Les Vampires (1915)

"Mleanh! About as spooky as a 14 year old poetry writing goth!"

Genre: Silent Crime Action Adventure Thriller Drama Serial (France)

Starring: Musidora, Edouard Mathé

Directed By: Louis Feuillade

Overview: The classic French series about a gang of jewel thieves and the reporter hunting them down.

Acting: The three real players are the reporter, his now-straight sidekick and Irma Vep. God. Why do these people spend so much time talking in a silent film? It's sad to watch them doing charades half the time, and when one of them keeps looking right at the camera? No, no, no.
Rating: 3

Cinematography: The same old static shots over and over, the same angles the same everything. The only good effects were the stunts and then they went and killed them by showing them to us for minutes at a time. I get that your climbing down a rope or up a drain pipe, fine, I'm over it. The guns however, nice touch, I quite liked them.
Rating: 4

Script: There was so much dialogue taking place, that after a full minute of discussion, you'd think that there would be one little line to explain what they've just decided. No. Weak, so very weak. How this stood the test of time, I have NO clue, this film series is NOT important.
Rating: 3

Plot: This is the best part of the movie, and the extended time it took to tell it killed it. S couple neat stories, but overall this thing had no direction. Give a man a budget and he can do something with it. Think about giving your money to someone with an imagination, I say. Blah!
Rating: 5

Mood: Poison and murder, safecracking and forgery plots aside, the mood was ruined by the slow delivery. SO SLOW. I don't need to see you spell out words ever so slowly. I don't need to see you laying out fuse and chasing oil splotches for a full 4 minutes. Filler, filler, filler.
Rating: 4

"Honey, I appreciate this Avant-Garde cape, but it's rather heavy..."

Overall Rating: 38% (Sucks You DRY! And Not In ANY Good Way!)

Aftertaste: 440 minutes, four tapes, and boy did it sure take a long time to get into. All the cloak and dagger stuff is cool, but the film quality and the convoluted plots don't hold up. It was boring. And I stuck with it, thinking the suspension of disbelief would go away. Eventually I started watching it in fast forward, and then I realized why the thing was so slow. I understood it better in fast forward than I did at regular speed. There was far to much DOING and not enough PLOT. This should have been a 300 minute serial, it could have been much better. Actually that would have fixed it right up.
Seventh and worst of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. You know I think I'll be glad to get through the earliest dark days of film and into the 20s and more sophisticated cinema.