Reclusive vampires lounge in a lonely American town. They wear sun cream to protect themselves. A descendant of Van Helsing arrives with hilarious consequences.
Vampire movies these days take themselves way too seriously. While the Twilight series has a loyal and rabid following, as does Blade, they present themselves to the world in an almost Shakesperian manner, never truly acknowledging just how contemplative and humorless they are. 1989’s “Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat” takes you back to a time when bloodsuckers didn’t take themselves as sedately as they do today.
Bruce Campbell plays Ethan Jefferson, a descendant of the Van Helsing family who has been searching for years for the mysterious Jozek Mardulak (David Carradine), a hermit-like vampire who lives in the small desert town of Purgatory. When Ethan finally discovers the town, he quickly learns that all of its inhabitants are vampires and use sunblock so they can move around freely during the day, giving the impression of ordinariness.
Also arriving in town the same day as Ethan is David (Jim Metzler), his wife Sarah (Morgan Brittany), and their two young daughters. He is the engineer whose schematics were used in the creation of the town’s artificial blood-making facility under the guise of medical purposes, a warehouse built by Jozek Mardulak as a way for the vampires to produce a substitute for human blood. Mardulak wants to be forgiven for his vampiric life and yearns to form allies and friendships with humans.
The machinery at the blood-making facility is not working properly and David is there to fix it but he comes across Sarah’s old college sweetheart Shane (Maxwell Caulfield), one of the town’s strongest and meanest vampires, who swears that he will take Sarah back. When Mardulak’s second-in-command, Jefferson (John Ireland), decides to go against him and assembles his own army of vampires with the intent of killing Mardulak and his followers as they desire to go back to the old ways of hunting humans, the stage is set for what will surely become an unforgettable night.
“Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat” follows in the footsteps of another great monster movie that came out that same year, “Tremors,” and they are both highly enjoyable. Honestly, I had never heard of this film until Lionsgate sent me a review screener and while I was a little apprehensive as the trailer made it appear ludicrous and unintelligent, I had an absolute blast with it. David Carradine is in top form as the town’s leader who drops a bombshell on them in the last act and Bruce Campbell seems like he walked out of “The Evil Dead” and wandered into this story by mistake. Deborah Foreman, Maxwell Caulfield, M. Emmet Walsh, and Morgan Brittany make up the terrific supporting cast, and if tongue-in-cheek vampire films are your forte, I would highly recommend “Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat,” you will be pleasantly surprised.
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