'90s Vampire Movie I Just Saw for the First Time

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (two and a half stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - a war between creationist and evolutionist vampires, with Dracula taking a side

They say no one ever sets out to make a bad movie (see also my "Difference Between Craptastic and Cult Movies" post, 11/5/09), but lots of people specifically set out to make B-movies. Historically, the term merely meant the second half of a double feature. The word "less" comes up a lot when discussing B-movies, as in "less" of a budget, "lesser"-known actors and the "least" number of minutes necessary to be considered a feature-length film. Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat proudly wears its genre conventions like a B-movie badge of honor, but it doesn't exactly fit the above criteria. It's cheap if that's how you feel about claymation. It's underground if you've never heard of stars like John Carradine (Kung Fu and Kill Bill) and Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead and Spider-Man trilogies). At 104 minutes, it's not a sweeping epic, but this horror-comedy with utopian sci-fi themes and a western setting still feels stretched thin. By giving the movie two stars, I don't mean to imply that it's horrible. Rather, it's a horror movie for people who don't like horror movies. I liked the "hemotechnics" laboratory, the umbrella impaling death sequence and the awesome '80s rock, not so much the red-flashing bat-vision, the soap opera subplot and the re-recorded versions of '50s doo wop numbers like "Earth Angel." At first it looks like it was filmed on location at Monument Valley, where John Ford use to make all his John Wayne westerns (see the panoramic picture above). Turns out it was shot just three hours north of that, outside of Moab, Utah (see the panoramic picture below). That leads me to my final observation. So much of Sundown is steeped in Americana - the old hicks swinging in overalls at the service station, the small town diner and the Manifest Destiny that applies even to vampires. It's not a period piece though. It doesn't trace vampire history back to the Wild West or show what vampires were up to during the Prohibition era, For that, you can check out American Vampire, a comic book series that was started by Stephen King.