Book Review: Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott

The most obvious bit of satire in Vampyres of Hollywood (St. Martins: July 2008) is the suggestion that the great stars of the Golden Age of Cinema are literally, not just figuratively, “immortal.” But the entire novel, written by actress Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing, The Fog) and author Michael Scott (The Alchemyst, The Magician) is really one enormous in-joke, on many levels. So pulpy that it should be printed on yellow paper, so formulaic that it should be filmed by Roger Corman, Vampyres of Hollywood stands in homage to the B horror flicks for which its heroine Ovsanna Moore and its co-author Barbeau are famous. In the best hack cinema tradition, Barbeau and Scott drench the scenery with blood, innards and ichor, borrow from every source that can’t run away fast enough, and finish with an outrageously over-the-top finale. It’s not great literature, but as every B-movie fan knows, the mess is all part of the fun.

Ovsanna Moore is a five hundred year old Vampyre with an attachment to the film industry. She loves it so much, in fact, that she has faked her own death twice and now poses as her own granddaughter carrying on three generations of movie stardom. She’s a one-woman version of the Barrymores. In the present day, Ovsanna runs a film company, Anticipation Studios, producing and usually starring in gory schlock horror films. As the novel begins, life is imitating Ovsanna’s art: actors and other people connected to Ovsanna’s film business are being found murdered in intensely gruesome ways (most of them being “found” in more than one spot). As the “Cinema Slayer” racks up a body count and terrorizes Tinseltown, world-weary Detective Peter King of the Beverly Hills P.D. pursues an investigation that quickly leads him to Ovsanna Moore’s doorstep. He ends up learning more about the “underworld” of Hollywood than he ever dreamed might exist.

That’s about all the plot that Vampyres of Hollywood can boast of. As more and more people around her turn up slaughtered (and usually sliced, diced and julienned), Ovsanna puzzles over the motive for the killings. Meanwhile, Peter King interviews various individuals without getting much closer to a resolution of the case. Finally, Ovsanna “follows a hunch” to another city and a possible explanation that is never foreshadowed in any way. Detective King trails after her to enable him to be part of the pull-out-all-the-stops-and-sit-on-the-keyboard climax.

I don’t care for first-person narrators, as a rule, and Vampyres of Hollywood has two of them. The chapters alternate between Ovsanna and Peter, with an icon on the chapter heading to identify who is talking. The icons are useful, because except for the content, there is absolutely nothing to differentiate the two characters’ narrations. Ovsanna and Peter think alike, talk alike, appear to have identical attitudes, moods, and outlooks on life, and their narrative voices are indistinguishable. They even are both currently celibate with a preference for female partners. I had to pay close attention to keep track of whose adventures I was following in the chapter I was reading.

Because of the skeletal storyline and the dual narration, the chapters are stuffed with expository padding. Ovsanna constantly cuts to a sidebar to explain to us readers details about Vampyrism in general and her past specifically. Peter King rambles off only slightly less often on tangents about his mother’s connection to the film industry and his experiences as a Beverly Hills cop. There are a lot of clever jokes--Ovsanna seems to have known everyone who ever wrote literature or made movies even slightly related to vampires and had a front row seat for every major historical event. She even tells us something we didn’t know about the real fate of Jack the Ripper. But all the explanation becomes tedious, and I found myself skimming chunks of digression to get back to the story.

Like a low-budget horror movie, Vampyres of Hollywood is filled with flagrant contradictions it disdains to reconcile. Ovsanna is the “Chatelaine of Hollywood,” but she seems relatively powerless when the other Vampyres of Hollywood appear at her home and warn her to resolve the situation or else. The Vampyres in the story are supposedly born as they are, yet at the same time, they can “turn” human beings into Vampyres. The relationship between Ovsanna and the murder victims is inconsistent, and sometimes tenuous. When we finally learn who is behind the killings, they still don’t make a lot of sense. Ovsanna is warned that she is putting Vampyres at risk of exposure, but nothing she does could possibly attract more attention than a string of horrendous homicides. Contradictions like this tend to haunt derivative stories. Vampyres of Hollywood owes a heavy debt to author Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron) and the fictional universe of Vampyres: The Masquerade and its “vampire clans.” I also detected loud pounding echoes of the movies Death Becomes Her (1992), Fright Night (1985) and Quentin Tarantino’s repellent From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).

But critiquing a book like this one too closely is like printing nutritional information on a tub of movie popcorn. Vampyres of Hollywood follows the predictable roller-coaster ride of every low-budget creature feature, especially the ending. If you’re knowledgeable about vampires and movies, you’ll enjoy collecting the trivia references and sly jokes. You probably won’t want to read this one on your lunch break, but if you have a beach vacation coming up, Vampyres of Hollywood is lively, undemanding entertainment.

The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe

The website Shock Till You Drop has an interview with Hans Rodionoff, the screenwriter for Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, currently in post-production. Twenty years after Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys redefined the cinematic vampire and launched the "punk vampire gang" motif, a sequel has finally been made. Warner Brothers has not yet decided whether the movie will get a theatrical release or go straight to DVD.

