| Cover Art |
 |
| Credits |
Director: Kevin VanHook
Starring: Gary Busey,
Jeff Manzanares, Charles Lister, Amy Angelowicz
Screenplay: Kevin VanHook
Music: William Richter
Tagline: Fear the light...
Country: USA |
"Uggh…"
You know
a movie is bad when you are unable to summate
said atrociousness with words – relying
solely on loud, animalistic groans that say more
than words ever could. That said though, I will
endeavour to express how truly awful Frost:
Portrait of a Vampire is…
Usually when I watch these films, no matter how
bad they are, I will always try to find something
positive, something that will allow me to give
the film some sort of clemency so that people
don't feel completely jaded by my own negative
opinion of what could be a favourite of theirs.
Not here my friends, not today. Today I present
to you a film with no redeeming value whatsoever.
How this film got made is beyond me.
Frost: Portrait of a Vampire is the horrifyingly disjointed story of two ex-military
buddies who become mortal enemies when one was
bitten by a Russian vampire in Afghanistan in
1989. That's essentially all the story there
is. It'd be pretty standard vampire fare
if it weren't for the colossal amount of
needless back story and excessive side garbage
that goes on in this film - apparently it takes
eleven or so years from when you're bitten
by a vampire for you to actually become one yourself,
so there's a new one for you vampire fans
to add to your book of vampire lore. If you take
all the unnecessary padding out of this eighty
six minute travesty you'd probably have
a primetime safe, half-hour T.V. show with less
production values than an episode of Passions.
The film has more clichés crammed into
it than a soap opera and acting of roughly the
same calibre. Gary Busey turns in an equally hilarious
and repellent performance as the blind, psychic
art connoisseur slash gunrunner who "helps"
Jack Frost (yep, that's his name) as he
hunts down his vampire buddy Nat. Both Jeff Manzanares
and Charles Lister who play Frost and Nat respectively
are two of the worst actors I've ever laid
eyes on to the point where I actually felt embarrassed
watching them (kind of like when you watch the Australian Idol auditions). Jack
Frost is this unbelievably versatile character
who's a champion at pretty much everything he
does (shit – the guy can even recite sections
from obscure books on the occult without even
reading them!) yet the actor who plays him is
this monotonous Kevin Smith look-alike who would
undoubtedly turn in a better performance as a
corpse. The guy wears the same pair of aviator
sunglasses throughout the entire film –
including night scenes - with no explanation as
to why he does so (and if it was at some point
mentioned it was so brief it went completely undetected).
Charles Lister turns in an embarrassingly over
the top performance, and he's quite possibly
the most non-threatening vampire to ever hit the
screen. Even Count Duckula sits above this guy
as a more imposing vampire. The rest of the performances
aren't even worth mentioning, as the whole
cast feels like barrel scraping.
On the subject of barrel scraping, the special
effects are the worst effects I've ever
seen and the production values are vomit inducing.
Troma is better than this. The vampire's
lair looks like something put together for a high
school production, and the make-up used to make
what appear to be those of Italian descent look
Afghani is hilarious. The CGI helicopters and
bats will actually hurt your eyes to look at them,
and the practical effects are so glaringly obvious
it's borderline ridiculous. When Jack fires
his rocket launcher at one of the helicopters,
you can actually see the rocket drop down before
moving forwards, as though whoever was suspending
it from above missed their cue and hoped they
got away with it (which they obviously did). It's
just careless, completely careless – but
the big problem is, it tries to cover it all up.
The script is really pretentious. It's
based on "the best selling vampire comic
book: Jack Frost" which
was also written by Vanhook back in 1987 (no surprise
that the comic is every bit as terrible as the
film and only lasted two issues). Fact is, it's
a nasty pile of garbage, and Kevin Vanhook (who
also directed and produced the film) tries to
make it sound smart and awesome by putting in
dialogue that may read like some sort of cool
on paper, but comes off as garbled crap when spoken
– especially by the no-hopers cast in Frost.
It jumps needlessly from one redundant location
to another (I think we were in Mexico for all
of two minutes) before settling down towards the
end, where it's already too late to undo
the damage. Ultimately it's just a terribly
uninspiring script and the downfalls of the script
have become monstrous on screen. |
