Paul Andrews
Thralls starts as five sexy half Vampire ladies manage to escape Mr. Jones (Lorenzo Lamas) their Vampire master, not wanting to be subservient half Vampires the girls also steal an ancient book called the Necronomicon which contains powerful spells including one to turn them into full vampires. One Vampire chick Leslie (Leah Cairns) decides to invite her younger sister Ashley (Siri Baruc) to the main event due to take place during a rave on the solstice but the evil Mr. Jones has no intention of letting them go & manages tot rack them all down to their club where he intends to reclaim them & use the Necronomicon himself to summon a powerful demon that will destroy the world, that is unless he can be stopped...More commonly known under the title Blood Angels this Canadian production was directed by Ron Oliver & isn't too bad a Vampire flick, the Vampire film has been done to death & there's not too many places you can go with the concept but Thralls makes a good fist of things & it passes 90 odd minutes. The majority of the film is set inside a nightclub so in that respect it's not original as Vamp (1986) was also set inside one & the more recent From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) was set in a bar, at night so Thralls is nothing new but it moves along at a decent pace, the lead character's are appealing & thankfully not annoying, the plot is forgettable but there's a reasonable twist & it entertains while it lasts with just about enough incident to keep one amused. I was actually quite surprised at how much I liked this although that's more of a damnation of todays low budget horror than Thralls being particularly good in itself.One thing that Thralls does have going for it is that the leading Vampire chicks are very hot & are certainly easy on the eye, apparently being a Vampire in Thralls also means that you know martial arts & are pretty damned good at it as there are several fight scenes that feel a bit out of place but are welcome none the less. There's not that much gore here, there's a ripped out spine, a ripped-off head (didn't anyone in that que call the police?) & a bit of blood splatter. The CGI computer effects are kept to a minimum with a decent CGI Vampire bat but an equally awful scene where two snake like creatures burst from a girls nipples. There's not much style here but it's well made & the girls do look sexy. Stick around for the end credits as a music video plays which feature two guy's rapping & some more very sexy ladies.Filmed in Vancouver in Canada for a budget of about $1,000,000 this has good production values & looks decent with an attractive cast. The women are all lookers & generally look good throughout but their acting isn't quite as good while Lorenzo Lamas plays the villain.Thralls is a pretty decent Vampire film with lots of sexy chicks, some fights & a bit of gore, you could do better for sure but you could also do a hell of a lot worse too. Worth a watch if your bored.
whpratt1
If you really like the dark side to real young chicks, who have very strange spiritual abilities to suck blood from all different parts of the body, this is the film to watch and enjoy. Lorenzo Lamas,(Mr. Jones),"The Nowhere Man",'05, is a sort of pimp of a Vampire and has strange powers over some very hot hot females. Siri Baruc,(Ashley),"Glass Trap",'05, tries to locate her sister in the big city and gets deeply involved with this wild and exciting night spot where her sister works and is controlled by a Cult. Leah Cairns,(Leslie) gives a great supporting role through out the picture. This is certainly a different type of vampire film and the sexy gals make it a lot more interesting than the Classic Bela Lugosi film !
