Bloodsuckers: Sucking the joy out of the horror genre!

Oh no, we're ravers. Seriously!

I caught a vampire in space movie recently called Bloodsuckers. It is a Canadian flick directed by Matthew Hastings and was made in 2005. I'll give you this, the story of this sci-fi thriller was not bad. Cross space travel with discovery of varied vampiric aliens and you have a winner. Mention space battles and futuristic melee-fights on land and you're probably already halfway to video store to rent this movie.

Not just yet. You might want to hear how this cool plot was actually played out. Well, story goes that mankind is capable of space travel, exploring new worlds, etc. Think Star Trek without the awesome captain. Having second thoughts now, aren't we? Anyway, the various planets are under attack from vampiric bad guys and an Earth-based police force of sorts safeguard and drive out such advances. Starting to sound a bit like Firefly, except without the quirky and lovable crew. The ship we focus on has a) a macho Captain who tries too hard, b) a weaselly first officer (in this universe, there were also no Rikers), c) a strong, silent cowboy type officer (unclear job description to boot), d) angry, possibly lesbian, Asian officer, e) a good vampire hybird who incidentally offers tantric sex to crew, free of charge. Did someone watch Firefly and think they could make it a million times better? Right, and then this movie became the 'how not to rip-off Firefly' guide.

Dammit, he made it look so easy!

Failing in the storytelling department, at least the movie had potential as an action thriller. You know, adding in generous doses of space battles and such. In fact, the first few scenes showed great promise. The scene of the massacre visited by this crew had a creepy atmosphere; it was the type of scene you would see in a FPS shooter game about aliens and other nasty creatures. The folks making the movie went all out in the gore department as well so those who crave a bit of icky sticky flesh ripping will probably dig into these scenes. See, it started out with potential and then fizzed out, right at the beginning. It was a downhill ride for this flick.

So anyway, this cleanup crew is ambushed by vampires – could have been flesh eaters – and the macho man dies. So Mr. Weaselly fellow rises up to the challenge an takes over the ship. You can see where this is headed. The folks must adapt to a new captain and still go about their business, perhaps solving that annoying mystery about the death of the previous captain.

WTF? Seriously, a vegan vampire?

That brings me to another major flaw in this movie. It appears that the good folks had trouble coming up with super cool bad guys. Everyone -and sadly this goes for the vampire-killing crew as well- was a sad mold consisting of various stereotypes. Thus, the fighter girl looked like she should attend anger management classes. And isn't the fact that they made her character gay a bit too cliché? After all, why can't a female character could be a super cool fighter without being either gay or moody angry? Look at characters created by Joss Whedon if you would like a good example (Zoe, Buffy, Cordelia, etc.).

Then there are the bad guys. Oh my, does the director have something against some folk? I mean, the vampires initially come across as Russian goths. Are we mixing in two groups that are easy bad guy targets? Ouch. And when it doesn't come across as weird prejudices, it looks like the nasty enemies are heavily borrowed from other famous flicks. Yea, so the leather-face guys who munch on the macho captain could easily have just walked off the set of the LoTR. You know, those Orc creatures that tried to eat Took and Merry?

All in all, I was quite disappointed with this movie. It actually had a lot of potential, in those first few minutes of the movie. Watch it if you must; it's so bad that you don't even get laughs out of this one.