The Daily Dig: Teen Vamp (1989)

You’d be better off watching Jim Carrey’s “Once Bitten” or the comedy “Summer School” with horror elements than wasting time on “Teen Vamp”.

A high school teen visits a prostitute to rid himself of virginity but walks into the den of a vampire. Let’s dig into 1989’s TEEN VAMP, directed by Samuel Bradford!

As I See It

Clu Gulager’s over-the-top performance as The Reverend is one of, if not the only, redeeming quality of this film. It’s meant to be a teen comedy but doesn’t put enough juice into the jokes. It’s supposed to be a vamp flick but doesn’t follow the rules of its predecessors or try to establish its own, for that matter.

Doomed to be compared to the 1985 teen vamp flick Once Bitten, Teen Vamp didn’t benefit from the prescient casting that Once Bitten had with a young Jim Carrey. It also had a far inferior script.

The whole thing plays out like a high school play that was written by a student.

I hope, at the very least, they had fun making it, but there isn’t much coming across on screen. I just rewatched Summer School recently, which captures the eighties gore hound perfectly with the legendary tandem of Chainsaw and Dave. That film, which was a pure comedy, had more horror and better-executed gags than this horror film posing as a comedy.

It’s not easy to capture that type of lightning that Carl Reiner and the writing team behind TV’s Full House did with Summer School, but you would have hoped at least they would get their own genre right.

Famous Faces

Clu Gulager (The Revered) passed away at age 93 in 2022. He had a long and storied career, but I have to lead with my favorite film of all time: Return of the Living Dead, in which he played Burt, the proprietor of Uneeda Medical Supply. I’m also obligated to remind you he was in NOES 2 – Freddy’s Revenge as Mr. Walsh and the criminally underrated Tapeheads, which starred John Cusack and Tim Robbins.

Of Gratuitous Nature

I remember growing up in the late eighties and early nineties and hating films set in the fifties. It seemed like ancient history to me at the time. Everything about the aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way, and it still does. What’s crazy, and making me feel old now, is that contemporary films have a penchant for setting themselves in the eighties and nineties now (see Fear Street, etc.), and that timeline matches up with the same gap from the eighties to the fifties. “What’s old is new” never changes.

With Teen Vamp, there isn’t all that much of a reason for the fifties setting, in my opinion. Cars and clothes are really all the effects we see in that regard. There is not enough of a reason to have a time period piece.

Heartthrob

It’s going to be Clu Gulager for me. I hope he got a nice payday for this one. It makes me want to rewatch ROTLD again and again.

Ripe for a Remake

Pass.

Spawns

No progeny to report.

Where to Watch

There is a German, Region B, Blu-Ray release that flaunts “two bonus DVDs with two more scary films’ but doesn’t name them. It also has a booklet that features Peter Osteried’s “The Vampire”. It’s limited to an odd 222 pieces. Teen Vamp is currently available to stream on Apple TV+.