Demon Queen (1987 Video)
4/10
A nice and brief vampire effort
21 August 2022
After meeting an enigmatic woman, a small-time drug peddler finds that she's responsible for the trail of bodies left around him as a means of her vampire tendencies and must try to keep himself alive to stop her rampage.

This one wasn't that great but does have its moments. The movie's main focus here is spent on the series of random encounters she has with the thugs around his business which does lend itself to some cheesy fun at times. From the initial meeting of her breaking up the attempted mugging which brings them together, the disturbing dream he has of her tempting and then graphically killing him, or the scenes of her going around town picking up random victims, there are some generally enjoyable low-budget scenes here. Once the henchmen are turned and he goes on his own rampage against those he knows, this one manages some rather fun and brutal attacks as well with these running parallel to the other action scenes of her going through his friends. This all makes for a fun, fast-paced effort that doesn't have much downtime in this short, and along with the fun indie gore here for all the throat rips and blood-drinking which carries on throughout the film, gives this some generally fun elements for the most part. However, for as much fun as all this is, there are also the films' egregiously obvious origins on display. The constant haze and fuzz over everything simply scream out the shot-on-video setup, as characters become somewhat indecipherable blurs only to be made out by their voiceovers to let you know what's going on. Likewise, the admittedly over-the-top gore features numerous shots and angles giving away the prosthetics involved, and the guerilla-style shooting out on actual streets involving real settings furthers this notion completely. Given that the entire thing also contains the constant hum of the running camcorder in the background, the overall atmosphere here becomes unmistakable. That doesn't take into account the other flaws here, from how the vampires can survive in daylight, what the cutaways to the video-store employees mean in a film this short, or how the massacre doesn't alert the authorities which would've been obvious considering how public they are and the similarities to each other. These stand out as drawbacks but the other issues here are the biggest factors.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Nudity, a sex scene, and drug use.
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