BLOOD TIES
A dime a dozen...dozen

  There was some other movie in the Drama section with pretty much exactly the same cover as this movie - you know, the pale woman in the slinky black dress with two fang-holes in her neck dripping an inconsequential amount of blood.  I can think of two additional movies with the same idea for a cover, both of which sucked. I'll bet that if I did a little research, I could crash my hard drive listing all the movies which use the same damn cover.  This is not something that gives me much hope for a good vampire movie.

A bunch of Amish-lookin' dudes bust into a country house and stake the middle-aged couple sleeping in their bed, following that up with a nice soak-'em-in-gasoline-and-toss-on-a-match barbecue.  They shoot their teenaged son (Jason London) in the gut with a crossbow and leave him for dead, because they're stupid, and the son gets away, natch.  He runs away to the coast, where he joins up with a yuppie-larva motorcycle gang of vampires who walk around freely in daylight and show him his true heritage.  Meanwhile, the Amish-lookin' cult-o-vampirophobes makes trouble, and the vampires have to deal with (really) racial discrimination.

Made for TV, this movie fails miserably at every attempt at suspense or eroticism (somehow getting an R from the MPAA), despite the wealth of cute women.  Fortunately, not all is lost; some of the lines are pretty funny.  "We're Americans!  Carpathian Americans!"  "I think it's time we came out of the coffin."  Or, when our teenaged hero brings up some of the common vampire myths, he's told "For God's sakes, where did you pick up all this crap?  Didn't your parents teach you anything?"

There are some yuks here, and a relatively fresh look at a vampire society, but overall it's just plain, safe, and very, very made-for-TV.  It feels like a pilot for a series that never was, like Fox Force Five.  I'd have preferred Fox Force Five.

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