Dinner With A Vampire

Dinner With A Vampire (1989)

Dir. Lamberto Bava

Written by Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti, story by Luciano Martino

Starring George Hilton, Riccardo Rossi, Patrizia Pellegrino

It's technically Dinner with A Vampire, but apparently German audiences demand definite articles.

            If there is one immutable and universal iron law of pop art, it is this: when something achieves a certain level of popular success --no matter what the thing originally was, no matter how idiosyncratic the product, or how obviously a fluke the success-- you can count on at least one rich guy to grab the artist responsible and say “make me more like that.” In this case, the inspiration was the financial success of DEMONS and DEMONS 2 in 1985-86 Italy, the rich guys were executive producers Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina of Italian TV production company Reiteitalia, and the lucky recipient of this enthusiastic artistic patronage was DEMONS and DEMONS 2 director Lamberto Bava. The result: from 1987-1989, Bava cranked out four (out of a planned five) made-for-TV horror movies that played on the channel Italia 1. Needless to say, none of them matched the feverish frenzied perfection of DEMONS, none is very well remembered today, and considering Bava The Younger does not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality, I was little inclined to doubt that assessment. Little inclined, that is, until I unknowingly watched UNTIL DEATH back in 2016. Obviously it’s no DEMONS, and nothing ever could be or will be again. But I found it a surprisingly solid, well-made little film noire horror riff that managed to entertain me even without any tits, gore, or swears. So I figured, what the heck, might as well tempt fate and see if lightning sometimes does strike twice.

Lightning did not strike twice. But if DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE is monumentally cheesier and crappier than UNTIL DEATH, it is not utterly without merit. In fact, it’s a rare Italian horror movie which seems to be at least marginally self-aware of how batshit it is, leaning into its silliness with a zeal that probably crosses the boarder into intentional parody. Or at least, everything about the script and performances scream campy, tongue-in-cheek fun, and the only thing that holds me back from wholeheartedly believing this was intentional is the simple fact that it would require the director of DEMONS to be self-aware enough to know when a film has gotten ridiculous, and I don’t see how I can square that with reality as I understand it.

            Anyway, DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE will deliver its titular meal eventually, but it starts with a film crew unintentionally resurrecting a vampire and enthusiastically filming the results until he predictably murders them all. This is the first, but not the last touch which could be seen as a bit of meta humor; you can easily imagine Bava himself (dubbed by an American accent, of course) shouting at his cameraman, “don’t miss a thing! This is incredible!” even as his crew gets slaughtered. Tedious backstory now out of the way, we then move on to the euphemistically titled “talent” portion of the movie, where we’re introduced to various young people and future vampiric victims of dubious ability, who are auditioning to be a singer (“well, I’m trying to be. I don’t have a great voice, but I have a good ear!” [??]), an actor (hot take: the romantic words of the immoral bard in Romeo and Juliet don’t sound so hot via the medium of a dubbed Italian woman mumbling the English phonetically), a “dancer” (skipping around vaguely to the rhythm of a pop beat) and… I dunno, some guy who’s really into finger puppets? What, specifically, they are auditioning for doesn’t seem to be an immediate concern for them, so they are dangerously unsuspicious when, after the audition, all four of them get “the call” to a mysterious castle which they all happily assume has need of dancing, singing, acting, and finger puppetry.

And what a castle it is! If ever there was a castle where one was obviously going to have an unexpected Dinner With A Vampire instead of a finger-puppet routine, this is obviously it. “Where’s the headless horseman?” asks one dude, apparently not as familiar with the setting of The Legend Of Sleepy Hallow as he believes himself to be. When the door is answered by a hunchback who appears to have taken Marty Feldman’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN role as a challenge to go broader (and I’m not the only one who thought so, since the young guy actually calls him "Marty Feldman" -- guess he’s more up on his Mel Brooks than his Washington Irving), they’re only slightly more surprised than they are when they’re told they can’t meet the promised “director” until… after midnight (this by an assistant with a rather pronounced Transylvanian accent). Soon a old-timey lady with very nicely crimped hair is warning them about an unspecified danger, which they take as an invitation to split up and wander around alone (“where are you going?” “To the bathroom!” “Alone?” “I always go to the bathroom alone!”).

