Ghouls (2017)

aka Vamps

Original title: Vurdalaki

Russia, some time in the 18th Century (I believe). Nobleman Andrej (Konstantin Kryukov), an aide-de-camp of the Czar, and his cowardly comic relief servant have travelled far from Russia’s capital to find the priest Lavr (Mikhail Porechenkov) who has been exiled to a small village. Apparently, the Czar has changed his mind about the man and wants him back. Lavr doesn’t want to come, however, for the village and its surroundings are in dire need of him. After a long absence, the local Vampire count – cape and all – has returned; not only to rekindle his traditional reign of terror but to become a daywalker.

His plan, as far as we will learn it, is to first re-establish a foothold in the area and then grab and bite young, beautiful Milena (Aglaya Shilosvkaya). Milena, you see, is a half-vampire (for once not called a dhampir here), and once turned, she - or her blood, the film’s not terribly clear on that account and the subtitles I watched it with are more than a little suspicious – will provide all the daywalking power a vampire can hope for.

Fortunately for the world, Lavr is the two-fisted stake-wielding kind of priest, and once he’s fallen in love (as is obligatory) and starts believing in vampires, Andrej’s pretty handy at murdering bloodsuckers too. Because this was made in the 2010s, Milena’s not a wilting violet either, so our big bad has his work cut out for him.

Sergey Ginzburg’s Vurdalaki feels like an attempt to reconcile urban fantasy and more traditional gothic horror – this is supposedly based on Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s novella “Family of the Vourdalak” like the best episode of Bava’s Black Friday and does indeed feature some core elements of the piece if in a changed context - for a contemporary audience, and while I don’t think it’s a completely successful film, I do think it is a very entertaining one certainly worth anyone’s time, showing some very good ideas besides the half-baked ones.

The film’s main problem apart from two romantic leads who seem to be cast more for their exceeding prettiness than for their thespian gifts - in itself of course a tradition in much of gothic horror – is that it not always manages to fuse the gothic mood it aptly creates –particularly in the earlier vampire scenes - with the urban fantasy tendency to create a somewhat lame parallel mythology that seems much too fascinated with explaining its own mechanisms. At least, it never goes as far down the urban fantasy rabbit hole as to present a hunky vampire special forces guy nor an eminently marriageable alpha werewolf. Whereas the film’s urban fantasy elements really want explain themselves to you (please don’t run away!), the gothic does of course live on the ambiguous, on supernatural powers that aren’t clearly categorized and on a sense of doom and dread.

I’m also not terrible happy with the big more action movie style final stand our heroes get up to near the end. There’s a lot of excited and exciting build-up to it, but once it actually starts, it’s short, not terribly exciting and goes out on a whimper. It certainly doesn’t help here that the film suddenly decides the up until then competent and active Milena shouldn’t participate in her own final defence.

While all these problems – also adding the painful comic relief guy – are there and accounted for, this might make Vurdalaki sound quite a bit less enjoyable than it actually is. Particularly its first hour contains many an effective scene in the gothic style given a Russian twist selling the feel of a village under an invisible pall more often than not. The generally beautiful – and by night appropriately creepy – landscape location shots certainly add to this too.


The scenes – you can imagine which ones – that really parallel the Tolstoy story are very effectively done, achieving an undertone of dread that might not be Bava-esque but is certainly working well, emphasising the horror of betrayal when family member feeds on family member without feeling the need to make it explicit. And while the action movie tendencies sometimes feel a bit grating, Ginzburg does have a decent eye for swashbuckling and even a cheesy heroic death or two, so these scenes – apart from the last stand sequence – are at least fun to watch. Plus, how many modern vampire movies remind one at least a little of Captain Kronos?