The Era of Vampires (2003)
Five heroes. A coven of vampires. A lot of bad blood.
The Era of Vampires - or Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters as it is also known - is tonight’s plate of cinematic entree. A new seasons of Castlevania drops today, so I thought it might be a good way to get that vampire-desiring heart pumping for vampire-hunting related content. It’s also something that’s been sitting on my to watch list for a hot minute, and I figured it would be good to get around to it before it wasn’t available without needing to be payed for. Mixing that old-school Chinese martial arts movie with the horror of vampires could make for an interesting main course, so check your romanticized image of sparkly toothy boys at the door and plug in for a different breed.
Chinese vampires aren’t the same as the vampires most people in the west would think of when hearing the word. Instead of these high-class lovely folks out to be overly sexual and turning people into blood fountains, we get a much more zombie-type of thing. How much of this is lost in translation could be an issue here and there, but let me break it down - you got two levels of undead here. We have what they call “zombies” in the movie, which if they eat enough people they level up and turn into a vampire. Although the looks of both are relatively similar (they both basically look like corpses in various states of decay), the zombies tend to be far less mobile then the others, with an entire batch of controlled zombies effectively resembling the old Hopping Vampire myths I once read. Meanwhile, the big vampire is capable of all sorts of things, from self-healing, burrowing about like a Graboid, flying through the air like any good kung fu movie would allow, and the ability to just suck some life force right out of a person without biting them.
This takes a particular breed of hunters - trained in mystical ways and martial arts - to deal with, and gets us directly into the plot. A large group of hunters seek out a Vampire King. When they find him, things take a horrible turn when some methane ignites and blows up most the hunters while the vampire escapes. Four remaining hunters continue their task after not being able to find their master for months, and it leads them to an estate where a wedding is taking place. Turns out, the wedding is a family quite well-off and there’s more than meets the eye going on about it. A shady individual has sold off his sister into the marriage to get at the family gold, but the Vampire happens to mess up his plans as well. In turn, the three groups end up causing quite a bit of complications for each other - and it doesn’t help that after her husband dies (almost immediately honestly), the new bride ends up becoming a focal point for one of the hunter’s affections. Can he keep his head on straight to beat the vampire with his friends? Will the shady guy manage to steal the gold? Is the master still alive?
This movie is subtitled - so you can probably guess but line deliveries from the actor’s are a bit out of my league. Given some of the expressions and how things sound, I feel like they might be intentionally hamming a few bits up for comedic effect. That said, most the expressions on folks faces seem to be pretty well done along with the general body language. Some of the lines as presented from the subtitles can seem a bit goofy, but like I just said - I think a lot of the camp in the flick is generally intentional, with only probably a hand full of moments not quite as intentional. Of course, some of it might just be lost in translation - such as some people might find all these stiffly hopping about zombie folks silly as heck, although it’s actually how they roll going off the hopping vampire myths I know off (and it actually makes sense that the undead would be under the effects of rigor mortis and whatnot).
It all starts with a dead man.
Costumes largely fit into that period-piece in China. This means some variety over the normal every-day wardrobe, although also probably pretty routine if you’ve watched a lot of the Old China setting movies. There’s a little bit of fancy details here and there - different style hair ornament in particular - and the characters look different enough that they should be easy to tell apart for most people. Some interesting gizmos pop up - like the compass for detecting negative energies - and there’s a bunch of weapons, so there isn’t so few things and differences that everything gets bland. The brightness levels could do a bit with some extra lighting to really help see some of those differences, but it also makes a lot of sense that a vampire movie would generally be pretty dark. The vampire itself has a few interesting things - like what appears to be a metal hand - but the head prosthetics aren’t exactly the most impressive thing either.
Effects are passable, although some might not like them. When it comes to the violence it’s actually surprisingly clean for an R rated movie. Most the on-screen violence is usually inflicted upon the vampire, who already doesn’t exactly look super convincing, but end up being pretty decent effects. There’s also some very painterly effects applied to the sword when used against the vampire in the finale that look both neat and also not great at the same time. The martial arts action is pretty fun and overloaded with movement. There’s of course also some wire-action if you couldn’t guess from the earlier comment about the vampire flying about. The explosions are also somewhat early 2000’s in how they look.
Audio is fine in balance. I’ll point out again that I don’t understand Chinese enough to comment on line deliveries really, but I could at least hear them saying things when they said them. There was a few moments where the background music popped out and sounded pretty cool, but most of the time I didn’t even notice it. Background effect sounds help spruce things up a bit as well. Overall, I can’t complain much about he audio side of things, and I don’t feel it goes as overboard as some of the old dubbed martial arts movie from the whole exploitation era that I’ve seen, but it’s still a little bit over the normal real sounds you would hear to make it more interesting.
You could probably convince me this is some weird three stooges picture.
It’s not the greatest movie, it’s not the worst. It’s fun to watch mythical things from other countries and see how things are different. It has some fun fight scenes, and some horror elements, and a real light-weight romance plot in there. It mixes them alright, but doesn’t really excel in any one of the fields because of it. It provides plenty of variety with it’s vampire attacks, which is a nice change of pace from the classic pretty vampire, and the fact that one of the provided ways of defeating a vampire is just blowing it up with dynamite is enough to at least peak some interest.