Night Junkies is what you get when the Muses bestow a flash of inspiration on a filmmaker who possesses neither talent nor skill. The end result is a good idea butchered almost beyond recognition and a movie that is only watchable when one of its attractive actresses gets naked.
The talentless incompetent in this case is Lawrence Pearce and his inspiration is to portray vampires as the equivalent of heroin junkies. That's a promising genesis, but everything pretty much goes to hell after that. Pearce starts undermining his own premise from the very beginning by casting the male-model-like Giles Alderson as the main junkie vamp, Vincent. Junkies don't look like male models. They look like 2 miles of bad road after a flash flood and a cattle stampede. When you make the main bloodsucker character look as handsome and fresh faced as an Osmond brother from 1975, you've already lost the point of the "vampire as junkie" analogy.
Anyway, Vincent hooks up with a stripper named Ruby (Karia Winter) and ends up turning her into a vampire. But Ruby is tortured by the memory of her drug addict father and vows to reject her compulsion for blood. Again, that's not a bad outline for conflict. But again, Pearce fails to fill in that outline with anything interesting. Ruby and Vincent meet, they have sex, he bites her, they have sex again, Vincent explains the "vampire junkie" concept to Ruby, they don't have sex again and Vincent tries to free Ruby from the clutches of her strip club owner and a stalkerish weirdo who works at the club. Then there's something about someone murdering whores and something else about a cure for vampirism, a lot of fancy editing that proves Lawrence Pearce has spent too much time looking at music videos and way too many moments that are supposed to be serious and suspenseful but are just laugh-out-loud funny.
Let me give you an example of just how badly written Night Junkies is. The climax of the film is a fight between Ruby and Vincent and the stalkerish weirdo from the strip club. To start with, the weirdo is never called an actual name during the movie and is listed in the credits simply as "Psycho". Not "Psycho" as in, that was his nickname but "Psycho" as in "the stupidly pretentious writer/director thinks it's cool if the character doesn't have a real name". Whatever you call him, this doofus is supposed to be a deadly threat to Ruby and Vincent. But earlier in the film, Ruby kicks his ass twice all by herself. One time, she knocks him to the ground with a single slap. The other, she knocks him out with one whack to the head with a small lamp. How in the world is any viewer supposed to see "Psycho" as a legitimate menace after you establish him as a complete and utter wuss? Far too much of Night Junkies is like that, with basic storytelling errors and ineptitude turning a supposed gritty supernatural drama into a farcical disaster.
Now, Karia Winter is cute as the dickins and does get buck naked. The movie also puts on display the amazing bosom of Lauren Adams, who plays one of Ruby's fellow strippers. Granted, Adams' boobs are so big, firm and perfect that they're probably fake. When they look that good, though, who cares?
This film is also crammed full of crudity. Not just obscenity but a generalized vulgarity that might appeal to the terminally adolescent. And this English-made production also has one of the oddest collection of accents you'll ever hear. It's like every different British inflection you've ever heard on public television jammed into your ear all at once.
But besides the quality female nudity, its generally coarse nature and some audio anthropology, Night Junkies has absolutely nothing to offer anyone. Unless you've got a taste for good ideas that get made into bad movies, skip this one.
The talentless incompetent in this case is Lawrence Pearce and his inspiration is to portray vampires as the equivalent of heroin junkies. That's a promising genesis, but everything pretty much goes to hell after that. Pearce starts undermining his own premise from the very beginning by casting the male-model-like Giles Alderson as the main junkie vamp, Vincent. Junkies don't look like male models. They look like 2 miles of bad road after a flash flood and a cattle stampede. When you make the main bloodsucker character look as handsome and fresh faced as an Osmond brother from 1975, you've already lost the point of the "vampire as junkie" analogy.
Anyway, Vincent hooks up with a stripper named Ruby (Karia Winter) and ends up turning her into a vampire. But Ruby is tortured by the memory of her drug addict father and vows to reject her compulsion for blood. Again, that's not a bad outline for conflict. But again, Pearce fails to fill in that outline with anything interesting. Ruby and Vincent meet, they have sex, he bites her, they have sex again, Vincent explains the "vampire junkie" concept to Ruby, they don't have sex again and Vincent tries to free Ruby from the clutches of her strip club owner and a stalkerish weirdo who works at the club. Then there's something about someone murdering whores and something else about a cure for vampirism, a lot of fancy editing that proves Lawrence Pearce has spent too much time looking at music videos and way too many moments that are supposed to be serious and suspenseful but are just laugh-out-loud funny.
Let me give you an example of just how badly written Night Junkies is. The climax of the film is a fight between Ruby and Vincent and the stalkerish weirdo from the strip club. To start with, the weirdo is never called an actual name during the movie and is listed in the credits simply as "Psycho". Not "Psycho" as in, that was his nickname but "Psycho" as in "the stupidly pretentious writer/director thinks it's cool if the character doesn't have a real name". Whatever you call him, this doofus is supposed to be a deadly threat to Ruby and Vincent. But earlier in the film, Ruby kicks his ass twice all by herself. One time, she knocks him to the ground with a single slap. The other, she knocks him out with one whack to the head with a small lamp. How in the world is any viewer supposed to see "Psycho" as a legitimate menace after you establish him as a complete and utter wuss? Far too much of Night Junkies is like that, with basic storytelling errors and ineptitude turning a supposed gritty supernatural drama into a farcical disaster.
Now, Karia Winter is cute as the dickins and does get buck naked. The movie also puts on display the amazing bosom of Lauren Adams, who plays one of Ruby's fellow strippers. Granted, Adams' boobs are so big, firm and perfect that they're probably fake. When they look that good, though, who cares?
This film is also crammed full of crudity. Not just obscenity but a generalized vulgarity that might appeal to the terminally adolescent. And this English-made production also has one of the oddest collection of accents you'll ever hear. It's like every different British inflection you've ever heard on public television jammed into your ear all at once.
But besides the quality female nudity, its generally coarse nature and some audio anthropology, Night Junkies has absolutely nothing to offer anyone. Unless you've got a taste for good ideas that get made into bad movies, skip this one.