Keep your creepy-chaste fake-ass sparklepires, you non-discerning mediocritan-media-reared trend-spongers, because some of us are old enough to remember when vampires were underground, man.



Some of you might not have seen Vamp, Starring Grace Jones, perhaps because your childhoods were recent enough that your television sets never included UHF dials, but for those of us who grew up without such luxuries as basic cable, low-budget horror films with cheap cock-teasing sex scenes grafted onto them were as close as we came to thrilling adult cinema after dark, most notably on Friday evenings after mom and dad had gone to bed.

A little more than a year ago, I waxed nostalgic about the neon-saturated nightlife cityscapes that appeared so often in movies made during the 1980s that they practically constituted their own Jungian archetype, and Vamp, Starring Grace Jones, features just such a fascinatingly fluorescent music-video-styled urban jungle, which probably accounts for a great deal of my abiding affection for it as an audiovisual experience, even though it's objectively rather crap as any sort of semi-coherent story.

Of course, since I was a teenage boy when I first saw Vamp, Starring Grace Jones, there's no use denying what its primary appeal was to me back then. For those who have led lives culturally poor enough to have been bereft of the pleasure of watching Vamp, Starring Grace Jones, here's the high concept behind it, as an artistic work: Previous films had featured strippers, and previous films had featured vampires, but Vamp, Starring Grace Jones, was the first film of which I was aware (at that time, anyway) to feature stripping vampires. This was genius.

Looking back on it now, this film had a brilliantly B-level cast: Chris Makepeace from Meatballs and Mazes and Monsters, Gedde Watanabe from Sixteen Candles and Gung Ho (both the film and TV versions), Billy Drago from his one good role in The Untouchables and his countless other roles in seriously questionable genre works, and Dedee Pfeiffer from Cybill plus a bunch of stuff that ... she was never actually in, because Wikipedia just confirmed for me that I was thinking of stuff that Lindsay Frost was actually in instead.

And yes, Grace Jones, because this was Vamp, Starring Grace Jones, and the reason why I keep referring to it that way is because I will never get over the hilarious fact that this film was such a quality work of art that Grace Jones, who was ostensibly the leading lady of the film, did not have a single line of dialogue in it, which is kind of like a guy being sold as the lead actor in a porn film without ever even whipping his dick out on camera.

So, if you happen to be watching your local FOX affiliate late at night when this airs at random, or if you stumble across an uploaded copy of it online, go ahead and roll with it, because it's a fun, dumb artifact of what a lot of movies used to be like, back during the best decade ever.

Fright Night and The Lost Boys. I'm older than you, but I can't say I have any recollection of Vamp (which apparently was released between the two above.)

And surely, with "Lesbian Vampires" being it's own sub genre, and just about any combination of Vampire and exploitation being another, there must have been prior vampire/stripper flicks. But nice to know there was once a time when you were innocent of such things.

... Is that both of those films were total deconstructions of the vampire genre, so two of the best vampire movies ever were created to make fun of vampire movies.

And there had indeed been lesbian vampire films before Vamp - everything from The Hunger all the way back to those sleazy '70s knockoffs of the Hammer horror films basically took it as a given that being bitten by a vampire would turn any woman into a lesbian - but I'll be damned if I can find any films earlier than 1986 (when Vamp was released) that actually featured vampires operating out of a strip club. Hell, it remained such a novel idea that, when Quentin Tarantino recycled the concept for the original From Dusk Till Dawn exactly one decade later, moviegoing audiences still treated it like it was fresh and inventive. Indeed, it was so new in 1986 that Sandy Baron (Jack Klompus from Seinfeld) devoted this whole speech in Vamp to explaining WHY a pack of vampires were operating out of a strip club:

"We get away with it because nobody's gonna come lookin' for these folks here, because nobody tells anybody that they're going to a strip club! Look around you ... these people are the dregs, the degenerates, the sickos, the scum of the earth. Nobody's gonna miss 'em. Truth be told, we're doing society a favor ... we're just taking out the trash."

Granted, the character who's delivering this speech is a sleazy strip club owner who leeches like a parasite off a queen vampire and is constantly making laughably inept attempts at emulating the style of the gangster nightclubs in Las Vegas, a city he's never even visited, so he has little room to talk, but still, back when it was still considered out of the ordinary to see an onscreen vampire shacking up somewhere outside of a mansion or a castle, it was a cute concept.