YMMV / John Carpenter's Vampires

• Awesome Music: The main theme.
• Broken Base: Out of all the movies directed by John Carpenter, Vampires remains his most divisive. Some see it as one of his most under-appreciated movies with a fun plot and great cast of characters that deserves better, whereas others claim it’s one of his weakest films with a sluggish pace and Unfortunate Implications regarding the treatment of its female lead, and a continuation of his decline as a director in the ‘90s.
• Complete Monster:
  • John Carpenter's Vampires:
    • Jan Valek is a sadistic predator with a merciless taste for blood and mass murder, boasting how much he has enjoyed the carnage and how many people he has fed on for centuries. Anyone who stands in his way is either killed or used to achieve many of his dark schemes. At a motel, he initiates a brutal, relentless, blood-drenched massacre of almost all of Jack Crow's team and the prostitutes they hired for the night. He and his followers slaughter and butcher a whole group of harmless monks, with Valek personally beheading one even after he tells him the whereabouts of the Berzier Cross. His goal is to become truly immortal so that he may extend his reign of terror forever.
    • Cardinal Alba is a seemingly benevolent member of the Vatican and Jack Crow's superior who grew to fear death. Renouncing his faith in God and joining forces with Jan Valek, Alba took to assisting Valek in his plan to acquire the Black Cross and help him gain immunity from sunlight in return for the chance to become a vampire, even allowing Valek to slaughter all in his path to accomplish his plan. Proudly selling out the entire human race for immortality, Alba even attempts to use Jack as the final key to awaken the Black Cross's power.
  • Vampires: Los Muertos: Una is a sadistic vampire queen who tries to enact a ritual to make vampires immune to sunlight, leaving dozens dead behind her. Devouring people for pleasure on the side, Una uses Bullet Time to tear out the throat of everyone in a diner, before massacring a monastery of priests and using their ravaged remains to decorate the fountain, later slaughtering a bar full of people and kidnapping a priest to burn him alive in the ritual-–the first having failed-–and continuing on in frustration when her target reveals he isn't even a priest.
  • Vampires: The Turning: Niran is the master of the jai tham vampires that kill humans for the fun of it and war with the benevolent phi song neng vampires. The origins of this war and the jai tham date back centuries when Niran was a warlord known as the "master of death"; he desired the vampire mistress Sang, killed her husband and child to have her to himself, and was turned into a vampire in retaliation. In the present, Niran has his vampires cause mayhem through murderous parties, locking and leaving numerous prisoners to rot away; he kidnaps an innocent woman to torture her via a slow and painful vampiric transformation, something he's done to "recruit" all his followers.
• Ho Yay: In Vampires: Los Muertos between Zoe and Una.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In Vampires: Los Muertos, a female prostitute (actually a vampire) is staked through the mouth, staked through the chest and then her head cut off, all by Bliss, and left to burn in the rising sunlight.
  • Before the reveal that both were actually evil vampires, the prostitute was threatened by her male customer with rape and murder if she didn't do what he said. Before they were stopped by Bliss.
  • In the chapel dinner, Bliss spits out his drink and falls out of his seat after experiencing a frightening vision: various evil vampires right where the ministers sat, eating human hearts and drinking blood. It's quite a Jump Scare.
  • An old man with a gun confronts the vampires out in his land before getting his chest and stomach slashed open by Una and his mouth stretched out to inhumane limits for devouring.
  • The vampires in the cathedral Bliss and Sancho enter. One sleeping under a table before their eyes pop open and they're roped into the sunlight, kicking and screaming. Another attacking from the ceiling and getting dissected by Bliss. And the third staked through the heart and moved into the sunlight, also screaming.
  • Una bursting through a window and slitting many of the restaurant patrons throats quick. By the time Bliss steps out armed, they're all dying.
  • Bliss and Zoe discovering the church full of blood trails and pieces of the several dead priests — brutally murdered by Una and stacked up in a pile by the fountain.
  • The group of evil vampires breaking into a bar, stringing up a man with lights hanging over a pool table, ripping open his neck and drinking his blood.
  • Derek's eyes turning pitch black and popping open complete with a Scare Chord as he becomes half-vampire due to a blood transfusion.
• Sequelitis: Most people aren't aware the sequels exist. John Carpenter not being involved in them doesn't help either.
• Special Effect Failure: When vampires are first pulled into sunlight, they don't burst into flame, but instead appear to light Roman candles up their coat sleeves. Eventually they'll fully ignite but the initial effects for each sunlight ignition are laughable.
  • Near the end of the movie Jack, Montoya, and the priest are clearing out the jailhouse. Just before one of the vampires explodes in the sunlight, it's obviously shown to be some sort of mannequin/rag doll. Also, when the camera cuts to Jack reacting to the explosion, you can see that it's actually his stunt double.
  • When the cross Jack is attached to at the climax of the film is de-rooted and dragged along the road it's clearly a dummy standing in for James Woods.
  • Carpenter himself pointed one out on the commentary track for the film’s DVD release: the smoke in the background during the scene where Jack buries the heads of the team is too small to be from the hotel burning a ways from where Jack stops. This was due to wind making it difficult to get a big bellow of smoke that Carpenter wanted.
• The Un-Twist: Cardinal Alba being the traitor might be a surprise if he wasn't the only other character in the movie who kept acting suspicious in his only scene before the reveal.

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