In the first part of the Subspecies tetralogy we witnessed powerful vampire Radu attacking a couple of students in the castle located in the heart of Romania. By the end of the movie, he was successfully killed by one of the female students and his good ol' brother which started a love connection with her. Part two is here, and Radu is back.
Subspecies sequel follows up to the storyline of the first movie in the exact moment the first one ended. What was once a happy end - combined coffin sleeping by a final girl-turned vampire and her new man, now becomes a revenge scene. As a result of a rather nice special effects job, veins from his severed head get connected to the rest of the body and his body parts combine back to a full-fledged vampire. He is once again trying to get the Bloodstone (hence the title), but the girl manages to take it and departs his kingdom. She dosn't go very far, just takes the train and visits the Bucharest. Radu follows her and we are off to enjoy a cat and mouse game between them.
The overall atmosphere and the look and feel of the movie follows the first movie, as well as the whole Full Moon "template" for the movies from that period. In case you are not familiar with Full Moon, this is a good thing, as they always had the ability to create rather good horrorish feeling from low budgets. Besides the total overhall of the Bloodstone, which now looks much better, we also get a new actress playing the female lead. The new one (Denice Duff) was very solid as Michelle - girl turning into a vamp, so the producers also got her for the next two sequels. Yes, she was probably also cheap to hire...
 
As the story just concerning Radu and Michelle would be tiresome, we get a couple of new figures - Michelle's sister coming from the States to check out what is happening, vampire's mother which deserves and gets a whole paragraph later and a wannabe Van Helsing type of a guy who tries to off Radu. The performance of these actors was bleak, while I need to note that Anders Hove as Radu was once again a perfect choice.
Unfortunately the whole shebang relating to owning the Bloodstone doesn't do any good for the movie, as besides some mediocre atmospheric scenes, Subspecies II didn't had anything special to offer. To tell you the truth, very fast the things become quite dull. Switching majority of action from a spooky countryside to the large town didn't result with anything positive. The creepy feeling from the first movie was lost and it was replaced with some generic scenes such as Michelle catching her first victim in a heavy metal club. This scene ended up truly hilarious, as I never saw faker headbanging in my life.
When you definitely think Radu cannot win, we get introduced to his mother, painfully old sorceress that looks like Crypt Keepers grandmother's grandmother. She looks really funny, as it appears that the parts of her makeup are just plastered across her head in a random way. Mommy knows the best and tries to help Radu in finally getting a victory, but you know, bad guys almost never win...
I watched the first two parts of the series back to back, so throughout the movie I was trying to realize what the movie did better or worse than the original. The result was that overall this sequel was a step back. It wasn't entertaining enough and lost all the (rare) good things the first movie had. My main problem with it was that the storyline was boring and didn't even try to provide some creepiness or excitement to the viewers.
By
Back to Horror Review Archive
|
ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Subspecies 2
MOVIE YEAR: 1993
DIRECTOR: Ted Nicolaou
WRITING CREDITS: Ted Nicolaou
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Anders Hove, Denice Duff, Kevin Spirtas
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 107 min
RATING: 3/10
Subspecies II: Bloodstone Website/IMDB Click here
Subspecies II: Bloodstone Trailer
|
