Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires is a stop-motion animation film created by Mike Mort about the eponymous hero, a cop on the edge in the mid-80s, looking for revenge for the death of his lady at the hands of ninjas. When people in the city start turning up dead, they think they have a grizzly serial killer on the loose, but when an old man named Abraham Van Rental shows up with a stake and tries to kill one of the victims who escaped her killers, Steel learns that these killings are the work of "trampires," the dreaded hybrid of tramps and vampires. At the same time, the precinct psychiatrist's attempts to help the force get in touch with their feelings is rendering them ineffective at fighting crime. That means it's now it's up to Steel and Van Rental to find the source of the trampires and take them all down.
Overall this is a fun time. For the most part the jokes about 80s action land, and land in a particularly smart and endearing way that I think all action fans will appreciate. On the other hand, the jokes about Steel and other guys dressing like women are dated and hacky, especially for 2018, and some of the sexual jokes were a little too "that friend you know who doesn't know how to dial it down," which in a movie like this you usually want, but, again, seeing Van Rental getting screwed by a pig/vampire is a bit much--another analogy is the comedian who's dying and hopes excessive profanity and jokes about sex will save them. As bad as that could be, this movie is full of jokes, and the fact that more land than don't means this works for me, and I think for action fans it's worth checking out.
We've all seen a lot of 80s action send-ups, and some are just so over-the-top--Stallone-style--that I would get it if you were skeptical of another one, but what I really loved about this film was how well they nailed them, even when they were over-the-top. I think the animation aspect of it helped too, you can do that over-the-top thing with stop-motion characters, and the animation lends an element of unreality that allows it to get away with the unreality of the action world in a way that a live-action unreality action world spoof would look gratuitously over-the-top, which would cause us to roll our eyes at those, when those same moments in this film feel more endearing.
One of the questions Will asked me on the pod was who my favorite cops on the edge are. The two I pulled off the top of my head were John McClane from the Die Hard films, and C. Thomas Howell's Mark Goddard in The Sweeper. Some other great ones in my mind are John Matuszak in One Man Force, Fred Williamson in any number of films where he played a Chicago cop in the 80s and 90s, and Dolph Lundgren's Chris Kenner in Showndown in Little Tokyo. Outside of the hacky sexual jokes or jokes about Steel dressing like a woman, this movie creates a caricature of our favorite cops on the edge that does the concept justice--but at the same time, it exists solely for this animated world created Mike Mort--there's no actor who could play a live-action Steel and make it work the way he works here. It's a testament to how well-conceived and executed Mort's vision is that it works so well.
The "trampire" aspect of this shouldn't be lost in all the great 80s action send-up talk, because it was a fun take on vampires that I thought really worked. It also allowed the film to be classified as a horror film, which meant horror films sites picked it up--and much more than the action sites according to the IMDb critic reviews section. I think the reason for that is horror sites review anything horror-related, whereas I think many action sites--myself included, though I'm more action by default because I do like to cover other genres--would look at the idea of an 80s action animated spoof and think it can't be good. Either that, or it just hasn't crossed enough of our radars. I hadn't heard of it at all until Will asked if I wanted to discuss on his pod, and then when I watched it, I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before. The problem is, there's just too much Dolph, Van Damme, Rothrock, etc. out there that needs reviewing, plus tons of actual 80s action movies we haven't done yet that's now becoming more available. Maybe if Dolph had voiced one of the characters we'd have known about it sooner--actually I know we would've.
Finally, no 80s action spoof/send-up would be complete without a fantastic soundtrack, and this film definitely delivered on that. My personal favorite was a Vixen track, who I loved during the Hair Band era, as ten-year-old Matt had crushes on all of them. It was a reminder of another element we’re missing in the current DTV age, whether it’s the New Metal/“Wildfire in the Streets” 2010s period, to the modern remixed/drum machine age, beautiful Hair Metal and 80s/90s-era rock added a layer that enhanced otherwise unremarkable actioners, and without it the movies are, well, just unremarkable. Take Wilding. Sure, Wings Hauser is fantastic, and the plot idea is ridiculous, but the great soundtrack with a Pat Benetar-esque singer giving us “Don’t Try to Stop Tomorrow” just makes it that much better. The problem is, with modern DTV budgets being slashed, getting a band to record in a studio is often out, which is a loss for all of us. My advice to modern DTV studios: cut one star from the tin, and find a group of aging rockers to give you two hard-driving tracks and one ballad.
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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