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.
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.
