Caleb (Pasdar) chats up the wrong young lady. Mae (Wright) talks about "listening to the night" and living forever, and Caleb, having never seen The Lost Boys (which in fairness opened around the same time as this movie so that's forgivable) presses her for a kiss and winds up getting a bite instead. He stumbles home, already smoking in the daylight, when an RV pulls up, someone yanks him in, and Caleb finds himself in a new family: A group of vampires.
The vampires' patriarch, Jesse (Henriksen), gives him a week to fit in or else he intends to let his eldest "child" (or should I say...childe? No, I shouldn't) Severen (Paxton) kill him. "Fitting in" here involves killing someone, since that's kinda how these vampires roll. Severen cleans himself up and seduces women to feed on them, Jesse and his vampiric bride Diamondback (Goldstein) pick up hitchhikers, and Homer (Miller), stuck as an eternal tween, lures in people by pretending to be hit by a car on his bike.
Mae, for her part, seems to rely on her looks to get people alone. She and Caleb hitch a ride in a truck and she tries to get him to kill the trucker (Roger Aaron Brown), but he can't bring himself to do it...so she does.
Yeah, these vampires are monsters, and that includes Mae, though she's a little more ambivalent about it than the others (and she does like Caleb a lot). The family rolls into a bar, intending this as a final test for Caleb, and slaughter the inhabitants in a truly terrifying manner (like, killing off the people one at a time, and in a such a matter-of-fact way that Jesse has cut the waitress' (Jan King) throat and drained her blood into a beer glass before the bartender (Thomas Wagner) really knows what's happening.
Anyway, the one survivor in the bar (James Le Gros) is meant to be Caleb's first kill, but Caleb can't bring himself to do it, the guy flees, and the vampires are all set to kill him but get stuck in a hotel as the cops blow holes in it and the sun rises, and Caleb grabs their van and saves them!
Questionable decision, really. Anyway, meanwhile, Caleb's father (Thomerson) and sister (Leeds) are out searching for him, and wind up at the same hotel that the vampires go to after their escape! Caleb winds up getting his family out, and winds up cured by a...blood transfusion.
This is a really good vampire movie that did not do well at the box office, largely because it opened right around Lost Boys (which...I don't think is better, I think they're about even as movies, but Lost Boys had a lot more money behind it). The vampire family has an obvious dynamic, and watching the behind-the-scenes they all came up with backstories and, most important, figured out the timeline for all of them getting turned. That actually made a big difference, I think, because Jesse and Severen have the clearest and strongest relationship, while Homer is perhaps closest to Diamondback and Mae, and Mae is really the odd one out generally (she's only been a vampire about four years). Caleb is actually probably the weakest character, but since he's meant to be our POV character that's probably pretty deliberate.
I have a couple of niggles. I think the movie peaks after the bar scene, and the ending sequences where the vampires kind of all die inside of a few minutes feels a little rushed. I'm not sure how I feel about a simple blood transfusion curing vampirism, and I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that Mae has been murdering people and drinking their blood for years (and never really shows any remorse) and then gets cured at the end and we're all OK with that. But then again, I like the really tight focus - we start with Caleb hitting on Mae and he gets bitten pretty much right away, so it's a pretty lean movie.
What makes the movie, though, is the vampire family's performance and chemistry, and how all that reacts to Caleb. I like that the vampires are strong and deadly, but not particularly smart or supernaturally powerful - they can't turn into wolves or mist or anything, they're just strong and fast. The movie isn't a million miles from something like The Devil's Rejects in some ways, except of course that we're not focused on the bad guys.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Nobody 2
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