Review: Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood (1996)

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood (1996)

Rated R for horror violence and gore, sexuality, nudity and strong language

Score: 2 out of 5 (on its own merits), 3 out of 5 (the viewing experience)

Bordello of Blood, the second and final film adapted from HBO's Tales from the Crypt horror anthology series in the '90s, is a horror movie where the recommendation not to watch it alone is for the exact opposite reason you normally say such a thing about horror movies. In most cases, it's a promise that you'll find yourself scared out of your wits without anybody around you to lessen the tension, but here, it's because you'll be bored out of your skull by a witless film where the signs of its spectacularly troubled, off-the-rails production (as in, there's an entire podcast titled How Not to Make a Movie, hosted by one of its writers and producers, A. L. Katz, whose first season is devoted entirely to it) are visible all over the screen from start to finish. No, this is one that you watch with a crowd of cult-movie aficionados, as I did at Cinema Salem at a screening this past weekend hosted by the Spooky Picture Show podcast and the drag queen Tammy Nicole Tootight, who spent much of their time before and after the film chatting about where it all went wrong and taking shots at many of the people involved in it behind the scenes. Make no mistake, this is a pretty bad movie, one where the gore effects, Dennis Miller's wiseass lead performance, '90s supermodel Angie Everhart as the villain, and the plentiful T&A aren't enough to salvage it from its janky writing, flat direction, wooden acting, and prodigious plot holes. But as a riotous crowd-pleaser, its sleazy horror/comedy tone was enough to make for a very fun night.

Our protagonist Rafe Gutman is a private investigator in Louisiana who's been hired by Katherine Verdoux, a devoutly Christian young woman, to find her missing brother Caleb, who as it turns out was last seen heading to a brothel with his friend. Gutman soon learns that this brothel is run and staffed by vampires who prey on horny, unsuspecting men, with their madam Lilith being a particularly ancient and powerful vampire who won't go down so easily. There are a bunch of other subplots, including Katherine working for a televangelist named Jimmy Current who turns out to be involved with the vampire brothel and Lilith being under the control of Vincent, the man who unearthed her tomb and holds a magic artifact granting him power over her, but ultimately, they barely amount to anything in the grand scheme of things. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote the original script for this when they were in college and still received story credits for it, and even after considerable rewrites, it shows, feeling like some student filmmakers' first draft for a '70s grindhouse exploitation film that offers tantalizing hints at more interesting directions it could've gone in but fails to do anything with them beyond just violence, gore, and nudity. The subplots I mentioned earlier could've been used for a story about exploitation in sex work and added some more layers to the villains, with even the powerful Lilith still being controlled by the men around her as part of a master plan to either get rich (as Vincent does) or kill sinners (as Reverend Current does), or alternatively, it could've cut them entirely and focused squarely on Lilith as a sexy, larger-than-life villainess who you can't help but root for even with what she does. Instead, we get the worst of both worlds, with the underdeveloped plot threads undermining Lilith's menace by making her seem like the pawn of others without adding any greater depth to the story or her character.

What the film becomes instead is a horror-comedy vehicle for Dennis Miller as Gutman at the height of his '90s comic stardom, and honestly, given how he spoke at length about how he didn't want to do this movie and only took the role for the paycheck, going so far as to straight-up tell people not to see it during the press tour, I'm surprised by how he wound up being the most enjoyable part of it. Don't get me wrong, it's not a great performance. Miller chucked the script in the garbage and more or less wrote his own dialogue drawing on his stand-up routine, and fortunately, even when he was phoning it in, him doing his '90s stand-up shtick as a private eye turned vampire hunter means that he gets many of the biggest laughs in the film with his constant wisecracking and getting one over on the vampires. Say what you will about him now (or hell, even at the time; apparently, he was the source of a lot of behind-the-scenes problems here), but there's a reason he was a comedy superstar in the '90s, and the film was fortunate to have him, too, because the rest of the cast are either dull as dishwater or playing one-note caricatures. The actor playing the guy who tells men at dive bars about the bordello in order to lure them in played it so over-the-top that it felt like he'd sooner start killing people himself, while Chris Sarandon felt lost as Reverend Current, his character's motivations shifting on a dime such that it becomes unclear what his deal precisely is. Erika Eleniak made for an exceptionally boring female lead as Katherine, the character clearly subject to heavy rewrites that sapped any depth from her and created a pretty big plot hole with the ending, all while her wooden performance did her no favors. Only Angie Everhart and Corey Feldman felt like they understood what kind of movie they were in and had any fun with their roles, with Everhart (pardon the pun) vamping it up and giving Lilith some flamboyant camp in her performance while Feldman makes for a fun henchman as Caleb after he gets turned, one who reminded me of Evil Ed from Fright Night. Again, like Miller, I wouldn't call their performances great or anything, the both of them being kind of one-note, but the notes they played were exactly what a movie like this needed to make for some solid, entertaining villains.

Visually and aesthetically, this movie is nothing to write home about. It's a comedy first and a horror movie second, with most of the scares coming from graphic gore effects as the vampires devour people, tear them apart, and eventually get slaughtered by the protagonists. The fight scenes where the main characters battle the vampires are often quite dire and feel carried by the effects and Miller's personality more than the action on screen. It wasn't wholly irredeemable, with highlights such as a vampire exploding messily in the sunlight and great use of "Ballroom Blitz" in the big third-act sequence where Gutman storms the bordello and takes the fight to the vampires, such that some of the action can be enjoyed as just dumb, cheesy fun. Unfortunately, moments like this are rare reprieves in a film that often meandered and spun its wheels, serving up the most boilerplate vampire movie plot and not really doing much to give any of the vampires much presence or menace. Even Lilith, the main villain, felt underused and seemed to blend into the background with the vampire prostitutes at the bordello, especially with what I said earlier about how the writing did her character no favors. The prodigious gore and nudity, at least, allowed it to deliver some visceral, over-the-top thrills, especially by the standards of '90s horror, but that just brought it to a baseline level where it at least served up the meat and potatoes of a sleazy horror-comedy throwback. I could get those things from many other, better movies.

The Bottom Line

Bordello of Blood is a party movie, a film you throw on when you have friends over and are doing other things -- or, alternatively, a film you screen for a crowd of movie buffs at an independent theater who are more interested in the wild story behind its production than the film itself. It's precisely the sort of film I can imagine being perfect for a remake: some fun ideas in there, but the finished product is less than the sum of its parts, the scars of its troubled production visible right away.