Ebert Did It Better: Gasbag Reviews

Director Gilbert Adler
Screenplay Gilbert Adler, A.L. Katz, Dennis Miller
Starring Dennis Miller, Angie Everhart, Erika Eliniak, Chris Sarandon, Corey Feldman, Aubrey Morris, Phil Fondacaro, Juliet Reigh

I never was much into Tales From The Crypt. It was on HBO when I was not old enough to make the financial decisions in my family. I have always been a fan of Dennis Miller, so I watched this movie after buying it used from Blockbuster. So many times I watched this, just moving from one liner to one liner from Miller. He had already established himself on his own talk show for the cable channel. He didn’t want or need to be in this movie. And it shows.

The script is similar to Tarantino and Rodriguez’ From Dusk Till Dawn. Losers hear about a brothel out of town, the address turns out to be a funeral home with a party of vampires ongoing in the basement.

Miller wrote all of his lines in Bordello of Blood. If he hadn’t, it would have been incredibly hard to get through. As it stands, the feeling is somewhere between MST3K and soft core porn.

Miller’s batting average is around .750. When he hits, the rest of the cast feels like an inanimate punchline just walking into the rakes that Miller places in front of their slightly raised foot.

The only times that he whiffs is when he shares the screen with either of the women leads. Then it’s his turn to become inert. Still it’s all worth it to hear Miller utter the phrase “a wierd Duchovnian riff.”

Everhart is not an actress. Every line she utters feels like it’s take 32. It’s not her fault that Joel Silver thought supermodels were the next big acting movement after her then boyfriend Sylvester Stallone convinced him to give her the role of Lilith, the great Babylonian demon.

Eleniak, forever to be known as the Baywatch babe who jumped out of a cake in Under Siege, plays the churchy sister of one of the idiot brothel patrons (Feldman) who is turned into a vampire himself. One has to wonder if Feldman knew his career was never going to turn out the way he’d hoped when they told him only Miller could change the awful script.

There are some nice cameos (Sadler and Whoopi), a cheese-ball turn by Sarandon and several bad jokes to accompany the bad acting. I think I will always be able to suffer through this, if only because I know Miller is suffering along with me. And, such a trooper, he’s making it just bearable for everyone. Only just, though.

(* out of *****)