Angel of the Night

Angel of the Night (1998): This movie is the first Danish vampire movie since the 30’s and hopefully a similar time period will pass until the next one. It is also one in which the trailer is more interesting than the whole movie, not a good thing. It started out as a short student film by director Shakey Gonzalez. His professors encouraged him to expand it into a full length movie. That move casts a dark pall over the future of the Danish educational system. It seems that Shakey was born in Chile and grew up and directed in Denmark, an unusual and apparently unuseful combination. And the movie is as shaky as young Shakey. The DVD copy I viewed had lots of jumps and flickers that apparently were on the original 16 mm film. Dubbing is not good and at times lips move to a different drummer than the soundtrack. The story goes something like this; ingénue inherits an old house in central Europe where a vampire once lived. They read an old book about it (this is the student film part) and then go down to the basement and accidentally bring the vampire back to life. Have you heard this one before? The formerly unstoppable vampire is killed off in short order, which doesn’t jive with the student film sequence set in the past where the vamps, though mostly killed quickly, took a lot of damage before going down. Logic was not considered during plot development I suspect. Unless this is the last movie in the rack, I’d give it a pass, even for vampire hunters. The soundtrack has some nice rock and classical music and the trailer looked good, so all is not lost. The movie is rated R for; brief breastulation, gratuitous strip club scene, neck nipping, gelatinous red stuff, crummy looking bat, heinous illogic, and for an excessive number of short lived vampires.