Random picspam - Yuletide edition (Vampires: Los Muertos)
So this year for yuletide I wound up writing in a fandom completely unknown to me when I signed up. I matched on Miracles with my requester (sailorhathor), but while I had several ideas, I was worried I wouldn't be able to finish in time. Out of curiosity I decided to watch the movie she'd asked for in one of the other requests: John Carpenter's Vampires: Los Muertos. It's a 'sequel' to John Carpenter's Vampires, though it's not directed by him and none of the characters/actors are the same. It does, however, star Jon Bon Jovi and Cristián de la Fuente. And they are slashy together. (Not Merlin levels of slashy. And let's not get into Torchwood. We're talking 'have fun looking for the subtext' levels of slashy. With pretty arms.)
Let me pretext this by saying that Los Muertos is not Boa vs Python levels of bad. The acting is fairly decent all around (Diego Luna is in this, looking and playing fifteen even though he's in his twenties at the time), the filming is pretty good, and there's a coherent (if not necessarily logical) plot from beginning to end.
That being said: it's not a great movie. Not really even close to a good movie. I think it mostly suffers from being unable to decide what kind of movie it wants to be. Theoretically it's a horror movie, but it's never scary, and the gross-out vampire feeding scenes come across as extremely fake (while still managing to be kinda gross). It kind of hints at romance, but while Zoey (played by Natasha Gregson Wagner, Natalie Wood's daughter) is adorable, she looks fifteen as well, and the chemistry between between her and Derek (Jon Bon) never happens. And the movie doesn't even try to go there in fact. Then there are the points where it seems like it's going for the soft-core lesbian vampire schtick, but it backs away before things get really interesting. So yeah, kind of a muddle.
I enjoyed it anyway.
Thus, you get an overview with picspam. I'm not doing this so much to encourage you to read my story, since I was more than satisfied by sailorhathor's response to it. (No, really. I keep poking at my feelings to see if I'm just fooling myself, but I am actually completely gleeful with writing something that my recipient enjoyed.) But I think the pretty should definitely be shared with appreciative fangirls, and if someone out there is encouraged to write Derek/Rodrigo slash, then the world will be a better place.
We open in Mexico, with a terrible Jack the Ripper/innocent victim reversal. Derek Bliss, our hero, arrives on scene to save the day.
(He'd be the one with the stake-gun. And the Bon Jovi hair.)
Derek gets his kill (which he films in order to collect the bounty) and returns to his apparent semi-permanent hotel home to get his next assignment: gather up a team of hunters and go after some badass master vampire down in Mexico.
Also, he eats breakfast without a shirt.
Derek is normally a lone-ranger, but his anonymous client insists on a team. He sets off to find more hunters, first stopping at a monastery where one of the characters from the previous film is hiding out. That guy turns out to be dead, but the priest he meets fills him in on the secret of the Bersier cross, which supposedly figures into a ritual that allows vampires to walk in the sun. (It apparently was the entire plot of the first movie.) While there, Derek also experiences visions of the vampires, which are apparently the vampire's attempts to get into his mind and take control.
(Oh, hey there, look who's hiding out in the background.)
Frustrated, Derek moves on in search of other hunters, only to get even more frustrated as each person he looks up turns out to be recently deceased. In messy ways. In one town, he actually catches up to the vampires who did it, and meets Sancho, who's very upset that his friend has been killed.
Derek talks Sancho into waiting until morning to go after the killers--and in return, Sancho talks Derek into letting him help.
(The magic surfboard full of slaying tools.)
Amazingly enough, Sancho turns out to be quite the efficient hunter, though he has no experience. Afterwards he's all gung ho to join up--his momma needs the money bad--but Derek tells him he's too young and to get lost.
Derek heads on to a diner where another hunter is supposed to be working--and amazingly enough, the guy's alive. Alive but busy cooking, so Derek sits down to wait for him to go on break. The girl next to him starts chatting him up, making hints about vampires and hunting.
(Zoey.)
