Rod Steiger is a great actor and he makes this movie good. The funniest scenes in the movie involve Steiger and the man he hires to help hunt vampires. Steiger puts everything into his role as Doctor Frederick Van Helsing the vampire slayer. His German accent is right on. Van Helsing takes out an ad in the paper to find an assistant. When a street thug applies for the job, the really funny stuff starts. Later when he needs more help he Van Helsing uses his thug assistant's street gang! How these two cultures play off of each other is the funniest part of the movie.
The vampires in this movie aren't looked upon like mindless brutes who just go around killing people. Well, they kill people but they have a "human" side to them as well. Casper Van Dien plays Dallas, a young WW2 veteran who was "turned" back in the 40s. For a vampire, Dallas is a pretty nice guy. His love interest is a young girl who was turned into a vampire when she was in her late teens or early twenties. She does something in this film that you never see a vampire do in a movie, go back and visit her family who thought she was long dead since she had been missing for years. The confrontation with her parents makes for a good scene and it is something fresh in a vampire movie.
The story moves along well and the ending has some interesting twists. There is a lot of gore in this film but it's not the worst I've seen. It's not as gory as say Saving Private Ryan. While sort of predictable there are some very surprising and funny things at the end of this movie. Rent this movie if you like camp and very funny humor.
Rayvyn
