Review of Subspecies (1991) by Michael T — 29 Jun 2013

A vampire film from producer Charles Band's Full Moon pictures. Band started out in the declining days of grindhouse and drive-in movies and soon realized there was money to made in the direct-to-video market.

Especially if you made low-budget genre films. The good points of this film is that this film was one of the first movies made in post-Communist Romania and director Ted Nikolaou takes full advantage of this (actually filming a vampire movie set in Transylvania in Transylvania).

We follow three attractive female university students as they drive off into the Romanian countryside to study local folklore and blunder into a family struggle between two disparate vampire half-brothers and a bizarre family struggle that goes back centuries.

Angus Scrimm ("The Tall Man" in the Phantasm movies) gets star-billing here but his appearance is pretty short. Anders Hove plays Radu, the principle heavy and his creepy makeup job looks intense.

The problem is that he spends 3/4 of the film looking menacing but doing very little that is actually menacing. And when he does do anything menacing, he relies too heavily on his creepy demonic homunculi that look incredibly fake.

Then there is Stefan, played by Michael Watson, who is the brooding good-guy Byronic vampire. Back in 1991, this probably was a fresh idea but we've had years of romantic brooding good guy vampires and his romance with Laura Mae Tate is pretty weak.

This series got better (and weirder) as the 1990s progressed so I give this film three stars because of its potential and the novelty of being the first western film made in Romania after the Cold War.

The slow plodding nature of the script and wooden acting (apart from Hove and Scrimm) and the really bad homunculi FX means that this is actually a two star movie.