Shock Till You Drop reports, "Tad Hilgenbrink and Autumn Reeser star as Chris and Nicole, respectively, son and daughter of Michael and Star (Jason Patric and Jamie Gertz's characters from the first film). With their parents gone, they relocate to Luna Bay where Nicole unknowingly takes a vampire for her boyfriend. Chris then turns to the authority on bloodsucker beatdowns Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman reprising his role) for help.

"Leader of the new vamp pack is actor Angus Sutherland, real-life brother of Kiefer, here playing Shane who travels the world with his fanged chums. Yes, they're surfing vampires. But Rodionoff is quick to dismiss that these are not the stereotypical "bro" and "dude"-dropping wave riders we've seen in cinema countless times. Roving gypsies is more like it. Traveling the world and pissed off that they've been deprived of sunlight."

The film's story does pick up from the original, with cameos by minor actors as well as character continuity. Attractive 53-year-old Canadian actress Gabrielle Rose appears as "eccentric Aunt Jillian," who takes in Chris and Nicole after their parents are killed in a car accident. The vampire "gang" in this movie are surfers, but we're assured by Mr. Rodionoff that not much surfing is done on film. The movie is scheduled to be released in summer, 2008.

Baby vampires and disturbed grown-ups

I read a number of vampiric community messageboards. Several of them include a forum for "troll baiting." Posts made by abusive, or clueless, individuals are moved to this forum and other members of the board are given free rein to ridicule, abuse and denigrate the poster to their heart's content, in this forum only. I suppose the intention is to divert the flamewars that often follow certain kinds of posts from the main body of the board. Whatever their intention, these "troll-baiting" forums are nothing but an excuse for self-indulgent and immature behavior of the worst sort by purported adults. The provoking posts are rarely worth bothering with at all, but the "troll-baiters" quickly surpass even the most abusive of their targets in sheer mean-spiritedness and infantilism. It's amazing how much time some people have on their hands to waste on such trash.

Eight years ago, when I was running my own messageboard, and contributing to others, I tried to convince other moderators that there was only one way to deal with trolls, abusers and nuisance posters--only one, no exceptions. The problem posts are instantly deleted on sight and never discussed, replied to or mentioned ever again. Period. Trolls are usually trying to stir up conflict, and they thrive on flamewars--they get a tremendous sense of self-importance from upsetting other people on the messageboard. But no matter how often this scenario was repeated, and how much I tried to demonstrate to other moderators that they were contributing to the problem, not helping it, people in the OVC never learned. They continued to play suckers and fall into the trolls' trap, every single time. Troll-baiting forums only corral the nonsense into a limited area.

For the most part, this would only be annoying. But recently I watched a "troll-baiting" unfold that had some very unsavory elements indeed. I won't say which messageboard this was on, nor identify the principals involved. I stumbled across the thread because I was looking for updates in a different topic that had been moved into the troll-baiting forum.

A new member of the board, who stated that she was 14 years old, had responded to an "Intro" post by criticizing the poster's grammar. Yes, it was a bit snotty--but no more than 14-year-old girls often are. If it had been my board, I'd have just deleted the post, no comment.

But of course, the purportedly adult suckers on the messageboard started sniping at the young person, and the whole thread was moved into the troll forum, where it proceeded to simply blow up--page after page of long posts attacking the young person for her subsidy-published book, her MySpace page, and other completely irrelevant things. They just wouldn't let it alone.

Now, there's nothing unusual about that--except that these were all self-proclaimed adults, ganging up on a 14-year-old. Not one of them seemed to feel they were doing anything inappropriate. The ringleader in the attacks was a 45-year-old (so claimed, anyway) who made lengthy posts diagnosing the young person as a "Narcissist" and expounding on why "Narcissists" could never change and are intolerable to be around. As far as I know, this 45-year-old is not a mental health professional and is not qualified to diagnose--although this 45-year-old evidently has extensive personal experience with mental health issues. As the 45-year-old continued to pummel the 14-year-old in this thread, I found myself getting more and more queasy. I hate the "troll baiting," anyway. It's stupid and juvenile, which is also how I'd characterize the alleged adults who indulge in it. But this went beyond that. For a 45-year-old to spend that much time and energy heaping public abuse on a 14-year-old for so little provocation was just...wrong. More than wrong, it was sick.

My main concern with the young person was the fact that she'd "borrowed" the name of my website, By Light Unseen, for her MySpace screenname. I reported this to MySpace and shortly afterwards the young person changed her screenname. As far as I was concerned, that settled things. I was curious enough to download the young person's book, which was free of charge, from the subsidy publisher's website. It's...well, it's stories written by a 13-year-old. But it could be far worse, and at least it's not fanfic, that cancer of creativity that is draining the last vestiges of original thought from most aspiring writers these days. Predictably, the troll-baiters crowed that they deserved credit for the young person changing the screenname, although we have no idea why that happened. The troll-baiters also jeered at the young person's listing her age, in her MySpace profile, as "100," as though the young person was pretending to be an "immortal vampire." The young person was claiming nothing of the sort. Many minors use ridiculous numbers for their age in their MySpace profile, because MySpace includes age in the page title. 14-year-old girls who don't want to be harassed by creeps and perverts usually fudge their age. But this young person was honest about her age everywhere else.