Derek gets suspicious, and excuses himself so he can check her out. Turns out her body temperature is in the gutter. He goes to the restroom to psych himself up to take her out. Unfortunately, while he's in there the real vampire master comes in and kills everyone in the diner--including the hunter cook--except for Zoey. Apparently there's something not!tasty about her.
(I told you they were going for the lesbian vampire angle.)
When Derek returns to find everyone dying, Zoey is gone. He hightails it out of there--only to later discover Zoey hitching along the road, under the midday sun. That shouldn't be possible if she's a vampire. Turns out she's only half-vamp: some vampire bit her in the middle of sex, and after she fought him off, she went to a clinic in Mexico City to get checked for HIV. The doctor didn't find HIV, but some other unidentified virus. He gave her some experimental AIDS medication, and it keeps the symptoms of vampirism in check--as long as she keeps taking the pills.
Oh, and Zoey also gets the vampire-induced visions, only stronger and more often than Derek does. Her most recent was of some monastery being attacked by the master, and all of the priests being killed.
Cue U-turn by Derek. Sure enough, he finds the monastery devoid of life, bodies piled up in the courtyard. But wait! Someone's still alive.
Rodrigo was away from the monastery when the attack happened, and he wants revenge. Also, the vampires have taken the black cross, and they need to get it back. One of the hunter-priests just happened to have provisioned out a little church bus as a hunting transport wagon. Rodrigo offers it to Derek, and wants to go along. So does Zoey. And guess who else shows up? Sancho has followed Derek, and wants to join up too.
Derek's not real big on the idea. Rodrigo talks him into it.
From here on out, Derek and Rodrigo seem to become best buddies, leading the group together.
(Random moments of Derek and Rodrigo on the road:
)
They pick up one more hunter, Ray (played by Darius McCrary), and head back into Mexico to take on the master.
(Ray. I think they call him 'Memphis', but I have a hard time registering names at times.)
After a day of driving, they wind up in the middle of the desert when it comes time to stop. Ray insists on sleeping outside, because he's claustrophobic. The others try to talk him out of it, saying he'll be in danger from the vampires, but Ray assures them he and his special shotgun can handle anything.
Anything except a sexy, mind-bending master vampire, that is. She seduces him, and the next day Ray doesn't seem to remember anything. At another pit stop, though, he manages to arrange things so that Zoey's pills get left behind. The master snatches them up.
(Random cute moment.)
They roll into the small town where the master's lair is located on El Diá de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The town's deserted at first, but once an old man who sells crosses and shrines for the celebration ascertains that they're there to kill the 'demons', the whole population turns out to welcome them. They kick back and relax for a bit--until Zoey discovers that her pills are gone. There isn't a doctor in town, and a search of the clinic doesn't turn up what she needs. Derek is torn--he thinks he should return to Mexico City with Zoey, but he also thinks he needs to stick around and kill the vampire. The choice is rendered moot when, after inhaling all of the pills, the master turns up in town and kidnaps Zoey.
The guys go after her, but before they enter the ruins where the lair is, Derek announces that he knows one of them has turned. That Zoey wouldn't have lost her pills by accident. He's pretty sure it's Sancho--but then the old man turns up and shoots Ray through the heart. Ray confesses that yes, she'd gotten to him, and he's sorry.
I found his last words inspirational for my story: "You ain't lived until you got head from a vampire."
The remaining guys (Rodrigo, Derek, and Sancho) plus the old man enter the ruins. Derek hears Zoey (who has escaped from the evil vampire's lesbian advances by throwing herself down a handy sunlit shaft) and separates from the group to rescue her.
(Lesbian advances:
)
This, of course, leads to bad things. The vampire (I'm going to start calling her Una, like imdb does, even though I swear I never heard that in the movie) knocks Sancho and Rodrigo to the side, whips the old man half to death with one of his arrows, and gets the drop on Derek. She's about to take a chunk out of Derek when Rodrigo yells 'Stop!'--and for some reason she listens to him. Rodrigo offers to trade himself for Derek and the others, since he's both a priest and a hunter and can guarantee the ritual will be a success. She lets the others go, and Rodrigo stays with her.
