Last Rites

Not great but nowhere near as bad as some gear say. How could a movie that came out when this movie came out get hammered by someone as dated, it's 30 + years old of course it's not up to date in any part BECAUSE it's 30 fricken years old. Even a 30 year old Sci Fi movie is dated that is of course if Pan Am is doing daily trips to the moon and we have archeologists on Saturn digging up slabs that portend our past and future like 2001 a space odyssey. Would anyone say that's dated. And I'm not saying you can compare this to that because as most people know that is one of the most boring movies that have no plot this is just an old movie with huge gaps in the plot. I never talk about details of movies I talk about and as you see I don't call this a review. And most discussion about movie I do usually takes issue with other people and what they think. Childish probably, but I don't think when you're some Bozo who believes himself (herself) to be a closet movie expert to tell people what to watch and why you should not watch, I rip movies all the time but try to show that this is why I didn't like it on a personal scale. I I'm watching a 30 year old movie I'm not going to rip it because of that and not sure why anyone else would. No one seeing an Ed Wood film when it was released in the 50s would ever believe how many people would for whatever reason love watching his movies. And I truly like this movie it's small it's plot is not what you would expect and the ending surprised me. Watch it knowing it's not the greatest movie ever made and if you watch it knowing you will not recognize anyone and at time lighting is bad and dialogue is a little annoying muddy but this should all be things you should know already.

SERIOUS SPOILAGE

I can remember seeing trailers for this on television when it was released, and being interested in all things vampiric, I longed to be old enough to see it. Boy, I didn't know what I was missing, that's for sure!

This is a face-off between vampire and...non-vampire. In the vampire corner, we have Lucard. A. Lucard, to be exact (haw haw). Lucard is a mortician, which is a great business for a vampire to be in, especially when mortician's wax seems to help vampires come out during the daylight. Lucard and his vampire buddies (the sheriff, the paramedics, and a few miscellaneous others) like to rush to the scene of accidents, declare the victims dead when they're not, then whisk them off to the mortuary for some bloodsucking. Immediately after biting them, the vampires stake the victims, for fear of any newly-minted competition getting a leg up on them.

In the other corner is one Ted Fonda. Ted's mother-in-law is the latest in the town's not-really dead but definitely soon-to-be undead category. Mrs. Ted is frantic, especially after they decide they want to have the wake at home and Lucard doesn't want to give back the body. Every shady businessperson's nightmare, Ted Fonda isn't one to be pushed around by any mortician, and he brings the old lady's corpse back home so they can put it in their living room for a few days until the wake--unembalmed, no less!

The match is on when Lucard sends one of his minions to steal the body back, but he winds up impaled on a picket fence in Fonda's yard instead. Grandma rises from the coffin later that same night and wanders the rural countryside looking like Grandmama Addams with Halloween vampire fangs, while the next day the Fondas are sure Lucard stole the body after all.

Meanwhile, there are social problems in the vampire community. The doctor and the sheriff think Lucard is getting too many victims, so some bickering leads to a few bat-fights. Fonda calls the doc over to give his already-sleeping wife a sedative, and he can't resist turning her into a late-nite snack. Fonda is out on his own little stake-out, following Lucard around while they search for Granny vampire before she can cause too much trouble and blow their cover. They find her and hold her down so the sun can kill her, but not before she makes eye contact with Ted, who finally figures out something strange is going on (duh!). Lucard tries to literally hold Ted back, stopping his car with his bare hands and sheer vampire strength, but Ted escapes and goes home to find his lovely wife completely drained.

When Lucard returns to the mortuary he finds the sheriff snacking on a 'drowning victim' Lucard had been saving for himself, so they have a slugfest that finds the town minus one undead lawman, and the town's vampire population dwindles. With only Lucard and the doc left, they employ some vague sort of deduction to guess Ted's whereabouts, while Ted sets a booby trap for them by dousing his car (and his wife) with gasoline and rigging it with an extension cord. The vampires fall for it--they're undead and not too bright--and Ted manages to stake both of them while they wriggle in flames.

