'Salem's Lot is one Stephen King's better novels, and great vampire fiction. Big recommendation if you need something spooky to read this month. In 1979 a primetime miniseries directed by Tobe Hopper aired on CBS. That movie is a classic, holds up too. In 1987 Warner Bros decided to make a sequel, A Return to Salem's Lot. Clearly they did not want to spend too much money on it. The resulting sequel was... less classic, let's say.
While the title claims to be "Returning" this movie has none of the Salem's Lot characters. I assumed this movie would be about Ben Mears and Mark Petrie returning to the fully-vampired town of Jerusalem's Lot and getting revenge. (That does happen in the novel.) Oh no. A Return to Salem's Lot has none of the book's or first movie's characters. It has nothing to do with Stephen King at all, really. Maybe there are two Jerusalem Lots in Maine that both got attacked by vampires? The legendary genre film director Larry Cohen went his own way with this movie. And oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy. We got a weird one today.
I knew A Return to Salem's Lot would be pretty fucking wild just from the first shot after the opening credits. This movie does not start in Maine. It instead starts in the Amazon Rainforest where a ruthless anthropologist, Joe (Michael Moriarty) films a tribe of "savages" performing a human sacrifice. Everybody hates Joe because he's generally a scummy jerk. His estranged son, Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed) is a filthy-mouthed wiseass with a thick New York accent. Joe is saddled with Jeremy and takes the boy up to Salem's Lot, trying to start a new life. Instead they discover the town is infested with vampires. Old-money WASP vampires. Vampires who have child weddings and drink cow blood. Turns out they want Joe to write their Bible for them. Yeah.
A Return to Salem's Lot is probably a more interesting movie to review than to see. It isn't very good as a scary vampire movie, but it is great as an off-the-rails wild one. I mean, the kid Jeremy starts the movie by cursing at his father, is all of twelve but gets to drive their car, and later decides he wants to be a child vampire. It gets even better when seventy-year-old Samuel Fuller shows up as Van Meer, a grouchy Ashkenazi Jewish old man who has taken a break from hunting Nazis to hunt vampires. Van Meer has seen it all, and is not worried at all about a whole town of vampires. When one jumps on the hood of his car, he casually lowers his window to reach around and shoot it with his pistol. Replacing the windshield is expensive. I *LOVE* Van Meer. Van Meer is who I want to be when I get old - taking no shit, but getting the job done.
I should note that much of A Return to Salem's Lot's score is pretty clearly ripped-off from The Exorcist. Also baby Tara Reid plays Amanda, one of the child vampire brides offered to Jeremy. Apparently vampires can get pregnant too since Joe knocks one up. The deeper layers of biology is pretty unclear. Thankfully Stephenie Meyer would sort all that out decades later with her vampire baby epic.
I struggle to fully recommend A Return to Salem's Lot since it is a bit slow and cheap. It is a vampire movie with few scares and exactly one really great monster effect, used very rarely. But you never get an uninteresting movie from Larry Cohen. If you want some of his flavor but in a more digestible package, check out The Stuff or Q: The Winged Serpent. But I am glad I found a movie like this. This is the kind of bizarre lost cultural object I live for.
Next Time: From Beyond (1986), my first rewatch of the month.
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