Brandt Sponseller
Mr. Jones (Lorenzo Lamas) is a vampire living an upper class life in Iowa, of all places, in this Ron Oliver-directed film. He has a Renfield-like acolyte named Rennie (Richard Ian Cox), and most importantly, he's keeping six really hot "half-vampire" slave babes chained up, dressed in sexy white lingerie, in his strangely white "attic". These slaves, or thralls ("thrall" was the Scandinavian word for "slave" during the Viking age), are the focus of the film. At the end of the opening sequence, they manage to escape. Shortly after we see them running a rave club (still in Iowa, amusingly enough). A major subplot involves Ashley (Siri Baruc), a sister of one of the thralls, who has runaway from an abusive situation with her father. But has she run into something even more frightening?I like most films, especially most horror, and I start watching any movie with very few preconceptions and a high score in mind. For Blood Angels, repeatedly I would be cruising along thinking it deserved a high rating, then it would do something awkward or too corny for its own good, and I'd feel compelled to give it a lower mark. But then it would turn around and make up for the problems with another move, and so on. The final verdict, obviously, was a 7. However, for much of the film it sustained an 8 for me.Among the minor problems are that the fight/attack scenes tend to be cut too quickly, there is a strange section of repeated footage in the middle (it's ostensibly a dream/hallucination) that seems like padding, and the bulk of the film is set in a club that just looks like a big warehouse. Sometimes such a limited setting works, but here it tends to become monotonous. It feels transparently like a budget-saving device. In interviews about the film, the cast and crew have made much of the supposed vampire mythology extensions in the film. They were exaggerating, at least slightly. While the thrall idea is unique for the film world, at least in its details, the influences for this "extension" were probably a combination of the mythology of role-playing games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and the "gay vampire" novel by author Michael Schiefelbein entitled Vampire Thrall (interestingly, early reports had Blood Angels' plot as an erotic gay vampire flick--that turned out to be wrong (or it was changed); whether that's disappointing or not probably depends on your gender and orientation, especially when we consider that the protagonists are beautiful women clad in skimpy clothing). Of course, if we look at it from an even less fine-grained perspective, Blood Angels is basically a Dracula story centered on his brides, where the brides have been merged with the popular idea of the vampire acolyte, but where they are not quite willing to be underlings--they're just partial vampires instead. The thralls' feeding methods are unusual, but certainly not unprecedented--similar ideas have appeared in a number of other vampire films, including Les Avaleuses (1973), Spermula (1976) and the more well-known and mainstream Once Bitten (1985). Blood Angels may be unprecedented in featuring a protagonist (Ashley) partially modeled on The Wizard of Oz' (1939) Dorothy, and also for featuring an odd bit part for an actor dressed up as Hunter S. Thompson.Other elements, such as a subplot involving the Necronomicon and raising demons from other dimensions are relative horror clichés by this point, although such things did not tend to be combined very often with vampire lore until "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997). Also like Buffy, Blood Angels mixes its modern Gothic atmosphere and liberal tongue-in-cheek humor with martial arts. Part of becoming a vampire, or even a thrall, is that you suddenly turn into a kick-ass kung fu expert. Combining vampires and martial arts is an idea that extends at least back to The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). Of course, post-Buffy, at least, having strong, intelligent and resourceful modern women as protagonists in a horror film isn't unique, but it is still relatively unusual, and it is certainly welcomed. Some feminists might cringe at the eye candy factor, which is very high throughout the film, but more enlightened feminists realize that being beautiful and proud of it isn't akin to playing a subordinate role. Also on the positive but unusual side is that the film is set in Iowa (though unfortunately not shot there, but surely that would have proved to be too much for the film's budget). It's at least nice to see writers and directors try to be a bit more creative with their locales.I was surprised that Blood Angels had as much humor as it does. There is a very funny comic relief character known as Doughboy (Kevin Ohtsji), an Asian youth trying to be "rap hip", somewhat reminiscent of Nadir (Saïd Serrari), the comic relief wannabe rapper Algerian in Samouraïs (2002) (Although it's a bit bizarre--but I like bizarreness--that the last five minutes of the film before the final credits run are a rap/hip-hop promotional video). And Rennie is also funny as a continually suffering zombie, reminiscent of Gabriel's (Christopher Walken) zombie assistants in the Prophecy (1979) films, or, without the "slave" aspect, Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) in An American Werewolf in London (1981) or Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) in Idle Hands (1999). Another positive aspect is that the special effects are good for a low-budget film. For the other roles, the performances are fine; nothing exceptional, but not problematic, either, even if Lamas starts to show off his scenery-chewing chops by the end.Overall, Blood Angels is above average, especially if you're a big horror fan and you enjoy watching attractive women. It's not likely to be remembered as a groundbreaker, but it's more than sufficient entertainment for 90 minutes. It also leaves room for a sequel, which would be welcomed.
