Sunday, September 13, 2015

Daughter of Darkness (1990)

After her mother dies, Kathy goes to Romania to find her father. Kathy is an only child and has no other living relatives. So she's willing to overlook that fact that her parents never married, and her father deserted her mother prior to Kathys birth.

Arriving in Romania, she pays a visit to the US Embassy.  All she has is a twenty year old photo of her parents, her fathers name and an old address. Devlin, who works at the embassy,  agrees to make some inquiries regarding her father.

He also warns her to be careful wandering the streets and doing her own research.  Romania is a police state. It's very dangerous to be wandering the streets when not familiar with local laws and customs, or the bad areas of town.  Kathy promises to be careful and immediately goes traipsing off down a dark alley when she spies an area that looks like something she's seen in her dreams.

She locates the address where her father used to work and asks the man inside for help. He looks exactly like the man in the photograph of her parents. Surprisingly, Kathy doesn't notice. She hands him the photo of her father and asks for information.

After an awkward pause, she is told the man in the photo used to work there, but died years ago after being hit by a car.  Despondent about her fathers death, Kathy crashes a fancy party at the Embassy so she can talk to Devlin.  I'm not sure that Kathy understands what Embassy's do.

Since she doesn't know anyone else in town, Kathy tells Devlin about finding out her father is dead, and how she's been having dreams about places in Romania that she's never been, but is now stumbling upon. Another awkward silence ensues, as Devlin tells her he's not a psychiatrist and that he can't counsel her on her crazy dreams or dead father.

Kathy ends up at a bar where she previously ran into the handsome Gregorio, who is willing to take on her counseling, which is unfortunate since he's a lounge singer and a vampire.  Kathy has no idea what she's infer, and neither does the viewer since we're stuck on this journey with dopey Kathy making bad decisions and for all her deja vu, can't even recognize her own father who looks exactly like he does in her photo.  Yes, it's a number of years later and he should look older. But he could be dying his hair or be especially well preserved.  Of course, he's actually a vampire, but that would be a ridiculous thing to consider... except she's in Romania and his family castle is in Transylvania.

This TV movie stars Mia Sara. The name sounded familiar but I couldn't place it.  But as soon as I saw her, I recognized her as Ferris Buellers girlfriend.  The film also stars Anthony Perkins as her vampire father.  IMDB lists this as a TV movie, and while the script has the pacing and tame scares of a TV movie, there is some nudity in it.

It's fairly typical TV vampire movie where our unsuspecting heroine never suspects that anything strange is going on, and is completely naive that it's not a good idea to trust a handsome stranger that you met in a bar in a foreign country that's in the midst of political oppression.  The most interesting thing about this movie is when a vampire feeds on a young woman, a small circle opens up in the tip of his tongue which seems to have lots of little teeth. So that's a unique way to feed.

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