Dynamite Entertainment gives us another Vampirella Christmas special directly following Vampirella Helliday Special 2024, this 2025 edition is also written by Frank Tieri and features art by Mariano Benitez Chapo.
After Vampirella left Christmas suspended a year ago, the Council of Holidays pays a little visit to the former resident of Drakulon. Turns out, the holiday representatives aren't trying to harm Vampirella but they are going to take her to the other holidays so Christmas can resume, since the lack of a heavy holiday puts too much weight on the rest. Vampirella agrees to save Christmas and goes on a search for a now stripper Santa to seize the North Pole and take back Christmas Town.
Again with the delirious and crude racy humor, this enjoyable little piece of holiday parody turns violent and hilarious with ease, making it a digestible and more than serviceable experience for those who already had a good time with the previous entry. Inventive with the same old concept of nasty holidays and Christmas, it never overstays its welcome and actually delivers quite fast on the raunchy and silly situations or gags you wanna see, a favorite is people referring to Vampirella as a "vampire hooker."
Recommended for Vampirella fans and those looking for a nice Christmas special, you don't even need to read the past issue.
Dynamite brings us Vampirella: Halloween Horror, the obligatory Halloween special with our beloved vampy. It’s written by Liam Johnson (Judge Dredd Megazine, Cadet Dredd) and illustrated by Jordan Michael Johnson (The Army of Darkness: Ash The Author).
Vampirella faces a mysterious enemy who targets homeless young boys and girls with troubled lives, ages them rapidly in a manner of seconds and makes them die of old age, supposedly "relieving" them from their pain. Drakulon's former inhabitant temporarily stops her usual vampire hunt to focus on this strange new entity.
A creepy, occasionally funny and sentimental short journey into Vampirella's emotional scars as well as her way of dealing with such a horrible past and overcoming it. Wonderfully tight and captivating storyline with enough horror imagery and emotional power to grab the reader.
Visually appealing and with likable characters that represent very precisely the poignant themes it deals with. Vampirella never runs out of possibilities for stories and the exact reverse of her this story features as the antagonist is a very intriguing idea that although could have gone even further perfectly showcases the philosophical conflict of the comic quite efficiently and in a very economic manner.
Recommended for a quick but enjoyable read this October.
This new Vampirella Christmas Special was written by Frank Tieri (several Deadpool comics, Red Sonja comics, Vampironica New Blood) and illustrated by Mariano Benitez Chapo (Savage Tales 2022) and Pasquale Qualano (Hell Sonja, Samurai Sonja, Gargoyles Quest, Harley Quinn Road Trip Special).
First we see Vampirella arrive at a house just in time to save some kids from an evil, bloodthirsty Santa Claus with fangs. We are introduced to the narrator: Snowman Steve, who tells the story of how this came to be. Elves and workers at Santa's workshop have been dying recently, a vampire is the prime suspect. However, Ms. Claus doesn't believe it. Vampirella is then called in to stop the newly vampiric Santa Claus once and for all.
It's a hilarious and irreverent Christmas satire, it hits all the expected bits (Santa's workshop being exploitive, Santa being sleazy with a bad marriage) but executes the jokes with such good writing that it makes them refreshing once more. Some quick and witty humor, sometimes with references but never to an annoying degree.It's short but charismatic, Vampirella is her usual cheeky self and causes a lot of carnage.
It's a clever and well done alternative Christmas special that its audience can appreciate. If you like Vampirella, you can get this one and have a good time.
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.
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