BEFORE: OK, I decided in favor of this film over watching "Dune" later this year. It was a bit of a toss-up, but
a) I can always get to that film later
b) I don't know enough about the linking for October 2023 to know if I'll really need this film then and
c) I realized this sort of fits in with many of the other horror films I've watched this month, namely that it takes place in a school setting, like "Scream", "I Know What You Did Last Summer", "The Rage: Carrie 2", and even "The New Mutants". (I think the kids from "The Witch" and "Marrowbone" were home-schooled.)
I didn't have much of a "back-to-school" chain in September, (just "The Prom" and maybe "Brightburn") so maybe this all makes up for that, in a weird way? High-school horror films can be a theme, right? Anyway, just three more horror films after this one, then I don't have to worry about it until the wrap-up in December. I tend to keep looking forward and not back, so if I've screwed up future linking by watching this one tonight, I don't even want to know about it.
David Arquette carries over from "Scream 4"
THE PLOT: Flighty teen girl Buffy Summers learns that she is her generation's destined battler of vampires.
AFTER: Even though I've never watched the "Buffy" TV show that followed this movie - with different actors, that is - I think I can see, for once, WHY a movie got turned into a network show. This film ran for under an hour and a half, and it feels like the start of a story, without much follow-up. After Buffy learns of her powers and heritage, there's just enough time for one big battle with vampires outside the school dance before the end credits roll. There's no third act here, there's barely a second act, even.
The show ran for seven seasons, from 1997 to 2003 (I know, it took Buffy seven years to get through three years of high school...), and of course I was semi-aware of it at the time, because I was taping TV for work, but it just didn't seem like my bag, so unless it made the headlines for having prominent lesbian characters or that all-musical episode, I didn't pay much attention to it. Still, it's a bit weird that it took me nearly 30 years to watch the film it was based on - talk about having a film fall between the cracks! Year after year I've ignored this one, and now I've finally crossed it off the list. It took me so long that several lead actors have passed away in the last year, like Luke Perry and Rutger Hauer. Thankfully, Donald Sutherland is still in good health, right?
Jeez, how can you not love Paul "Pee-Wee" Reubens camping it up as a vampire? (camp-ire?) And I've sort of come full circle here, I started Shocktober with a vampire film, "Salem's Lot", and now I'm back where I started with another one - and vampire lore didn't change THAT much between 1979 and 1992, both films featured teen vampires floating outside their best friends' bedroom window, asking to be let in. That's a common trope, I take it. But the whole point here was to flip the vampire-hunter character concept on its ear, why does it have to always be a strong, male, white hero figure who's pure of heart and just KNOWS something's wrong with the town? Why can't it be a blasé, jaded, socialite cheerleader who enjoys hanging out at the mall with her friends and is, like, so OVER high school? Hey, she's got gymnastic skills, those could come in handy fighting vampires...
Sutherland plays the mysterious figure who doesn't hunt vampires himself, but is fated to find each generation's "hunter", and it took him a long time to find Buffy, simply because as the modern Valley Girl cheerleader, she's nothing like the vampire hunters from the past. Honestly, it's a bit unclear WHY his character, Merrick, doesn't hunt vampires himself, and how old is he, exactly, is he many centuries old, or is he descended from a long line of vampire-hunter finders, what's his deal, anyway? Instead he keeps sneaking up on Buffy as she's working out, or in the gym's showers, and he kind of comes off like a big perv here, or is that just me?
Buffy's got a boyfriend, but she ends up bonding with the lower-class mechanic kid, Pike, after Pike's friend Benny got turned into a vampire. Fighting the undead together can really put two people on the fast-track to forming a relationship bond, it turns out. And then one of her ex-boyfriend's friends gets vamped up and decides to play in the big basketball game anyway, which feels like a reference to "Teen Wolf" perhaps. But they forgot to include the scene where the referee scours through the rule book and determines, "Well, there's nothing in here that says a vampire teen CAN'T play basketball..."
At that big dance, Buffy finds out that her boyfriend has dumped her, in favor of one of her friends. Or maybe he didn't like the fact that she hunted and staked his basketball-playing friend. Either way, it's a chance for her to re-connect with Pike, just as the vampires surround the school and demand that Buffy come out and face them. And this pits her against the biggest, most powerful vampire around, Lothos. Her training with Merrick can only take her so far, and at some point she has to fight the vampires her own way, with her own Valley Girl-weapons and skills.
The only NITPICK POINT I have tonight concerns the scene when Merrick takes Buffy to the graveyard, so she can see the fresh vampires rising up out of their graves after being dead for three days. (Wait, was the resurrected Jesus a vampire? No, he was a zombie, that's right.) The problem with this plot point is that after a person dies these days, there's a wake, then a funeral, sometimes they wait for the weekend so more people can attend, and very often it takes more than three days to organize all that stuff, so it's often a week or more before they bury people. And then in a small town like this, where there's been a sudden rash of vampire-related deaths, you might imagine that the town coroner and funeral director were swamped, so it could take even longer. But all those new vampires, who died on the SAME day, apparently, and they all got buried right away? Yeah, that seems quite unlikely. There could have been a coffin shortage that held up some of the burials, right?
That's it, roll the credits, movie's over just a bit too soon, there's no real time here to explore what it all means in the grand scheme of things. Writer Joss Whedon went on to create the "Buffy" TV show, among other things like "Firefly", "Angel" and a little movie called "The Avengers", before missing out on "Wonder Woman", screwing up the "Justice League" movie and then falling victim to cancel culture. The last project mentioned on his IMDB page is a proposed reboot of "Buffy", but between the pandemic and various accusations from stars about Whedon's workplace harassment, who knows if that can even happen now. Right or wrong, I can't say, I wasn't there - but again, right or wrong, it seems these days that if enough A-list actors say you're a problem, then it's probably going to be hard for you to keep working in Hollywood.
Unless there's anything else, this is going to wrap up my horror-meets-high-school programming for the month - which almost seems redundant in a way, because isn't high school generally horrifying ENOUGH before you add vampires and killers to it? No? Just me?
Also starring Kristy Swanson (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Luke Perry (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood"), Rutger Hauer (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Donald Sutherland (last seen in "The Calling"), Paul Reubens (last seen in "Matilda"), Hilary Swank (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Paris Vaughan, Michele Abrams, Randall Batinkoff (also last seen in "Higher Learning"), Stephen Root (last heard in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Natasha Gregson Wagner (last seen in "Wonderland"), Sasha Jenson, Thomas Jane (last seen in "The Predator"), Candy Clark (last seen in "Blue Thunder"), Mark DeCarlo, James Paradise,
with cameos from Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Way Back"), Seth Green (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Ricki Lake (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Alexis Arquette, Slash (last seen in "Lemmy"), Liz Smith (last seen in "Everything Is Copy")
RATING: 5 out of 10 pointy ears
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