Back in town, Derek mopes. A) because he thinks he has to kill Zoey and B) because he left his lover with a vampire. Er. That might not be the exact plot there. Let's start over. Derek goes to stake Zoey, but smart-and-plucky local!nurse stops him, because she has a plan. By giving Zoey transfusions, they can get her back to the level of humanity she was at with the pills. Cool.
Now Derek goes to mope about his lover. Er, Rodrigo. That's when the idea occurs to him--if he can sneak into the lair without his humanness blaring out to vampire senses, then he might have a chance of saving Rodrigo. So he gets the nurse to transfuse Zoey's contaminated blood back into him. Which, ew. But it works.
(Shake it off, dude.)
(Better, I guess.)
Back at the ruins, Una is performing the ritual with the help of Rodrigo. (Help mostly consists of him being strung up and saying a few prayers, then getting his leg used as a wine-in-a-box.) She tastes his blood--and then Rodrigo says ha ha! I am not really a priest, vampire! You failed!
At which point she goes "um, dude, you didn't really hurt me, and now you die." I might have LOLed.
Fortunately, Derek comes bursting in to pull Rodrigo's nuts out of the fire. Fight, fight, fight, but Una gets away. They do a little regrouping, come in and fight some more. Una almost gets Derek, but with some teamwork they manage to kill Una and save the day.
(I might have glossed over the end there. It was a little repetitive, sorry.)
Right. Back at the ranch. Rodrigo, though he's not really a priest, is giving the ruined church longing looks. He's taken the vampire cross and hidden it, and won't tell Derek where, since Derek could still turn into a full vampire. Rodrigo's going to stay in town, and Zoey and Derek plan to head to Mexico City in order to get the humanity-saving pills. Sancho...does something. Which involves bringing money home to his mom, I'm sure.
Anyway, the movie wraps with half-vampire Zoey and Derek driving off into the sunset--
--but not before we get the most hands-on moment of any two people in the film (not counting the vampire stuff) when Derek and Rodrigo say goodbye.
(Oh, hello, short sleeves at last. The man should not be allowed to cover those arms.)
And that's pretty much that. No, not the most exciting film ever, nor the deepest, but I can imagine plenty of lovely little vampire-slaying adventures for Derek and Rodrigo, hunters-in-love. Can't you?
Let me pretext this by saying that Los Muertos is not Boa vs Python levels of bad. The acting is fairly decent all around (Diego Luna is in this, looking and playing fifteen even though he's in his twenties at the time), the filming is pretty good, and there's a coherent (if not necessarily logical) plot from beginning to end.
That being said: it's not a great movie. Not really even close to a good movie. I think it mostly suffers from being unable to decide what kind of movie it wants to be. Theoretically it's a horror movie, but it's never scary, and the gross-out vampire feeding scenes come across as extremely fake (while still managing to be kinda gross). It kind of hints at romance, but while Zoey (played by Natasha Gregson Wagner, Natalie Wood's daughter) is adorable, she looks fifteen as well, and the chemistry between between her and Derek (Jon Bon) never happens. And the movie doesn't even try to go there in fact. Then there are the points where it seems like it's going for the soft-core lesbian vampire schtick, but it backs away before things get really interesting. So yeah, kind of a muddle.
I enjoyed it anyway.
Thus, you get an overview with picspam. I'm not doing this so much to encourage you to read my story, since I was more than satisfied by sailorhathor's response to it. (No, really. I keep poking at my feelings to see if I'm just fooling myself, but I am actually completely gleeful with writing something that my recipient enjoyed.) But I think the pretty should definitely be shared with appreciative fangirls, and if someone out there is encouraged to write Derek/Rodrigo slash, then the world will be a better place.
We open in Mexico, with a terrible Jack the Ripper/innocent victim reversal. Derek Bliss, our hero, arrives on scene to save the day.
(He'd be the one with the stake-gun. And the Bon Jovi hair.)
