Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat (1991) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 15

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As a vampire western, would this be considered High Midnight?

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat is a quirky film that completely lives up to its reputation as a cult movie. It has the right amount of low-budget cringiness with the high-concept ideas that make it appealing. But the real draw is the amazing cast of character actors assembled for this film.

Before Viewing

This comedic-looking trailer has vampires living in a desert town in Arizona. They drink synthetic blood and go out in the daytime with parasols, wide-brimmed hats, and sunglasses until a group of gangsters arrives in town. I’m uncertain what to make of Sundown, but since it also stars Bruce Campbell, it can’t be all that bad.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

In the American southwest, David Harrsion (Jim Metzler), his wife, Sarah (Morgan Brittany), and their two daughters, Gwen (Vanessa Pierson) and Juliet (Erin Gourlay), move to the town of Purgatory for his work. What they don’t realize is that it’s a town filled with vampires, who are looking for David to help fix the bottling plant that produces their blood substitute. They prevent the sun from vaporizing them with the help of sunglasses, sunscreen, and protective clothing. Very few people ever travel through town, but this week there have also been three hikers and a man whose car has broken down. On their first night, Sarah is attacked by a vampire in her bedroom, Shane (Maxwell Caulfield), who is later revealed to be someone she once had an affair with before he was turned into a bloodsucker.

The town is run by the reclusive Count Mardulak (David Carradine) as a safe haven for vampires who no longer want to kill innocents. He is opposed by Ethan Jefferson (John Ireland), a vampire who believes that their kind should be looking for more control, not less. He is gathering an army to start a revolt against Mardulak and his town. The man with the broken-down car enters town and stops by the diner. He is Robert Van Helsing (Bruce Campbell), and he is here to kill Mardulak. Robert meets a young vampire-waitress in the diner, Sandy (Deborah Foreman), and she asks him to meet her outside of town.

Gwen and Juliet discover a secret passageway between their house and Mardulak’s mansion, across the street. He returns the girls’ home, welcoming Sarah to town. Sandy is attracted to Robert, but once he finds out she’s a vampire, he wants to destroy her. She takes him to see Mardulak instead. David fixes the problem at the plant, but has an encounter with Shane, who reveals that he slept with Sarah while she was married and that Juliet is his daughter. Shane meets up with Jefferson, as his right-hand man, and kills the town sheriff with their new weapon against vampires–wooden bullets.

At Mardulak’s mansion, Sandy explains to Robert that they, as vampires, have changed and aren’t the same creatures his grandfather fought. Mardulak allows her to turn him into a vampire, which freaks him out. David tries to get his family out of town, but they are turned back by Jefferson’s army. Mort (M. Emmet Walsh), a gas station attendant who is in jail for beheading a young hiker, turns the other two hikers in jail, Jack (Dana Ashbrook) and Alice (Elizabeth Gracen), into vampires, so they won’t become food. They join Mardulak’s people, while one of the older vampires in town, Bailey (George ‘Buck’ Flower), switches sides.

A shootout starts at the plant as Jefferson’s group guns down many vampires, but Sandy, Mort, Jack, and others manage to grab some guns and even things out. David drives his family back to the mansion, but they are stopped on the road by Shane and his men. Sarah manages to flee with her girls on a horse, but Shane follows and grabs her in her house. Robert gives David his vial of Holy Water as he goes in to save his wife. David shoots Shane with a wooden bullet, but not in the heart, so he continues coming for the father. Before being choked out, David pours the Holy Water on Shane to distract him, and then can shoot him in the heart.

Jefferson manages to grab Sandy when her machine gun runs out of ammo, forcing Mardulak to surrender. Before Jefferson can kill the Count, Mardulak cajoles him into a duel, unless he’s scared. Mardulak wins the draw, shooting the gun out of Jefferson’s hand before revealing he’s actually Count Dracula. Just as Jefferson’s men are about to kill the remaining vampires, David manages to erect a giant cobbled-together wooden crucifix on the roof, which destroys Jefferson and all his men. Mardulak and his group suffer no damage as he realizes they have been forgiven. David gathers his family, and they drive off into the sunrise!

“You’ve all been watching too many damn horror films.” – David

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (henceforth referred to as simply Sundown) is another obscure film from the early 90s (some sources date the film as 1989, when it was first screened, and others as 1991, when it was released on video). At least it’s not one that had been on my radar, being a smaller film from the time that went straight to video. It has since become a cult hit on video for reasons I’ll be discussing, starting with its vampiric qualities. The late 70s and 80s showed a resurgence of vampire films, starting with the 1979 remake of Dracula starring Frank Langella. The trend continued until 1992 when three prominent vampire films were all released within four months of each other: the comedic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the crime-influenced Innocent Blood, and the Oscar-nominated Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was a time when horror films were attempting to alter the normal parameters of the genre, especially with time-honored characters such as Dracula and vampires. Some standouts from this era include Fright Night (and its sequel), The Lost Boys, and Near Dark (coming later this month). The genre also experienced an uptick in the number of comedic films, which, for some reason, all seemed to be teen comedies, like My Boyfriend’s A Vampire and Once Bitten (Full disclosure: I am well aware of the popularity of teen comedies during the 1980s, and the following sentence should be read with blistering sarcasm). Sundown took the tropes of the vampire genre, such as their sexual power, the ability to transform others into vampires, and their aversion to sunlight, and gave them a comedic edge, placing a cadre of vampires in the American southwest.