In the film's stunning denouement, Ted stumbles away thru a pasture, while a title card informs us that Ted was found guilty on four counts of murder, and that nobody believed his vampire conspiracy theory. Furthermore, the body of his wife was NEVER FOUND! EEEEEEE!

"Last Rites" was probably a real scream to make; it looks a lot like a home movie and seems to have been assembled by filmmakers who were just jazzed about making a vampire movie and didn't really care about having an actual script. Truth be told, some of the 'arty' shots really do work up some atmosphere, and the shamelessly hokey vampire lady is great. Then something comes along and goofs it up, like those long unnecessary shots that track the characters as they drive in their vehicles along endless rural roads, or Ted and his numerous phone calls, or when some stray filming equipment or a Pizza Hut or something enters the frame and reminds us that we're watching a cheesy flick. This movie's imaginary story doesn't even exist within the frames of the film itself. Just like the vampire lady, who wanders around dazed and realizing she's dead, the movie knows it's baloney.

Marie (Patricia Lee Hammond) and her husband unwittingly expose a vampire cult at a mortuary after they demand her dead mother's body be delivered to the house for a wake. Problem is the vamps have already put the bite on ol' Grandma and she is expected to get up any minute now. This is one of those regional horror flicks prevalent in the late 70s/early 80s. The film is very low budget (the tops of sets can be seen) and features many other problems (like no Dracula, although I suspect distributor Cannon added that as the on screen title reads LAST RITES), yet it is oddly endearing. I like the desolate country location work (Vineland, New Jersey), the cast is decent and director Domonic Paris seems to have a good eye for his shots. In fact, it reminds me a bit of Don Coscarelli's PHANTASM (this flick also bears a 1979 copyright year) but with vampires running a funeral home.

Low budget horrors about a small-town undertaker who, in league with the town's doctor and sheriff, are secretly vampires feeding off accident victims and other faked fatalities. After vampirising their victims this thirsty threesome stakes the victim to prevent them becoming a vampire too.

Their shady dealings arouse the suspicions of Ted Fonda, the son-in-law of a recently deceased old lady. Then when the woman in question is not staked she escapes to becomes a bizarre comedy vampire creeping around the town scaring people.

The makers of the film tried for some arty shots but overall the film looks cheap. Some footage seems to be missing with a conversation that is yet to occur played over generic driving a car footage. At other times the film seems padded with several establishing shots of farm animals and rural fields.

With its combination of some shaky acting, artistic camera angles, Halloween-style music, talky scenes that go nowhere, disregard for accepted vampire lore, scenes switching from day to night to back again, a few bloody slasher-film type murders plus some traditional style fangings, this film is a delightful must for any bad movie fan.

My quest to see every Dracula movie ever made brings me to this low-budget regional vampire film in which bloodsuckers in a small town, all prominent local citizens, feed upon people who have been wrongfully declared dead by A. Lucard (Gerald Fielding), the local mortician. To prevent their unwilling blood donors from joining the ranks of the undead, the vamps stake them once they are all done slurping; unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances sees one victim escaping their clutches and rising from her coffin...

The idea that these vampires have successfully carried out their operation for a long period of time without being rumbled is highly unlikely, but I'm willing to accept this, the film at least attempting to pump some new blood into an old genre. What I cannot forgive, however, is director Domonic Paris's languorous storytelling, which makes Dracula's Last Rites really drag for much of the time, and the atrocious editing, many shots continuing for far longer than they need to.

There are a couple of moments that are lot of fun -- a vampire is impaled on a picket fence, another is pinned to a door, and a creepy old vampire lady (Mimi Weddell) wanders around in a Alzheimers-style state of confusion -- but most of the film is talkative and very tedious. Definitely one for vampire/Dracula completists only.

3.5/10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.