At some unspecified time (somewhere around the fifties, maybe), a large cabal of vampires have settled in Purgatory, an old abandoned mining town in the middle of the American desert. Led by the mysterious Count Mardulak (David Carradine), they're using modern technology - UV protection cream, sunglasses, and a synthetic blood replacement - to be able to walk along humans during the day and to avoid having to eat them. Their intentions are pure.
Change is never easy, though, so of course you have some fucking conservatives led by Jefferson (John Ireland) out to ruin things for everyone, planning a violent coup and trying to get everyone to go back to their old murderous ways.
That'd be enough for any movie to deal with, but Sundown adds a bunch of regular humans who happen to come to town on the eve of the uprising, each one of which with their own stories and arcs.
It could work, but then you have to factor in that this is an Anthony Hickox movie - so it ends up being a mess. A fun mess, as usual, but the film is spread so thin and its sense of humour is so goofy that it'd be really hard to argue that it is in any shape or form... you know, good. Another agreeable blast of weirdness from a director whose most professional outing* remains, uh, Hellraiser 3.
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| That's a pretty un-chiropterous mane of hair. |
The first half of the movie establishes the town of Purgatory, which is a fun conceit: there's a trio of oddball vampire elders out on the town's only approach who give warning if any humans are headed in. Once the town goes into alert everyone goes out during the day to pretend being human - they sit at tables in the diner playing with food they can't eat, man the stores, pretend to be out on daily business.
It doesn't work out all that well, though - the first visitor, an obnoxious yuppie type, gets his head knocked off when he annoys one of the lookouts (M. Emmett Walsh), leading to a small subplot when a couple of the dead guy's friends witness the murder.
Then the Harrisons arrive: The father (Jim Metzier) was summoned to town to work out some kinks in the artificial blood plant production line, and he brings along his wife (Morgan Brittany) and two children. His wife used to date a local vampire played with hammy relish by Maxwell Caulfield, a frat/yuppie douchebag caricature who's still got designs on his old flame. A surprising amount of time is spent on these four and their deeply crappy drama.
Last but not least is Bruce Campbell, who arrives alone and immediately catches the eye of a local beauty (Deborah Foreman) - Ok, it's fucking Bruce Campbell, but here he's playing an extremely dorky, comically ineffectual idiot. He even wears a bowtie! I get that there aren't a lot of eligible vampires around, but come on, lady, you can do better.
There's quite a bit of clumsy exposition to be delivered, a lot of goofy humor and a fairly... well, friendly tone - even when compared to the Waxworks movies, this is even less of a horror movie. The main big genre that the comedy channels is westerns, instead: the backdrops, a lot of the actors, the score (by Richard Stone), and especially the final act.
For Jefferson has been raising an army of fledgeling vampires, and has armed them with guns that fire wooden-tipped bullets. So the last half hour or so of the film is an extended action sequence where they roll into town and stage their coup.
It's not good action - basically just people standing around, shooting at each other. One of the big set pieces takes place in the factory, which might as well be an empty warehouse. Lots of squibs, though, and it's fun enough watching it clumsily incorporate the resolution for its many subplots. It's messy as hell and sometimes borders on incompetent, but it's pretty charming and perfectly entertaining.
There's some noise made about how all the older vampires that side with Mardulak are more physically powerful (that's why they went through the trouble to get the wooden bullets, to level the playing field). But it's all gun violence, all the time; a late climactic one-on-one confrontation ends up being a gun duel.
The script (by John Burgess and Hickox) struggles with basic storytelling and fails to deliver jokes, opting instead for very hammy character moments. The biggest laugh in the movie comes when a vampire mob forms to feed on a couple of innocent humans - but two (human) little children pop up before they can pounce, so everyone looks away, starts shuffling their feet and whistling tunelessly. We're talking about twenty people doing that at the same time. It's very, very funny, but it should give you an idea of how corny the humor is. It also wrings some laughs from some endearingly shoddy claymation vampire bats - they keep their human hairdos and beards!
Meanwhile, the acting is... well, the best you can say about it is that they were obviously having fun. It's all very cartoony; Caulfield is the most cringe-worthy, but it's not like Carradine and Campbell acquit themselves a whole lot better. A lot of the cast chose to return for some of Hickox's latter movies, though, and he famously dated Foreman for a few years- so yeah, everyone obviously had a good time.
You can't accuse Sundown of lacking ambition or enthusiasm, and there's so much going on that it never outstays its welcome. This would be one of the final releases from Vestron, a studio/distributor that put out some legendary low-budget stuff during the eighties; It was one of the studio logos I was always happy to see pop up before a movie during my teen years.
It's not a bad note to leave things on.
*: But definitely not his best
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