John Carpenter's Vampires wins a Loosie Award in the category of

Idiot Plot Involving Bondage

• Idiot Plot -- a story which has major elements that turn on the protagonist behaving like an idiot. (This clearly does not count for protagonists who actually ARE idiots, as in "The Paint Job" or any Jim Carrey movie.) Very popular in TV sitcoms, idiot plots are generally identifiable as those in which the whole story would dry up and blow away if the hero would just apologize.

In John Carpenter's Vampires, beautiful Sheryl Lee plays a whore who's been bitten by a vampire. James Woods and his fellow vampire slayers more or less kidnap her so they can use the psychic link between her and the vampire to track the vampire.

Vampires, as portrayed JC's Vampires, are incredibly strong and fast and they can fly. Bullets stun them and slow them down a bit, but otherwise have little effect on them. Vampires are NOT to be messed around with, especially at night.

So as they drag Sheryl around, is she dangerous or what? We don't know. And to judge from the following scenes, neither do they.

When they first kidnap her, they march her around the desert for awhile, trying to find transportation. They don't restrain her, so you have to figure she's not very dangerous.

Now they've got her squirrelled away in a hotel room, and you have to figure she's pretty damn dangerous, because she's tied face down on a bed stark naked, her arms secured to the sides of the bed, her feet tied together and a big square of duct tape over her mouth. Dangerous? You bet!

Next scene, a little later in the evening. Now her vampire slayer captor, Montoya, has untied her and let her get dressed, and he's lying on a sofa fast asleep with a gun in his lap while she is wide awake. Guess he's decided she's not dangerous. Make sense? Not to me, either, but there it is.

Next scene, still later in the evening or maybe the next night. There's three vampire slayers in the room with her, but they've got her wrists tied together (IN FRONT of her body! Don't they know ANYTHING? No wonder the whole team of slayers got killed earlier in the movie!). Dangerous? Oh, yeah.

Next scene, they're driving to where the vampire are. Sheryl sits in the cab of a jeep with Montoya, unrestrained.

Later, they drive into town where the vampires are holed up. Sheryl is still unrestrained, but as they prepare to kill vampires, Montoya ties Sheryl's hands to the roll bar of the jeep, for no apparent reason.

Later, she is either unrestrained or succeeds in working her hands free of the ropes (it's kind of hard to tell) and attacks Montoya.

ALSO FROM PAT POWERS

Be it noted that none of the bondage in JC's Vampires is Loosie Awards caliber and it's a pretty good guy movie -- lots of fighting and violence and James Wood doing a great psycho turn. But the bondage is done so arbitrarily that it makes no sense. You could say it's gratuitous, but the only scene to play up the bondage's sexual aspect is the first one (and it does so very nicely, thank you).

The only real purpose the bondage serves is advancing a subplot concerning love between Montoya and Sheryl Lee's character. (In fact, we have to wonder why Montoya tied her up naked in the first place. He says it's so he could clean her up from her trek in the desert, but there's no reason he couldn't have tossed a blanket over her afterward. Was there a little bound sex implied here? Is that why he loves her? Hard to say.)

If Montoya hadn't untied Sheryl and then fallen asleep, the subplot that ends the movie wouldn't have happened. But Montoya had to be an idiot to fall asleep with an untied person who might be a vampire in the room, given what he KNOWS about vampires.

That's why we've given this film a Loosie Award for Idiot Plotting. Other Idiot Plot points: if the vampire hunters have all this high-tech weaponry, why not crossbows or other projectile weapons that fire wooden stakes instead of bullets? If they KNOW that bullets don't work against vampires, why do they keep using them? And so it goes...put this Loosie Award around your neck and see if IT keeps vampires away, Mr. Carpenter.

Return to the Loosie Awards main page