Dampyr

This movie is yet another tedious cover of all the vpure movies of the past, the most obvious being John Csrpenter's Vampires. This movie follows that plot almost scene for scene.

That would be fine if there was some meat to chew on, so to speak, but this movie is all bare bones. The acting is - as do many of these entries into the vampire world - dead. The action is just plain dumb. For example, the protagonist charges towards the villain (a vampire) 3 or 4 times, only to be hurled back 50 feet. And what does he do when he gets on his feet again? Yup. He charges at the vampire AGAIN. No matter it didn't work the previous 4 times. And you have the usual humans-encountering-vampires fight. Humans fire their machine guns, the vampires laugh. Well, you can figure out what happens next.

And one can easily predict the dialogue, or the following scene. It drones on and on. The trajectory resembles the recently launched rocket that flew 500 feet towards space - and promptly exploded. If it was an ekg, it would be a flatline. My husband watched, while I just listened. I asked four times how it was, and his response was "bad." There is no genuine tension or climax in the movie. How anyone could get this at 10 is beyond me. I can understand being entertained (and even that is questionable), but objectively? A poorly done film with little plot, bad acting, endlessly derivative. This is a 5 at best. A 3 is a fair rating. Keep in mind, I'm not the demographic for this, whom I would imagine to be 18 year olds who like to watch things explode, or guns firing endlessly. For the rest, this will not cut the mustard.

This movie seemingly came out of nowhere and I added it to my watchlist and since it was quite popular on the IMDb page I thought I'd give it a try. I do enjoy vampire movies as long as they are not just Romance and there are some nice horror aspects. This movie does have some horror in it, however for me it was still too tame. The production value was good and the movie definitely looked better than I anticipated but these generic cardboard characters that we are supposed to root for where boring and predictable. The story however was still rather interesting but it also suffered from its generic approach. I think the movie still has some franchise potential and the overall result was better than I thought it would be but it is definitely not groundbreaking. [5,7/10]

It's 1992 in the Balkans. Emil Kurjak (Stuart Martin) and his soldiers find a town ravaged by vampires led by Tesla Dubcek (Frida Gustavsson). Meanwhile, Harlan Draka (Wade Briggs) and his sidekick Yuri travel from town to town. He performs as the Dampyr, a vampire hunter. It seems to be a fake performance until Emil puts him to the test. He has to take down Gorka, Master of the Night (David Morrissey).

I like the first half. I like the premise of Harlan and Yuri as traveling snake oil salesmen although I would keep their act more as a fake scam in the beginning. I would cut out all the early reveals of vampires. I want Harlan to have a fun shocking reveal. I like all the characters stuck in that small town. I definitely do not want Harlan to be separated from Yuri. I don't buy Tesla's turn. I don't like expanding the movie out into the bigger world and I definitely don't like the setup to an interconnected cinematic franchise universe. Let's see how this movie does first before we pile on a whole new franchise series.

I rarely watch Subtitled movies, as I tend to multi task and miss bits. But this was a bit special, and had my attention all the way through. For me it had echoes of John Carpenters Vampires, 30 Days of Night and another Russian movie, Night Watch. The acting is top notch, and I liked the way the story developed. A few people have commented it is a bit slow, and lacks bite. But for me, the character and story development helps build the atmosphere. I have watched a lot of Vampire movies, and this is definitely up there. The cinematography was superb, with lots of atmospheric scenes, dark woods and swirling fog. All in all a very enjoyable watch.

When i saw the trailer for this movie it got me intrigued. Its the kind of movies i enjoy in general. Vampire theme, fight scenes and such. But when these movies are made outside of the United States and release VOD, usually they are kinda cheap and it show.

But this one actually came out pretty decent. Yes the sets are mostly old eastern europe rural areas so nothing too fancy and the costumes, guns etc ain't exactly the best looking i ever saw, but the action is well filmed and the CGI effects are not overused. The french dub version gave some decent acting in general and the characters altough not particulary complex were fine.

The movie does not take too much time establishing itself and altough its set in some war set-up, i have no idea what actual war it is and even the movie use more as a pretext to have characters there rather than be important to the plot.

Overall for a saturday night movie with a few beers during Halloween season, it does the job pretty fine.