Vampirella (1996) Review

Vampirella was a comic book created in 1969 by nerd overlord Forrest J. Ackerman and the title character was designed by feminist artist Trina Robbins. Vampirella was an alien/vampire/femme fatale and became incredibly popular, turning into an icon of horror comics and monstrous females. To this day, Vampirella lives in the form of comics and in pop culture but there was a film adaptation made in 1996 that left people baffled.

Directed by Corman alumnus Jim Wynorski (The Lost Empire, The Wasp Woman, Murderbot, Hard to Die, Dinosaur Island), the film was widely given bad reviews and never managed to achieve any kind of notoriety, most people even forgetting it's existence, or simply labeling it as a disposable piece of camp and a generic pick for a bad movie night. For the creators it was just a chance to make a movie based on a known IP, destined to be dumped into Showtime's Roger Corman presents series. 

Is it fun and cheesy or just badly made? Let's see.

Planet Drakulon is being attacked by vampiric rebels, they are led by the fiendish Vlad, who manages to escape to earth and plans on emptying humanity's blood. Vampirella, previously known as Ella, goes to earth looking to defeat Vlad and his minions. These are elements roughly taken from the comics in a very modified fashion.

Unsurprisingly, while not a major classic, the film manages to be entertaining and digestible enough, especially when compared to a lot of bad movies of its kind. One can see that the people involved were at least aware of what they were making and always intended for it to be as campy and exaggerated (or meager) as it could possibly be.

One thing that it has going for it is how much fanservice it has for the movie nerds out there, it's super referential. Wynorski uses the film more as a way to pay tribute to classic and not so classic horror/sci-fi flicks of the campy and cheap variety, using all of the techniques and implementing the gaffs one might expect from the model. Vampirella even meets and saves her creator, Forrest J. Ackerman, when she first arrives on earth. Another highlight is when director John Landis makes a cameo and drops some titles in one brief scene. It's all just about having fun with the tropes and creating a playful and self-aware game that pays homage to the type of B-movies that originally inspired the Vampirella comic to begin with. It's charming in that way but not everyone can be in on the joke. 

It´s a bit of a deviation from the known Vampirella storyline, more so than one would expect, a lot of the set up entails space politics and long, drawn out dialogue scenes that resemble the typical DTV outing more than the epic fantasy horror film it promises. In that regard, is kind of a let down for a lot of the first act, only really serving the goodies once it gets going about 10 or 20 minutes into the picture. Even then, Vampirella (the best part of the picture) isn't as prominent as she should be, mostly being buried beneath waves of dry dialogue sequences with generic bad guys and such.

I also think that Vampirella's outfit wasn't very well done here. It definitely looks as cheap as it should, but it's so crude and shoddy that it simply comes off as feeble instead of gloriously extravagant, which is what I was expecting.

Wynorski wasn't very happy about Talisa Soto being the titular blood-sucking heroine but he had to use her for contractual reasons. I can see why he wasn't crazy about her, she does sort of look a bit like Vampirella but she doesn't have the screen presence a woman like her should have, she looks more like a normal girl in a cosplay than anything else. Still, she isn't terrible in the picture, but her performance (while not awful) just wasn't up to the task.

At the end of the film we are promised a second film titled Dark Avenger of Death but there were no sequels as Wynorski lost the rights to the character a long time ago. However, in 2021 Dynamite Entertainment announced another picture and maybe a TV series but we still haven't seen any footage, trailer, images or even official material from these projects. While Vampirella is all but forgotten, I still think a more proper and bigger movie should be made about her.