Stop me if you've heard this one. A man runs into a gas station late at night screaming about death...and he's right. A few minutes later, we meet an enigmatic vampire who is traveling the earth, taking victims in small towns and turning them into an army of the undead. Throughout the film we meet a small ragtag group of survivors and we begin to wonder if they will be able to stop him or if they will be the next to die. Have you heard that one before? I sure as hell haven't. I didn't know what to expect from this movie, but for $10 I figured I'd take a chance, and boy was I rewarded in spades! The tagline for this movie is "Even the dead will scream." That's gotta be the coolest tagline I've ever heard. And it's true, the dead scream in this movie, howls of pain and horror and madness. Plus they talk in this kinda computerized, distorted voice that's sometimes hokey but often effective, especially when they're uttering creepy lines like "We already have your soul..."

When I was younger, I enjoyed every movie I saw, just happy for the experience. Then in my twenties I went through this snobby period where I decided I knew everything and I totally abandoned my grindhouse roots, my spirit and soul which loved movies like "Telefon" and "The Hills Have Eyes" and I deiced I could judge a movie by its first few minutes. If the camera work was jerky and slightly off-focus, the acting wasn't very good, and the picture quality was grainy and otherwise cheap, I decided the movie was going to suck and it wasn't worth my time. I know, right? Who WAS that person? She was starting to melt away by the time I saw this movie and I started to remember how much fun it was sitting around chomping popcorn and not worrying every second about line delivery and clear picture quality.

The musical score was creepy and effective, and even though the camerawork wasn't the best and the scenes suffer from poor picture quality, everything is performed with such heart that you want to keep watching. In an age where the market is flooded with big-budget horror films that look gorgeous but ring hollow and empty, it's so refreshing to see a horror film made by people who actually CARE about the movie. The care put into this film pays off in spades, and if you're able to look past the budgetary limitations, you'll find a real gem of a movie hiding underneath. The movie starts in a gas station, where late-night patrons are interrupted by a hysterical man screaming about doom and death. His predictions turn out to be accurate as the night dissolve into bloody mayhem when one of the coolest vampires I've ever seen arrives to dispose of anyone living in his path and turn them all into the legion of the undead. Something about this vampire carries a feeling of evil...his mesmerizing eyes, his scraggly 80s hair metal appearance, the way he keeps going like the energizer bunny and dispatches his victims gruesomely.

As the band of survivors roam about through the movie, slowly becoming aware of the vampire plague around them, the mediocre acting again threatens to overshadow the proceedings, but the filmmakers are smart and by the halfway point, all the bad actors are dead and the survivors are competent enough to carry the rest of the movie. And as I said before, even the bad actors throw themselves into the movie with abandon. There's no overpaid Paris Hilton here sleepwalking through her performance to earn a paycheck, these people get down and dirty, cover themselves in blood, then get up and run around effectively crazy and creepy in crowds of vampires that remind me more of zombies than vampires (in later films where the zombies run, of course). It looks like so much fun that I wanted to jump in the screen and be a vampire, too, all gooey and covered in gore.

And what gore! The makeup effects in this movie rock and the few times the camera pans away and leaves the murders frustratingly off-screen are more than made up for by the times the camera lingers on terrifically real killings: severed limbs, gooey bites taken out of hapless victims, an orgy of chomping, biting, licking, and drinking one victim's blood that has to be seen to be believed...not to mention the mother of all vampire apocalypse scenes where a teenage boy turned undead fiend leads a pack of vampires to their doom as they melt and explode and dissolve in the sun, screaming and writhing in pain. Gorehounds rejoice, you've found your movie here!

In the end, the flaws disappear under a haze of appreciation for the care taken with this movie. The gore, the chase scenes, the tension, that creepy fucking lead vampire, the willingness of the filmmakers to smash taboos and kill main characters and present an ending that refuses to wrap everything up in a neat little package... all these things add up to a movie you will want to experience again and again. Damn right you already have my soul, you blew me away! God bless you, Lief Jonker. You directed a movie that snapped me out of my snobbishness and brought me back to my grindhouse roots, and I'm thankful.