Vampires are awesome. Everyone knows that. And that's a fact that's unlikely to change anytime soon. For some reason the vampire genre never seems to go out of style, despite all manner of shitty and sub-par efforts. Blood, sweat, tears and cash are wasted in vain attempts to bring newer, shinier product to the public, which, most often, is ultimately inferior. It's a process that repeats itself every couple of months. Vampires are kind of bulletproof which maybe explains why people just throw stuff together and expect it to do well.

Another problem is that the genre has already peaked. The greatest vampire work of all-time is obviously Blade 3.

Uh, now that I think about it, actually, it's the Joss Whedon masterpiece Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hilarity, heart, depth, meaning, re-invention, subtext, metaphor, genius, and bad-ass villains galore... Yeah, not so top-able. Then came Angel which took everything great about Buffy, moved it to Los Angeles and had it open a detective agency. Yup.

"Hey, look at that proverbial bar, it's rising up into the clouds! Oh well, let's make movies about Aliens."

Only they didn't. They kept making vampire products. Admirable if not ill-advised. And here we are, years later, looking around at a mixed bag of vamp offerings.

Moonlight is still hanging around, I believe. A show that tried to go the Angel-vamp-detective route without the whole Joss Whedon part, which, to say the least, is a rather curious strategy.

One of the greatest vampire books of all-time, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, had a shot at being a pretty good vampire movie last year until they decided to take all the vampires out of it.

Twilight is on the horizon but it's a kid's movie based on kid's books.

The most promising recent offering was HBO's True Blood. It had HBO and a critically acclaimed writer/director attached, what more could you want? The answer was "many, many things." Alan Ball seems to have made a piece of vampire fiction without having ever seen a piece of vampire fiction (which, he kinda admits). The heavy-handed vampires as a minority group set-up has already been done. Puns like "God Hates Fangs" are atrocious and shouldn't have been done.

This show also commits the common sin of mistaking "updating" vampires for "putting tattoos and S&M gear" on vampires. I was all set to stop watching this series when last week's episode gave us the show's first enjoyable moment, a vampire mind-controlling a cop into handing over his gun. That was cool but not "wait four episodes to get to" cool.

All is not as bleak on the vamp-front as it appears, however. This looks intriguing.



Not bad at all. And did that kid use the phrase "go steady"? I wonder, is that the mistake of the sub-titler, in assuming we still use that phrase, or do they actually use that phrase in Sweden? Charming either way.

When all else fails, there's always Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 8., which is easily the best vampire stuff around. God damn it, does Joss Whedon have to do everything vamp-related all by himself? Apparently he does.



TheCoolerKIng's column appears each Sunday at SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for further reading. He's also doing this: HowToBeatUpAnything