ADDICTED TO MURDER
(1995)

(From Joe Bob's Ultimate B Movie Guide)


Stylish little micro-budget shocker about a confused young boy who finds a sexy vampiress in his backyard chewing on an extra and ends up as a confused man living in a tacky walkup apartment in New York City, where he tries to figure out What Women Want. (Some want his blood, some want his body, and some just want him to fix their light switches.) Meanwhile, he's going through these changes that make it impossible for him to be a serial killer anymore. He's started to actually think about his victims. Bummer. Does it possibly have something to do with the ravishingly beautiful brunette vampire who taught him how to plunge cleavers into her stomach? Was it the alcoholic mother who made him wear a dress? Was it the babysitter who liked to molest him in front of her boyfriends? Is it the bitchy receptionist who treats him like dogmeat at work? Or maybe, just maybe, it's those hotties he brings home from the vampire disco. Mike McCleery plays the beefy handyman in a checked shirt who likes to troll the streets like a brooding process server, scoping the bars, looking for the mysterious "Rachel," obsessing over his failed marriage to the only woman he didn't want to kill. Writer/director/producer Kevin Lindenmuth, the one-man film industry of Brighton, Michigan, has some great spooky camera effects, and he intersperses the McCleery story with umpteen jillion flashbacks, dream visions, and talking-head TV interviews in which various experts describe why serial killers do what they do. Of course, none of them put forward the old Traumatized In His Youth By A Female Vampire Who Pawns Him Off On Her Vampire Sister So She Can Teach Him How To Suck Blood And Eat Flesh theory. But that one's probably not in the standard FBI profile. I didn't quite follow the part about why there are two female vampires obsessed with this guy, but it might have something to do with shooting the movie on weekends with actors who had day jobs. At any rate, one of the outstanding independent vampire efforts, with excellent slime-glopola makeup effects and a nice surprise ending. Ten dead bodies. Four undead bodies. No breasts. Nasty chest-scarring. Blood-drinking. Shoulder-chomping. Strangulation. Neck-snapping. Two instances of criminal child abuse. Stabbing. Cleaving. Body-part snacking. Gun barrage to the chest. Throat-slashing. Stomach-gouging. Multiple aardvarking. Chainsaw to the gizzards. The old hair-dryer bathtub electrocution. Arm rolls. Wooden-stake Fu. With Laura McLauchlin as the fangy chomping beauty who likes a good knife in the tummy ("I need to feed, Joel! Feed me!"), Gordon Linzner as the only FBI criminal psychologist who looks like he played in an eighties hair band, Lori Tomlinson as the uninhibited babysitter, Bernadette Pauley as the ex-wife who leaves messages on the answering machine like "I thought you should know that Randy's going to be with me, helping," Candice Meade as the annoying company secretary who treats everyone like crapola then says "Tell me you're not mad," Sasha Graham as the sexy jealous trampire he takes home to his apartment ("You're a hunter--you're a killer--drink me"). Three and a half stars.

 

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