The troll-baiters got bored and moved on, finally, and I'm sure that hapless young person will never trouble that messageboard again. Meanwhile, this news item appeared in my online news filters.

It's difficult to imagine an adult, and the parent of a teenager, who could justify being that cruel and deceptive. She definitely has no business being a parent, I'm certain of that. I shudder to think of the model she has been for her own teenager. Whether the young victim would ultimately have committed suicide anyway--since there are numerous clues in the article that her life was filled with problems and she had a history of mental health issues and medications--is something no one can say. But when the victim's mother says, "But when adults are involved and continue to screw with a 13-year-old, with or without mental problems, it is absolutely vile," she is absolutely correct. Vile, and sick. How could anyone be an adult in America these days and still not realize that?

Fun With Search Engines...

For a multiplicity of reasons, I've been running a lot of tests on search engine results. Last night, just out of curiosity to see what actually got the best Google rankings (at least at that moment in time), I did a Google search on "vampire." Not surprisingly, that term returned 39,400,000 hits. I wanted to see, first, what a person who typed "vampire" into Google would immediately be presented with; and second, how close to the top any "real vampire" sites were, and which sites were top rated. What I saw was...interesting.

The top-rated Google site for "vampire" is the Wikipedia page with that name, dealing with vampire folklore. Next came Vampire Wine, which I believe is the old domain that used to be Pathway to Darkness, and hence may be riding on that now long-vanished site's extensive linkage and popularity. Then VampireRave.com, which is a commercial Goth/punk site aimed at Lifestylers and vampire fans more than vampiric people. Then came the two main pages for Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: Requiem at White Wolf Games. Then the Skeptic's Dictionary page on "vampire," which links Sanguinarius.org and Dr. Elizabeth Miller's Dracula page. A technical page was number 7, then VampireFreaks.com, which is a very disturbing site. 9th and 10th on the first page of hits were Sanguinarius.org and Temple of the Vampire. So, two "real vampire" sites appeared among the first 10 hits.

The second page started with two gaming sites, "the vampire random name generator" and the "vampire" section in the site "How Stuff Works," titled "How Vampires Work." This is kind of sketchy, and has a handful of links that need updating. (Among other things, it links a page on this site that is no longer there.) But the fifth entry, the vampire section on Monstrous.com, is a candidate for my Hall of Shame--it's entirely plagiarized! I started to read it and immediately recognized big chunks of text from my old "Human Living Vampires" articles and from Sanguinarius' site, all just jumbled together without attribution or credit. The whole section consists of unashamedly ripped off material. The rest of the page was technical sites, gaming sites, and VampireMeetups.com.

The technical sites are intriguing. There seems to be a trend to name technical products, businesses or projects "vampire" something. There was "Vampire, an extension module for mod_python," "Net Vampire, a file download manager," "VAMPIRE--Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval," and "Vampire Wire," an online store for cables and wiring.

The third page of Google hits included Damien Deville's organization The Vampire Church, and one of my friend Bev's articles on vampire myths. It also contained Vampire Wear, the IMDb page for "John Carpenter's Vampires," a gaming site, a photographer's gallery site, the spoof website "Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency," and the website for the band Vampire Weekend.

And so it went, for pages and pages. Very few serious information sites or real vampire sites appeared among the top, say, 200. Obviously, anyone running a Google search on just the word "vampire" is going to have a hard time finding much information of substance--and not because the information isn't on the 'Net. But Google's method of ranking sites is not angled toward returning the highest quality material. Apparently, it's related primarily to the number of links a site has from other "important" websites.

The results from the same search on Yahoo! are entirely different. Yahoo! returns far more hits, 54,100,000, to start with. The first site on the list is Vampires Among Us, followed by Vampires Only, Dr. Miller's Dracula Page, Sanguinarius.org, Beverly Richardson's Vampire's Vault, and Vampyres Online. By Light Unseen is number 11, top of the second page, and with the correct name. Google still lists us as "Living Vampires," which hasn't been the site's name since 2002. (It still comes up if you Google By Light Unseen, however). Unfortunately, Yahoo! also returns Monstrous.com on the first page of hits, so I really will be contacting Monstrous about their little copyright problem. But the bottom line is: Yahoo! returns a much more substantial assortment of websites at the top of a simple keyword search than Google does.

"Angel"--the story continues:

On the heels of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" comics (or graphic novel) series, Joss Whedon is producing a comics series picking up the plotline of "Angel" after the television series finale's cliffhanger ending.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2007/09/return-of-the-v.html?csp=34

I'm tempted to say something about a line drawing of David Boreanaz having more range than the actor does...but I'll be nice. There are some sample pages of the comic available on Ain't It Cool News, it looks quite handsomely done.

Blood drinker achieves international fame!

International newswires have been carrying this item:

"Vampire" arrested for stealing and drinking blood at hospital

I wonder if this fellow even knew what he was drinking, or if he was so drunk, he thought they were shooters of something? I certainly hope the female patient wasn't being tested for something really nasty...