Derek gets his kill (which he films in order to collect the bounty) and returns to his apparent semi-permanent hotel home to get his next assignment: gather up a team of hunters and go after some badass master vampire down in Mexico.
Also, he eats breakfast without a shirt.
Derek is normally a lone-ranger, but his anonymous client insists on a team. He sets off to find more hunters, first stopping at a monastery where one of the characters from the previous film is hiding out. That guy turns out to be dead, but the priest he meets fills him in on the secret of the Bersier cross, which supposedly figures into a ritual that allows vampires to walk in the sun. (It apparently was the entire plot of the first movie.) While there, Derek also experiences visions of the vampires, which are apparently the vampire's attempts to get into his mind and take control.
(Oh, hey there, look who's hiding out in the background.)
Frustrated, Derek moves on in search of other hunters, only to get even more frustrated as each person he looks up turns out to be recently deceased. In messy ways. In one town, he actually catches up to the vampires who did it, and meets Sancho, who's very upset that his friend has been killed.
Derek talks Sancho into waiting until morning to go after the killers--and in return, Sancho talks Derek into letting him help.
(The magic surfboard full of slaying tools.)
Amazingly enough, Sancho turns out to be quite the efficient hunter, though he has no experience. Afterwards he's all gung ho to join up--his momma needs the money bad--but Derek tells him he's too young and to get lost.
Derek heads on to a diner where another hunter is supposed to be working--and amazingly enough, the guy's alive. Alive but busy cooking, so Derek sits down to wait for him to go on break. The girl next to him starts chatting him up, making hints about vampires and hunting.
(Zoey.)
Derek gets suspicious, and excuses himself so he can check her out. Turns out her body temperature is in the gutter. He goes to the restroom to psych himself up to take her out. Unfortunately, while he's in there the real vampire master comes in and kills everyone in the diner--including the hunter cook--except for Zoey. Apparently there's something not!tasty about her.
(I told you they were going for the lesbian vampire angle.)
When Derek returns to find everyone dying, Zoey is gone. He hightails it out of there--only to later discover Zoey hitching along the road, under the midday sun. That shouldn't be possible if she's a vampire. Turns out she's only half-vamp: some vampire bit her in the middle of sex, and after she fought him off, she went to a clinic in Mexico City to get checked for HIV. The doctor didn't find HIV, but some other unidentified virus. He gave her some experimental AIDS medication, and it keeps the symptoms of vampirism in check--as long as she keeps taking the pills.
Oh, and Zoey also gets the vampire-induced visions, only stronger and more often than Derek does. Her most recent was of some monastery being attacked by the master, and all of the priests being killed.
Cue U-turn by Derek. Sure enough, he finds the monastery devoid of life, bodies piled up in the courtyard. But wait! Someone's still alive.
Rodrigo was away from the monastery when the attack happened, and he wants revenge. Also, the vampires have taken the black cross, and they need to get it back. One of the hunter-priests just happened to have provisioned out a little church bus as a hunting transport wagon. Rodrigo offers it to Derek, and wants to go along. So does Zoey. And guess who else shows up? Sancho has followed Derek, and wants to join up too.
Derek's not real big on the idea. Rodrigo talks him into it.
From here on out, Derek and Rodrigo seem to become best buddies, leading the group together.
(Random moments of Derek and Rodrigo on the road:
)
They pick up one more hunter, Ray (played by Darius McCrary), and head back into Mexico to take on the master.
(Ray. I think they call him 'Memphis', but I have a hard time registering names at times.)
After a day of driving, they wind up in the middle of the desert when it comes time to stop. Ray insists on sleeping outside, because he's claustrophobic. The others try to talk him out of it, saying he'll be in danger from the vampires, but Ray assures them he and his special shotgun can handle anything.
Anything except a sexy, mind-bending master vampire, that is. She seduces him, and the next day Ray doesn't seem to remember anything. At another pit stop, though, he manages to arrange things so that Zoey's pills get left behind. The master snatches them up.
(Random cute moment.)
