Subspecies 4: Bloodstorm (1998) – Here’s the thing about all of the Subspecies movies: They’re all pretty watered down. Yes, the Romanian scenery is nice, but the plot doesn’t move so much as tread water. Here, once again, unwilling vampire Michelle is fighting against being dragged to the dark side by Radu. And to add filler to the plot, we have a medical clinic run by a doctor who’s secretly a vampire himself, who has developed a serum that lets him walk in the daylight and be almost normal. (We thus get the uneasy combination of supernatural and medical vampirism, which is too common in vampire stories these days.) Said doctor and his main associate are both played by Romanian actors, so if you want a movie in which characters speak English to each other with heavy Romanian accents, this is the flick for you.
Budgetary limitations (this was after the mid-90s breakup between Full Moon and Paramount, which reduced production budgets by an order of magnitude) mean that the movie is mostly confined to shooting locations in Bucharest itself instead of in the castle-dotted countryside. It was a pretty good bet that, even if writer/director Ted Nicolaou hadn’t gotten bored of the series and ended it pretty conclusively* on this outing, it would have petered out on its own.
(Oh, and by the way — the actual titular subspecies doesn’t show up at all.)
*Twenty-five years later, the recently-released Subspecies 5 is a prequel.
Iron Monkey 2 (1996) –Was I just complaining about too little plot? Iron Monkey 2 has about a thimbleful of actual story spread across 92 minutes, but in its place we have fantastical wire-fu filling the screen from end to end. Donnie Yen returns as the vigilante Iron Monkey, and he’s about the only person who doesn’t proclaim loudly that he’s the Iron Monkey — everyone is trying to get in on that Monkey cachet.
Disappointing, though, to have Yen’s stunt double so easily identifiable by his floppy haircut. I’m supposed to at least believe that it’s Yen himself being hauled around on invisible wires, dammit!
Crypt of the Vampire (1964) – aka Terror in the Crypt, aka Lesbian Courtship in the 19th Century; apparently the producers of this movie saw 1963’s The Haunting and said, “That subtext is too sub!” Christopher Lee star as Count Karnstein, the only person whose lips sort of match his dialog, and the descendant of a family once cursed by a dying witch. He’s semi-convinced that his daughter Laura is the fabled descendant through whom the witch has reincarnated to take her revenge. Laura’s close to convinced, too, what with her sleepwalking and strange urges and bizarre dreams. She seems to be getting better when Ljuba, a young noblewoman close to Laura’s age, takes sick while traveling and stops at Castle Karnstein for a while; lots of radiant smiles, giggling, and pushing each other in garden swings ensues. There are a couple of times when you swear they’re going in for a kiss that only becomes a hug at the last moment.
The “twist” resolution doesn’t make much sense — you spend the whole closing credits saying, “Yeah, but what about this scene and that scene?” — but being kind of a low-energy production, you don’t mind that it’s finally wrapping it up.
Abandoned movies:
The Wild Women of Wongo (1959) – Dumb, amateurish, and boring, punctuated by stock-footage alligators.
Captain Scarlett (1952) – Set in a France with no accents, this features leaden expository dialog and bad swordfighting.
Flat No. 609 (2018) – It’s an Indian (Bangla-language) version of a bog-standard haunted house story — or haunted apartment, rather. At the halfway mark I realized that the whole second half was going to be the protagonist-wife convincing her husband that the ghost is real and decided to skip it.