The strength of Kathryn Bigelow’s second feature is that the story is as simple as a knife to the throat. Vampires are on the loose, somebody’s gotta stop ’em and that’s all, Paul. The twist is that these are southern hick vampires. Bigelow really gets into the imagery. These nighttime desert stretches, pool halls with country music on the jukebox and crumbling motels off the highway are freshly exotic under her eye. None of it looks like a studio set. Then there’s the undead crew themselves, which is a kind of patchwork family, complete with a weathered patriarch, his woman, their mouthy son, a pretty farmer’s daughter and a little kid (who the film tells us is actually much older). Their problems start when the “daughter” falls for a sweet country boy and turns him on to the bloodsucking lifestyle, but he can’t bring himself to make his first kill. For a family who are careful about covering their tracks, draining all witnesses and burning all evidence, this new guy just ain’t gonna work.
Adding to the fun here is the top-notch 80s cult movie cast. You’ve got Tim Thomerson as a good guy, Lance Henrickson as the scary-eyed, bag-of-bones lead vamp, and THE ICON, Bill Paxton, as everyone’s favorite over-the-top psycho who kills people with his boot spurs. Paxton’s Severen is a vampire as filtered through the persona of a psychobilly band frontman. Bigelow’s direction to him might have been nothing more than just “Steal the scene” because that’s exactly what he does throughout. Paxton is your classic hair-trigger. He inhales danger and exhales murder. He’s bug-eyed and madcap, loves being a bully and prefers to tease his meat before he bites. Paxton inhabits his leather and blood-stained shirt mightily.
For some dumb reason, this film is hard to find as of this writing (September 2017). In the 80s and 90s, this was in every video store in America. Today, the discs are out of print and, according to my trusty Roku, the only places to legally stream it on your cool smart TV are via shady apps that either have 3,000 Google reviews saying that it crashes after two seconds or that dump the same Nissan commercial on you every four minutes. None of the mainstream streaming sites have it. No Amazon, no Vudu, no FandangoThis, no AppleWhatever. I don’t get it.