Daughter of Darkness Reviews

Horror veteran Stuart Gordon's DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS, a 1990 made for-TV movie released to home video in 1994, is a paltry chiller that makes much use of its gothic European settings and not much else. A creaky walk-through by Tony Perkins in the last stages of his career doesn't help. After her mother's death, attractive high school teacher Catherine Thatcher (Mia Sara) returns to Romania in search of the father she never knew. Armed only with a faded snapshot, she quickly butts heads with dashing embassy functionary Jack Devlin (Jack Coleman), and is adopted by Max (Deszo Garas), her very own English-speaking cab driver. Persistent questioning leads her to Anton Crainic (Perkins), a glass factory worker who remembers her father, and to Grigore (Robert Reynolds), a wolfish pop crooner tickling the ivories in a cheesy disco, to whom she feels a strange attraction. According to Crainic, Catherine's father was killed in a car wreck many years before. Yet the hospital records don't corroborate the story, and Romanians in the know attribute his death to the brutal, ubiquitous secret police, whose victims now approach roughly a million. After a couple of close calls with villainous Col. Massoff (Attila Lote), Devlin tries to put Catherine on a plane out of the country. Meanwhile, however, Grigore is revealed to be a practicing vampire, part of an ethnic bloodline thought to have died out in the Middle Ages (instead of fangs, he sports a screw-like protuberance that shoots out of his tongue). As Grigore's planned seduction of Catherine becomes a gallery performance for a subterranean coven, Anton reveals himself as both Catherine's father and prince of the bloodsuckers. He intervenes and facilitates her escape. Catherine then tries to rescue her father from torture at the hands of the other vampires, but she's betrayed by Max, who turns out to be the vampires' servant. Devlin arrives in time to save her from a fate worse than death. The film's central conceit--crossing the Romanian tradition of vampirism with Ceausescu's bloodthirsty secret police--generally holds up, in conception if not always in execution. Set in the summer of 1989, six months before the Romanian dictator's Christmas-day execution, and filmed on location in a currency-starved Bucharest, DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS aptly uses local color to reinvigorate the Carpathian origins of the story. Ultimately, however, amateurish production values seriously compromise the political allegory. As for horror, Gordon's fright effects aren't nearly as disturbing as the appearance of an obviously ailing Tony Perkins. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations.)