Once the plot is introduced, much running around in a line through the most stunningly beautiful castle I’ve ever seen ensues, and it’s all very silly and could certainly be set to the Benny Hill theme song without losing much in terms of spine-chilling terror. The characters are notable for panicking when there’s no reason to panic (at the start, when they don’t even know there’s any danger, just watching a black and white movie causes one girl to faint!) and then being bizarrely nonchalant once they actually have to face rampaging ghouls. Faced with an obviously real vampire sitting two feet away and monologuing about the torments of immortality, one of his guests can only think to nonchalantly ask, “Well don’t you have a vampires’ union or something?” At an hour and seven minutes, this mental giant solemnly mansplains, “girls, I think we may have to accept the fact that he’s a real vampire,” as if that hadn’t been established forty minutes before.

            Still, it makes its silliness something of a charm, best embodied in the titular vampire who eventually makes an appearance at an elegant dinner where he informs the motley assembled “talent” that they’re actually here for a very unexpected reason (and indeed, one which might be unexpected even to the audience, who doubtless assume our collected protagonists were summoned to be Dinner For A Vampire). The courtly vamp in question is played by Uruguayan actor turned Spaghetti Western star George Hilton (THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK), camping it up gamely as an ageless supernatural menace bound and determined to have a good time with his unsuspecting guests, and fond of teasing them with phony hints about how to kill him (when they suggest killing him with a cross, he points out that he’s wearing one [“I wear it for good luck!”], and I like the implication that vamps have overcome their old nemesis of garlic and crosses by investing in big corporations which come up with scientific cures).

Hilton cements the movie’s sense of silly, giddy fun, and that tone is sufficient to keep things lively and tolerable, even when technically speaking there’s not a whole lot of whammy going on. The movie, for example, spends a surprising amount of time with our protagonists just watching a black and white film-within-a-film starring a suspiciously familiar vampire. This movie looks quite handsome in black and white and does turn out to be relevant to the events at hand, but somewhat typifies the film’s comically ineffective protagonists, who find it challenging even to successfully watch all the way through a movie. Their complete uselessness is kind of funny, but also makes them somewhat inert narratively, meaning we spend a whole lot of time basically watching them run around screaming. There’s some monsters and chasing and creepy dungeons backlit by an eerie blue light and all that, but it’s a little short on showstopper moments, which gets to be a bit patience-testing even at 92 minutes. Still, if one must watch a bunch of nitwits run around screaming for an hour and a half, one could hardly imagine a more pleasant setting for it. Shot in the Tuscan Sammezzano Castle, which sports 365 rooms each featuring a unique Moorish design, the location itself is such an eye-popping marvel that it almost doesn’t matter what’s happening in the foreground. Even when the movie is corny and kinda uneventful -- which is almost always—it’s never entirely uninteresting because it’s in such a sumptuously imagined palace, lit as elegantly as you would hope from an Italian production.

The juxtaposition of this stunning work of architecture against a dorky Scooby Doo story about a campy vampire film director is, perhaps, a fitting symbol for Italian genre filmmaking as a whole, especially by the late 1980’s: impressive technical artistry backing up a bunch of muddled, schlocky nonsense. Where the best films of this era blended those two things indissolubly (as in the immortal DEMONS), though, this one stratifies them almost entirely, leaving the schlocky stuff a little stranded and too lacking in the goods to stand on its own. But it’s a friendly, goofy enough experience to squeak by on charm and good looks, if only barely. Self-awareness is not the best lens through which to experience Italian genre films, but it’s at least unusual enough that I’ll allow it in a single TV movie that no one could reasonably have much hope for in the first place. Lightning may not have struck twice, but perhaps I was foolish to think myself capable of finding any Italian horror film from the 80s completely worthless. Bring on GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE and THE OGRE!      

But seriously dawg, look at this fuckin' place!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a literal dinner with a vampire in there, though it’s mostly just exposition. But I guess HALFHEARTEDLY RUNNING AWAY FROM A VAMPIRE wouldn’t be as good a title.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, horror-comedy
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Not specifically horror, but George Hilton is something of an Italian B-movie God, appearing in Westerns, actions movies, and gialli
NUDITY?	One boob appears in the horror movie they watch
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	The vamp turns into one of those adorable 1930s bat puppets, but the poor thing looks like it can barely stay aloft, let alone harm anyone
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Vampire, but the building doesn’t seem to be the problem.
POSSESSION?	Vampiric hypnotism
CREEPY DOLLS?	One girl stumbles onto a prop room with a bunch of weird mannequins, including one with a arm for a head with one eye in the middle. Man, I wanna see THAT movie
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Vamp into bat, Sexy George Hilton into scary vampire Hilton
VOYEURISM?	None, oddly; you’d think this would be a prime opportunity to have the antagonist peeping on his guests while they’re vulnerable, but he’s actually quite the gentleman.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Finger-puppetry as a career won’t get you as far as your High School Career Councilor told you it would.