The Vampire is Alive
(aka Counter Destroyer, The Vampire is Still Alive)
1989; directed by Edgar Jere

Mind-bogglingly bad even by the ultra-low standards of the 1980's kings of straight to bargain bin releases, Filmark International and producer Tomas Tang, The Vampire is Alive is a wretched piece of cut-and-paste tomfoolery trying to disguise itself as an actual motion picture. You might think that a movie featuring a Robocop ripoff fighting vampires might at least be interesting, even in just a cinematic trainwreck kind of way, but you'd be wrong. This is just deadly dull to sit through and a release reserved for only the most masochistic fans of Z-grade cinema.

It didn't help matters that this was one of the worst looking DVDs I have ever watched. Keep in mind that I have been reviewing Hong Kong films for over sixteen years now, and thus I have learned to sit through bad pan-and-scanning, white-on-white subtitles, and other sorts of annoyances that make old fogeys like me appreciate good new Blu-ray releases where you can actually see what is going on. The DVD watched for this review (under the title of Counter Destroyer) comes from Brentwood's "Eastern Horror" line, and not only is the picture extremely fuzzy and washed out -- indicating that the DVD was probably sourced from a well-worn VHS tape -- there are gray bars at the top and bottom; you can click here to see an example.

At any rate, even if this film was presented in remastered full 1080p, it wouldn't matter. The plot is incomprehensible. Like many Filmark releases, The Vampire is Alive is a mish-mash of footage from different films spliced together. Here, we have a Thai actioner, a cheap Taiwanese kynosi ("hopping vampire") horror/comedy, and Robo Vampire. The credited director is Edgar Jere, but, since most of the credits slapped on during the title sequence are obviously fake, most people would suspect the culprit is actually Godfrey Ho, who worked with Tomas Tang quite a bit during the 1980's (he directed Robo Vampire) to flood video store shelves with schlocky releases such as this. However, Ho never helmed any Filmark releases, so your guess is a good as mine as to actually slapped this mess together.

Some of these sorts of films, such as Robo Vampire, are fun in a bizarre "did I just take some acid" kind of way. This, however, is not one of them. The different footage is just lazily put together, with the weakest of attempts to tie everything together via an atrocious dubbing job that is so bad that the women's voices are done by men. I am by no means a film snob; you're looking at a site that gives a shocking large number of positive reviews for Wong Jing's output. So I can appreciate some stinky cinematic cheese every now and then, but The Vampire is Alive is so incompetent that it barely qualifies to even be called a movie.

RATING: 2