia also gets really possessive about Vlad. Some other vampire rival also has it in for Vlad.

There are some vampire bites and stakes in the heart, but it doesn't really matter much. It all wraps up at the end. The vampire melting death scenes are great and they really hold up as awesome special effects. It's shot on video but the production is actually pretty good. It's mediocre but I might give it a second pass at some point.

While looking up more info on this movie I found out that there is a sequel, Son of Darkness: To Die For II. It's about a baby vampire, or that's what I gathered from the wikipedia description. That really surprised me because I couldn't imagine this movie making much money on it's release, but I guess it was cheap to make so it was cheap to make a sequel too.