Upír z Feratu (also known as Ferat Vampire and Der Autovampir) is a black Ferat racing car that sucks blood from its driver’s feet through the pedal. Even if you wear shoes with thick soles. And you understand the hilarious pun, right? nosFERATu. Har-Har.
If you expect a crazy Maximum Overdrive-ish thing here, or a miniature car with bat wings fluttering with strings in the light of the full moon, Ed Wood-style, you can just give this a pass right away. It is impossible not to expect something real special when you hear a title like DER AUTOVAMPIR while taking a look at its cover, and with Dracula himself appearing in the original poster. Be ready to be really underwhelmed, for this pretty obscure film from Czech Republic is obscure for a good reason.
The plot goes something like this: A foreign car manufacturer has created a whole new car design that is using human blood as fuel. Dr. Malek has realized from the start that there is something really fishy about this company, and is not at all happy when his colleague, Mima, has signed a contract with them to work as a rally driver. Dr. Malek comes in contact with another bizarre guy, a scientist, who looks more like a creepy uncle that you never would allow babysitting your kids. He also likes to sneak up on people while they shower. Fuck this guy. However, he is convinced that this Ferat lives on human blood. And in order to convince Dr. Malek what they’re dealing with, he puts on an old roll of Nosferatu to lecture him about vampires, as if he was a five year old. And nothing much really happens from here. We get a completely random sex scene where someone cuts himself on a broken bottle that happens to contain blood. There’s also a completely random scene where an old, disorientated grandma is run over by someone (off screen) during rush hour. Just because of shock value, I guess. Except it’s so poorly filmed that it isn’t shocking at all. The film builds up to a rather anticlimactic sequence with a rally racing which you probably couldn’t give a shit about unless you’re a big fan of cars and… well, rally racing.
I must also point out that this is not a comedy, or a parody, this is made in all seriousness with serious actors, dry as sandpaper and with really dull dialogue that doesn’t help much to keep the interest up. And to make it look more serious, Dr. Malek is played by a guy who looks like a clone of Bill Gates, and is as bland, wooden and uncharismatic as a potato. However, one has to be a complete mental imbecile to take any of this as seriously as the communist censorship board in the Czech Republic did by cutting away the only two scenes containing blood, and the only thing that reminded the viewer that this was actually a horror movie. Well, “horror” is a word that fits very loosely anyway. These scenes are now added back on the limited German DVD/Blu-ray release, but they’re too tame and downright weak and silly to add any form of shock value. And if you expect some great visuals here, there’s not much. Most of the scenes are filmed out in the broad daylight, mainly in the outskirts of Prague that comes off a bit cheap and lazy. I’m not sure what to make out of Der Autovampir, to be honest, or what the appeal is. There’s several eye-rolling and unintentionally funny moments here for sure, which is impossible for a film like this to avoid, but as a whole, you’re not missing out a damn thing unless you’re in for a few chuckles.
Director: Juraj Herz
Country & year: Czech Republic, 1982
Actors: Jirí Menzel, Dagmar Havlová, Jana Brezková, Petr Cepek, Jan Schmid, Zdenka Procházková, Blanka Waleská
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0083264/
City of the Living Dead is the first part of the Lucio Fulci Gates of Hell trilogy, which followed up with The Beyond and House By the Cemetery. But apart from sharing the theme of the dead being brought to life, with some small doses of inspiration from H.P Lovecraft and with actress Catriona MacColl starring in all three, they work well as separate films.
It’s a dark and stormy night when comic book artist Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs) works on his horror series Cellar Dweller. He sets his final drops of ink on a sequence where a young, half-naked damsel in distress runs through the woods and ends up trapped by a satanic, hairy monster. After Colin randomly quotes some obscure phrases from a book of witchcraft, he unconsciously manages to summon both the monster and the damsel who emerges right behind his back. While Herbert West..uhm, sorry, I mean Colin, runs frightened out of his studio, the monster kills the damsel off-screen. Since the monster was summoned from the drawing paper, Colin gets the brilliant idea to set the artwork on fire, which escalates into an inferno that kills them both. The rest of his artwork manage to survive, though.
Carol Anne has now moved to her uncle and aunt at the John Hancock Center in Chicago where she attends a special school for gifted children and visits a psychologist regularly. She would prefer to not talk about the past, but the shrink hypnotizes her to do so and can assure Carol Anne that talking about the past will make it go away. In this case it makes the dark forces enter her life again and a certain scary old man starts to manifest in mirrors and reflections. To quote Tangina: He’s back!
After losing the house, Steven also lost his job and the family is now completely broke, thus they have moved into Diane’s mother’s house. It’s hard times, but they do all they can to live a normal life. One day a mysterious old man named Kane, a creepy looking reverend, shows up in their life. And he is especially interested in Carol Anne.
The Freeling family of five, Steven, Diane and their children Carol Anne, Robbie and Dana, plus the dog Buzz, live a quiet family life in the town of Cuesta Verde. Their youngest daughter, Carol Anne, wakes up one night and starts talking to the TV in the living room while it’s on static, and strange events in the house starts happening during the next days. Their parakeet dies, furniture moves by itself, and one stormy night the dead tree in the back yard suddenly wakes to life, almost “eating” little brother Robbie while Carol Anne is sucked into the closet by supernatural forces and disappears. The family later hears her screams for help from a static TV channel, and decides to seek help from a group of parapsychologists in order to get her daughter back.