This brings to light the second awesome aspect of the film, which is its union with Western tropes, making it a vampire western. The vampire western is a subset of the horror western, which doesn’t necessarily need to include vampires. The first of these films was Curse of the Undead (1959), which did include a vampire. For a genre-fusion that’s been around for over 60 years, it’s surprising that more horror films don’t take advantage of this mashup. Most films that have choose to use vampires, such as Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), the aforementioned Near Dark (1987), From Dusk till Dawn (1996), John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998), and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), but there are also giant monster movies like Tremors (1990), and the cannibal themed Bone Tomahawk (2015). These types of film can be set in the modern day or in the Old West, which provides the story with an interesting lack of technology to deal with monsters and supernatural creatures. Sundown is contemporary but feels like a mix of various time periods due to the vampires all wearing clothes from the era in which they originally died, which includes Old Western gear, but also 18th-century European garments mixed with 1980s Americana. The film also has all the tropes of the American western. The groups each ride horses. There are several shoot-outs where the characters all use wooden bullets to kill the vampires, a fun addition created for this film. The two main vampire characters have a duel, shot like any classic western. And in the end, the characters drive–not into the sunset–but off into the sunrise.

This was director Anthony Hickox’s second feature film after Waxwork (coming later this month), which included over a dozen of the same crew members he worked with on that film. He also utilized several cast members in both, including Deborah Foreman (April Fool’s Day), Dana Ashbrook (Return of the Living Dead II), and Christopher Bradley (The Initiation). The top-billed actor, David Carradine, was a legend of the time, having worked on a mix of high and low-budget films, as well as horror and western films. At the time this was released, he was probably best known for his role on the 70s television show Kung Fu, the 70s cult film Death Race 2000, and the 1980 western, The Long Riders, in which he appeared with two of his brothers. He is the son of storied actor John Carradine, who was also known for his roles in a variety of westerns and horror films, but David’s appearance here, as the gun-toting vampire leader (who also happens to be Dracula), feels like a direct reference to Billy the Kid vs Dracula, due to the fact that John played Dracula in that film. John Ireland (Jefferson), the other gun-toting vampire, famously played Johnny Ringo in the original Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). The rest of the cast, mostly made up of character actors, all appear to be having a great time. This includes Buck Flowers (The Fog, They Live) as the cowboy vampire, Bailey, who switches sides, M. Emmet Walsh (Critters, Blade Runner) as the curmudgeonly Mort, and pretty boy Maxwell Caulfield (Grease 2, Waxwork II: Lost in Time). Of course, I can’t leave out Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead, Bubba Ho-Tep), who steals the show as the nebbish grandson of Van Helsing, the fearless vampire hunter. It’s a fun riff on the tropes of the “one person who knows about vampires” falling for, and being turned, into that which he fights against.

For all the fun things happening in this film, it does suffer from an overabundance of everything. There’s a lot going on, and it tends to break up the pacing and flow of the film as it switches between storylines. Primarily, there is the vampire war between Madulak’s people and Jefferson’s group. This has been simmering for a while and comes to a head during the film while David and his family are in town. This was Shane’s doing, as he created a problem on the pipeline, forcing David to come fix it, knowing that he would never leave his wife and children behind–even on a two-week business trip. Shane wants the family in town because he’s in love with Sarah, having had an affair with her. Shane prods David that Juliet, the youngest child, is not his and was part of the affair Sarah had with Shane. This seems evident given her blonde hair and blue eyes, not looking like Gwen, Sarah, or David. In the end, Sarah lies to her and tells her that “Daddy is your Dad,” which is what she should have told her husband in the first place. There’s also the subplot with the hikers who get embroiled in the vampire war. One is killed at the start by Mort, and the other two are turned into vampires as a mercy so Jefferson’s group (or maybe other town folk) doesn’t eat them. Finally, Van Helsing’s story weaves throughout all of this as he comes to town to kill vampires, and ends up getting changed into one himself, fighting with the creatures he’s vowed to destroy. Some scenes work fine, but a lot of the others are just messy in terms of characterization, dialogue, or logic. But that adds some low-budget charm to this quirky film.

Overall, Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat is a fun film that provides a few chuckles and not too many scares. It does suffer from low-budget effects, such as the claymation or puppeted bats, but that may only be due to the large cast that was assembled for this film. It would be nice to see more horror films done as Westerns. The sensibilities of both genres complement each other, and if horror is the objective, it removes a number of the modern technologies that make classic horror problematic.

Assorted Musings

• The Hemotechnics plant, where the blood substitute is produced, has a logo reminiscent of the paint producer Sherwin-Williams. That logo is a can of paint being poured over a globe, while Hemotronics has blood (or the blood substitute) being poured over the globe.
• Madulak is mostly an anagram of Dracula, specifically M. Drakula, which I’m surprised it took me so long to figure out, considering I get such a kick out of Count Alucard (a backwards spelling of Dracula from 1943’s Son of Dracula), and Dr. Acula (from Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls).