|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Cuba, the 1930's: Young Pepe is a trumpeteer who likes nothing more
than playing his instrument and making love to his girlfriend Lola. But he
is also part of a movement against Cuban dictator Machado and instrumental
in a plot to seduce Machado's wife. Of course though, Pepe's group of
rebels is nothing but a bunch of chaotic youngsters whose plots tend to go
terribly (and hilariously) wrong. What Pepe doen't know thoughis that he
is also a vampire, the grandson of Dracula, and it's only thanks to his
father Professor von Dracula that he can walk freely out in the sun and
has no more craving for blood. Now, the Professor wants to make the
formula that allows vampires to do that accessible to the whole vampire
world - much to both the Düsseldorf vampires (traditional old world
vampires) and the Chicago vampires (gangster-style vampires) - and soon
the two fractions arrive in Cuba to engage in a bitter war over the
formula, with Pepe and his gang of rebels caught in the middle. Eventually
- and on the very day Machado is overthrown too - the war is ended only
when it turns out that by applying the formula vampires would turn into
humans again, which would erradicate the power of both the Chicago and the
Düsseldorf fraction over the vampire world - and they agree to destroy
the formula ... but Pepe has since turned the formula into a song and
sings it on Vampire Radio International anyways to all the vampires
out there ... Now Communist Cuba is not exactly a country with
a big film industry, let alone is it known for its accomplishments in
animation ... yet Vampires in Havana is a pretty entertaining film,
a wild and disresprectful mix of vampire and gangster clichés full of
intentionally exaggerated characters, nonsense chase sequences, sexual
innuendo and deliberately stupid jokes, all a bit in the tradition of
Robert Crumb. Very amusing, actually, and not in the least bit
heavy-handed.
|