At eighty five minutes in length, if you took out thirty minutes from “The Impaler” you really wouldn’t notice anything missing. I’m not even kidding, what’s drawn out to a painful degree in eighty five minutes could be told in fifty minutes, and we wouldn’t be subjected to a lot of the alleged scares that occur. The movie is so bad that it rips off “Spellcaster,” and hilariously its budget is so low it can’t even rip off the cheesy effects involved with the haunted castle that ensue.
“The Impaler” is about Vlad the Impaler and opens on a very confusing and ridiculous prologue involving Vlad the Impaler at a fire who drinks the blood of a soldier in front of a fire. We then fast forward to the present where we’re forced in to an endless series of scenes involving a group of high schoolers that are now going to college. Or something to that effect. There are horrible expository lines like “God I can’t believe we’re all going to college in the fall.” Why are you telling your boyfriend what he already knows? Meanwhile they drive in fancy cars and party in their own private house, all the while the main character Dominic and his girlfriend are terribly in love. So much in love that Dominic refuses come ons by his girlfriend, insisting that they wait for marriage before sleeping together. Not to stereotype, but no man acts like this. No man talks like this.
After turning down his girlfriend twice, she playfully agrees to wait, and they retreat back to their party. Their friends of course mock them for being virgins. Again, no one acts like this in this day and age. Adam the group leader reveals that he had a mysterious nightmare about a castle and a gorgeous woman who is a vampire. In honor of the dream he some how convinces his entire group to go to Romania to visit the castle of Vlad Tepes. That’s not ridiculous at all. Most of the first hour is just exposition after exposition with poorly edited conversations from a director who has no idea what the word pacing means. After the god awful discussion with chaste Dominic and his girlfriend, they walk off screen and the director holds the shot longer than necessary.
It’s called editing, guys. It’s not just a fancy film school term. When the group travels to Romania, we have to watch these numbskulls stumble around the woods, and then in a castle as their guide saunters around with a bad accent that is a weird mix of German and Italian. The movie is never certain if it wants to be a vampire film or a supernatural film, or a comedy or a horror movie. So it aims for everything. The obligatory heavy character of the group gets his comeuppance when, while greedily eating away at a roast chicken left on a table, gets a goofy surprise. It’s kind of hilarious how the heavy person gets the cruelest fate out of the group of gorgeous characters.
The worst one character gets is a bunch of hands smacking her shower curtain as she takes a bath, horribly startling her. “The Impaler” is nonsense from beginning to end. It’s endless padding, and laughable acting, followed by zero pay off, in the end. You can’t just reference Vlad the Impaler and call yourself a vampire movie.