Near Dark (1987)

What a crapfest. This is without a doubt one of the worst movies I'd ever seen.I saw this movie because I'd trust the IMdB score and some positive reviews. What a scam. Ridiculous plot. Laughable characters, silly performances and a finale that I'm pretty sure was made on the run.This is a cringe-worthy film, that's for sure. Only good thing I can say about this movie is that after a while it ends

Damn, this movie could've been good. Hell with that, it could've been great. It's got everything--an excellent cast playing fascinating and nuanced characters,,a wild premise (white trash vampires on the road!), great dialog, and atmosphere galore, topped off with spectacular sequences of blood-soaked violent horror.It's got all that, *and* one of the most jaw-droppingly stupid and contrived devices in any horror movie, ever. If you've seen ND or read or heard much about it, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you haven't, well I'll put it like this: a convenient bit of information never encountered in any other vampire movie, book or folklore collection seems to have been thrown together just to give the flick a commercially acceptable ending.Plot: a handsome young cow-puncher is bitten by a cute, country-style vampire chick. Love, death and madness ensue.The tribe of vamps are the best characters in the movie:scary-sexy, sexy charismatic Civil War vet Jesse, his hot-bodied cold-blooded tattooed bad-momma Diamondback, exuberantly sadistic Sevrin (was he maybe an Olde Weste outlaw while he lived?) Homer, the creepy, obnoxious, scary, funny but ultimately pitiful vampire kid who gets the best death scene in the whole movie, and Mae the aforementioned cute bloodsucker chick who brings photogenic young lout Caleb into the story.,.The creators *really* shouldn't have gone for that stupid, made-up ending, though. *Near Dark" wqould've been a near perfect horror movie if they'd done it different..

I knew that this was meant to be some sort of scary movie, I was interested because of the monsters that featured, the good cast, and it was rated well by critics, so I hoped for something worthwhile, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty). Basically in a small town in Pheonix, Arizona, late at night young cowboy Caleb Colton (Heroes' Adrian Pasdar) meets young beautiful drifter beautiful Mae (Jenny Wright), she asks him for a ride to her trailer. Before dawn, Mae bites Caleb on the neck, he is forced to walk home when his truck does not start, however when the sun rises and hits him, he starts to burn. Suddenly Caleb's father Loy (Tim Thomerson) and sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds) witness a van appearing out of the blue, and Caleb is pulled in and kidnapped. Caleb is introduced to Mae's family, a group of vampires: the leader Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen), his girlfriend Diamondback (Aliens' Jenette Goldstein), the cruel Severen (Bill Paxton) and the boy Homer (Joshua John Miller). What they all have in common is that they are all predatory creatures of the night who urge for and survive on blood, but Caleb refuses to kill, so Mae gives him her own blood to keep him alive. While Caleb is forced to join the vampire gang on their road trip, as they seek victims, while also trying to enjoy themselves, including nights in bars, Loy and Sarah are looking for Caleb, they eventually find him in a motel. Caleb has to choose whether to return to his beloved family, but eventually the vampires are killed off one by one in various circumstances, Jesse, Severen and Diamondback turn vicious, and will do whatever it takes to stop and kill Caleb and Mae, but in the end they survive and comfort each other. Also starring Kenny Call as Deputy Sheriff, Ed Corbett as Ticket Seller, Troy Evans as Plainclothes Officer and Bill Cross as Sheriff Eakers. Pasdar is alright as the luckless farm boy, Wright is seductive, and Henriksen and Paxton are good at being the nasty villains, it is a simple story about a gang of bloodsuckers, acting like outlaws, and trying to stay one step ahead of daylight, it is an interesting mixture of a road movie, a western and a scary movie, with striking moments of bloody violence, it is a watchable horror thriller. Good!

I watched the trailer for this, saw the poster and wasn't really impressed... But then I read some reviews saying that it's better than 'The Lost Boys (1987)' I thought I'd give it a go still.Now I never expected it to be true that it was better than 'The Lost Boys' as that's one of my favourite horror movies HOWEVER I did expect it not to be a generic bore-fest with a complete lack of humour or interesting characters, at least SOMETHING that would even make it WORTHY of being compared to the classic that is 'The Lost Boys'.But no such luck, perhaps if you saw it in it's hey-day it will have a nostalgia level to it that still makes it likable (which surely is a part of why I like 'The Lost Boys' so much) but as a new watch in 2016 I felt it was frustratingly trite.