In numerous past reviews, I've expressed my loathing for films that take a good premise and make a bad movie out it, thereby spoiling the premise for anyone who might have come along and made a good movie out of it. Well, shot-on-video, direct-to-video (do we have to start saying "direct to DVD" now) horror film Bloody Tease is a fine example of such a film. If you ask me what a film is about, and I say, "vampire strippers," then that immediately sets up some simple but definitive expectations about the film. It shouldn't be too hard to deliver on those. Unfortunately, I have a long-reaching familiarity with peanut-budget shot-on-video horror films, so I know that unless it stars Cash Flagg Jr., then the movie is probably going to disappoint me by failing to deliver on almost every level.

But still, vampire strippers? How hard is it to pull that off?

Well, things go wrong almost immediately as we discover that this is one of those strip clubs where the women don't actually get naked. Yeah, there's nothing a man likes more after a long day than paying a bunch of money to see fully clothed women dance listlessly on stage. I assume that most of the women in this movie were strippers to begin with (which means they came in with at least some sort of talent, unlike the male stars), so why the director couldn't throw an extra twenty bucks their way to actually get them to, you know, strip during the stripping scenes, is beyond me. Not that you need gratuitous nudity to make a movie good, but hell, it never hurts. And gratuitous nudity can salvage an otherwise irredeemable film from time to time (but not, as H.O.T.S. taught us, every time).

Bloody Tease plays strictly by the established laws of the imagination-free shot-on-video movie: we get scenes of non-nude stripping, then someone gets bit. There's your standard issue "you killed my brother" vampire killing drifter. There's some college meatheads to act as food. The sets look like someone's unfinished basement. The acting --well, let's just say the strippers are best actors. For some reason, you have to stab these vampire sint he eye, presumably because that's an easier gore effect to pull off than a big ol' sucking chest wound. There's some OK special effects, but any SOV film can deliver those these days. Eventually, the movie gets around to some gratuitous boob shots, but by then the level of boredom will have ground down all but the stoutest and/or most desperate of viewers.

The one thing this movie does well is light a fire under my ass and make me think, "You call that a vampire stripper movie? Buddy, I'll show you a vampire stripper movie!" So now I guess I have to start casting.

Director Brad Sykes is practically a one-man shot-on-video production studio, and like many of the auteurs working in the SOV DTV arena, he shows a remarkable skill for not getting any better as he progresses through film after film. Still, as bad as these movies are, I admire the "Hell, let's just go make a movie" bravado that gets them done. I mean, I'm giving Bloody Tease one of my rare bad reviews, but it's not like I didn't go and add all of Sykes' other films to my Netflix queue. And not only did I add them -- I'm actually looking forward to them. Because I have a weakness for this stuff, and I have a fondness for the people who work in the medium. They get movies made by any means necessary, and even when the movie is bad (and Bloody Tease is bad, but lord knows I've seen a hell of a lot worse), I almost always garner some sort of entertainment out of it simply because it's all so familiar. I'd even watch Bloody Tease again. It's like visiting the crappy old neighborhood where you grew up (unless you grew up in a nice neighborhood, or out in the woods raised by feral pigs, like me). Hey, old Mickey the Drunk is still hanging out behind the IGA.

Bloody Tease -- you're my Mickey the Drunk.

And seriously -- I'm going to make a vampire stripper movie.