They roll into the small town where the master's lair is located on El Diá de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The town's deserted at first, but once an old man who sells crosses and shrines for the celebration ascertains that they're there to kill the 'demons', the whole population turns out to welcome them. They kick back and relax for a bit--until Zoey discovers that her pills are gone. There isn't a doctor in town, and a search of the clinic doesn't turn up what she needs. Derek is torn--he thinks he should return to Mexico City with Zoey, but he also thinks he needs to stick around and kill the vampire. The choice is rendered moot when, after inhaling all of the pills, the master turns up in town and kidnaps Zoey.
The guys go after her, but before they enter the ruins where the lair is, Derek announces that he knows one of them has turned. That Zoey wouldn't have lost her pills by accident. He's pretty sure it's Sancho--but then the old man turns up and shoots Ray through the heart. Ray confesses that yes, she'd gotten to him, and he's sorry.
I found his last words inspirational for my story: "You ain't lived until you got head from a vampire."
The remaining guys (Rodrigo, Derek, and Sancho) plus the old man enter the ruins. Derek hears Zoey (who has escaped from the evil vampire's lesbian advances by throwing herself down a handy sunlit shaft) and separates from the group to rescue her.
(Lesbian advances:
)
This, of course, leads to bad things. The vampire (I'm going to start calling her Una, like imdb does, even though I swear I never heard that in the movie) knocks Sancho and Rodrigo to the side, whips the old man half to death with one of his arrows, and gets the drop on Derek. She's about to take a chunk out of Derek when Rodrigo yells 'Stop!'--and for some reason she listens to him. Rodrigo offers to trade himself for Derek and the others, since he's both a priest and a hunter and can guarantee the ritual will be a success. She lets the others go, and Rodrigo stays with her.
Back in town, Derek mopes. A) because he thinks he has to kill Zoey and B) because he left his lover with a vampire. Er. That might not be the exact plot there. Let's start over. Derek goes to stake Zoey, but smart-and-plucky local!nurse stops him, because she has a plan. By giving Zoey transfusions, they can get her back to the level of humanity she was at with the pills. Cool.
Now Derek goes to mope about his lover. Er, Rodrigo. That's when the idea occurs to him--if he can sneak into the lair without his humanness blaring out to vampire senses, then he might have a chance of saving Rodrigo. So he gets the nurse to transfuse Zoey's contaminated blood back into him. Which, ew. But it works.
(Shake it off, dude.)
(Better, I guess.)
Back at the ruins, Una is performing the ritual with the help of Rodrigo. (Help mostly consists of him being strung up and saying a few prayers, then getting his leg used as a wine-in-a-box.) She tastes his blood--and then Rodrigo says ha ha! I am not really a priest, vampire! You failed!
At which point she goes "um, dude, you didn't really hurt me, and now you die." I might have LOLed.
Fortunately, Derek comes bursting in to pull Rodrigo's nuts out of the fire. Fight, fight, fight, but Una gets away. They do a little regrouping, come in and fight some more. Una almost gets Derek, but with some teamwork they manage to kill Una and save the day.
(I might have glossed over the end there. It was a little repetitive, sorry.)
Right. Back at the ranch. Rodrigo, though he's not really a priest, is giving the ruined church longing looks. He's taken the vampire cross and hidden it, and won't tell Derek where, since Derek could still turn into a full vampire. Rodrigo's going to stay in town, and Zoey and Derek plan to head to Mexico City in order to get the humanity-saving pills. Sancho...does something. Which involves bringing money home to his mom, I'm sure.
Anyway, the movie wraps with half-vampire Zoey and Derek driving off into the sunset--
--but not before we get the most hands-on moment of any two people in the film (not counting the vampire stuff) when Derek and Rodrigo say goodbye.
(Oh, hello, short sleeves at last. The man should not be allowed to cover those arms.)
And that's pretty much that. No, not the most exciting film ever, nor the deepest, but I can imagine plenty of lovely little vampire-slaying adventures for Derek and Rodrigo, hunters-in-love. Can't you?