Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter

I’m going to be honest here and tell you that when I was tasked with reviewing Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. Look, I’m a professional and I’m going to give a movie a fair shake when I review it, and I’m going to grade it on its own terms. Whether it's The Brutalist or Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter, I'm going to give it the same level of attention that I give anything else.

When it comes to schlocky cinema, I’m a very picky person. I love so-called “bad” movies and especially “so bad they’re good” movies. But there’s a trickiness to them. I’m less enthusiastic about self-aware “bad” movies that aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just lazy, and they coast on a kind of tongue-in-cheek-branded badness that seems cultivated and tailor-made for cult status. It doesn’t feel organic, and I don’t buy it. What I love is a bad movie that is trying its hardest to be good, but somehow or another, it just doesn’t work out. When I saw the title Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter, I fully expected some goofy, half-assed movie that hid its true intentions behind a veil of cynical irony.

I was not prepared to enjoy Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter as much as I did. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a completely successful film on its own terms and has a lot of issues that plague movies with a budget this low. At a pretty lean running time of 93 minutes, it feels a bit overlong. Some of the acting is… let’s be generous and just say “not great”. Ditto, some of the dialogue, some of the plotting, and blah-blah-blah. When you’re sitting down to watch a movie called Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter, you’re there to see a guy dressed as a priest, wielding a samurai sword, dispatching the undead in gory, inventive ways. On that level, the film delivers - again and again and again.

Anything else the movie does well is just a bonus, and it turns out that the movie is interested in more than just violence and sex, broaching some serious subjects and doing so with aplomb. Our titular priest/vampire hunter is after a specific gang of vampires who are portrayed as sympathetic and yearn for more than a life in pursuit of blood. They understand their addiction to the life of the innocent and try to rationalize their parasitic relationship with humans, and at one point, even try to view them as more than just food. No, they believe that one species is just as crucial to survival as the other, that they’re two sides to the same coin. Meanwhile, our “hero” often goes too far in his pursuit of justice, and that relentlessness blurs the line between good and evil. It was surprising how nuanced it was in its portrayal.

Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter has less in common with self-aware schlock and more in common with a good old-fashioned adventure tale. One part spaghetti western, one part Robert Rodriguez, with a dash of John Carpenter, it manages to wring a lot from its simple premise. And if you’re able to forgive it for some less-than-stellar production values, you might just find yourself entertained enough to tap into its deeper thoughts. With a lead role anchored by the indispensable Tim Thomerson, it has that kind of wild, punk rock ethos of Full Moon’s early 90s oeuvre like Dollman.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter slays the undead in a single-disc release from ETR and OCN Distribution. The disc is housed in a standard case with reversible cover art. On one side is a comic book-styled image of the priest wielding a sword, and on the other side is a more salacious image of scantily-clad, buxom vampire women.

Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter began as a simple restoration of the direct-to-video flick Live Evil, which was shot on Super 16mm film. During the restoration process, it turned into a much more ambitious project, rescanning the film negatives, doing a total overhaul and bringing the overall look of the movie back to its filmic roots, instead of the digital video presentation it had been unceremoniously dropped onto previously. Finally, some reshoots were performed, some ADR work recorded, and new artwork commissioned, which restored the story closer to director Mark Terry’s original vision. I never saw Live Evil, but the Blu-ray special features compare video quality and the difference between versions is night and day. Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter isn’t aggressively gorgeous or anything, but the work that has gone into restoring the picture is painstaking and helps it achieve a wonderful look and feel from another era. It has a genuine aesthetic of a more polished picture from the golden era of direct-to-video flicks shot straight onto 16mm and printed onto VHS, where it suffered significantly less loss in quality than its big-budget 35mm counterparts.

Along with the video presentation, a full restoration was also performed on the audio mix. Viewers have the option between a 5.1 surround mix encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA and a 2.0 stereo track encoded in Dolby Digital. The stereo track is great for anyone without an external sound system and just using their TV speakers, but the 5.1 surround mix takes full advantage of an immersive soundstage. The sound design is inventive and fun, both subtle and slam-bang in equal measure. Instead of simply being content in playing through the musical score on the front and rear of the soundstage, instead, it pipes in certain musical cues through the satellite speakers, like a blasting trumpet or a percussive beat, so it feels like you’re being surrounded by a series of performers instead of just a musical score as a single amorphous entity. Many offscreen cues like spoken dialogue by a character just behind the camera will ping the rears, as well as a creepy bump in the night to help add to a moment of tension-building.

Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter is loaded with special features that dive into the film’s production history and how it went from an unremarkable little flick like Live Evil and was eventually resurrected as the Blu-ray we see today. There are two feature-length audio commentary tracks, a whole series of featurettes, deleted scenes, and trailers.

• Audio Commentary – Director Mark Terry

• Audio Commentary – Editor Michael A. Hoffman

• The Movie That Wouldn’t Die: Car Chases (HD 11:22)

• The Movie That Wouldn’t Die: Film Restoration (HD 22:35)

• The Art of Samurai Priest (HD 1:34)

• “Kyle the Coyote” Video Book (HD 7:53)

• Restoring the Negatives (HD 4:50)

• Almost Samurai Priest: Don Calfa (HD 20:15)

• Q&A: The Artwork of Samurai Priest (HD 40:22)

• Music & Score

• Trailers

• Artwork Gallery

It’s refreshing to see a movie like Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter take itself… well, perhaps “seriously” isn’t the right word here, but it does take itself seriously as being a piece of entertainment. It’s not a dour, humorless work, on the contrary, it’s quite funny in moments and has an overall air of levity, but rather, it doesn’t cop out in some cynical bid toward self-deprecation. It wears its influences on its sleeve and instead of lampooning the silliness of those features, it embraces those absurd highs in a manic amalgamation of blood, nudity, and anti-heroic posturing. Samurai Priest Vampire Hunter looks and sounds great, and has a ton of special features to sink your fangs into. For anyone looking for a fun, no-budget horror movie, it’s Recommended.