Has anything good ever happened to the guy in horror films who says, “oh, that’s just superstition”? Well, not in this movie. Dinner with a Vampire opens with a team of tomb hunters/fimmakers busting into a mysterious, cobweb-ridden crypt (is there any other kind?) and being summarily dispatched by the titular creature of the night. Lamberto Bava, director of the gloriously ludicrous Demons, actually restrains most of the violence and gore in favor of absurd camp humor and what passes for witty banter (the fact that Dinner with a Vampire originally premiered on Italian television as part of a horror anthology series is perhaps the main cause of this). Demons, however, is a surprising example of a horror film whose gasp actually exceeds its reach. Dinner with a Vampire achieves the exact opposite.

 

The inanity begins soon after the opening as the audience is introduced to four youthful individuals seemingly chosen for their ability to annoy. They and other assorted 20-something simpletons enter into a movie audition process that appears to have no specific goal whatsoever, as dancers, singers, and actors all perform in from of the same people. In a universe where hopping around randomly is considered good enough “dancing” in order to be hired for a film, it is difficult to gauge whether these individuals are supposed to be talented or not. Seeing Shakespeare performed by a horrible actress (playing an actress) with dialogue dubbed by a horrible voice-over artist was enough to boil the goo inside my eyeballs. It was like watching drunken frat boys using a Rembrandt painting as a beer pong table. Was this supposed to be awful? Was the performance supposed to be good and is still awful because everyone involved is incompetent? I couldn’t tell, but it did kind of feel like a microcosm of the whole movie. Or something.    

 

More seizure-inducing predicaments occur when the principle characters view a supposed “classic” vampire film from the same director (and, surprise, vampire) they were auditioning for. When a movie-within-a-movie is supposed to be great (maybe?), but the framing movie is dreadful to begin with, the opportunities for meta-crapitude reach frightening proportions. Not only are the imbecilic characters supposed to be impressed, but the film-within-a-film has to meet the director of Dinner with a Vampire’s standard of greatness. It’s a self-replicating cycle of stupidity. 

 

The actual story, concerning a vampire who has grown weary of life and thus forces others to find a way to kill him (under pain of their own death), is actually a unique one, which is commendable considering the unending parade of films featuring the living dead. Still, a poorly-executed original idea within a well-worn genre can engender a result just as cliché as any other dismissible entry in the vampire film canon. The fact that the vampire tries to kill his would-be assassins before they kill him even though he wants to die seems to be counter-productive, but plot nuances seem mere trifles here. 

 

The capstone to Dinner with a Vampire’s inanity is the completely bizarre inclusion of Gilles, a character that is an unapologetic rip-off of Marty Feldman’s Igor from Young Frankenstein. The ridiculousness of the character’s inclusion seems like a parody, but parodying a parody of a horror movie cliché (the Hunchback Assistant) inside a movie rampant with horror clichés seems inexplicable. Gilles is even mocked at one point as one of the incompetent main characters calls him “Marty Feldman.” This is like if, in the middle of “White and Nerdy,” Weird Al Yankovic stopped the music and said, “gee guys, this rap music sure is something else. Welp, back to my song.” I’m surprised my brain didn’t explode from all the cognitive dissonance. 

 

Despite all the filmmaking and character deficiencies, the whole movie looks gorgeous, far better than it has a right too. Huge, ornate locations and decorative sets appear in nearly every scene. The castle where much of the “action” takes place, with its brightly colored tiles and fascinating architecture, looks like a palace fit for a hallucinatory sequence in a Dario Argento film or even Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. I suppose one could write this off as luck, that the filmmakers just happened upon an amazing location, but the props are also striking and well-made, with absurd amounts of cobwebs strewn with care over the more macabre set pieces. Even the transfer looks good, as the image quality is clean and well-defined. What a pity so little care went into what was done on those sets. 

 

Appreciation for the visuals can only go so far. From the cartoonish gesticulations of the main villain, the bizarre imbalance of parody and false gravitas, and the presence of intolerable protagonists, Dinner with a Vampire fails on a spectacular scale. This is the kind of movie that turns the lone male character into the hero, as horror films are wont to do, despite the fact that he spent the entire first act making sophomoric comments with a fucking hand puppet. I give up. So bad it’s good? More like “so bad it will make you retarded.”