A Return to Salem's Lot

Review by Mike Finkelstein

In covering the 1979 Salem's Lot I slammed the miniseries for being dull and dry, putting in a lot of characters and storylines that didn’t matter and went absolutely nowhere. The miniseries, like the book before it, really wanted to get you invested in the day-to-day lives of the small town folk so that, once the vampires come and eat everyone, you feel how much was lost. But where/ the book makes these characters and stories interesting and compelling, the miniseries leaves them flat and boring. You never care or invest, so you’re stuck with a three hour slog that goes nowhere.

Credit where it’s due, the film “sequel” (and I put it in quotes because it’s a sequel in name only) doesn’t fall prey to that problem. The film is an absolute mess, completely bonkers, totally stupid, and absolutely trashy as hell. It’s not boring though, cutting right to the quick and reveling in all its trashy glory before the opening act is even over with. This is a film that absolutely understands that there’s no way to make a good sequel to Salem’s Lot, in part because the miniseries ends on such a definitive note and in part because King never went back to write a full sequel himself, so we may as well get a bad one instead.

Honestly, I do respect that. The film sets itself up with a crazy situation, a town taken over by ancient, European vampires, and then just layers on more and more ridiculous stuff until it dives right out into the deep end, never to be saved again. And while I wouldn’t say it works – this is a terrible film on every level – it’s entertaining as hell to watch. It’s like a Howling film or The Monster Squad. You’re not watching a good movie, you know you’re not, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun in the process, and A Return to Salem’s Lot is dumb, trashy fun.

Joe Weber (Michael Moriarty) is a documentarian, filming strange people in out of the way areas just to study how they live. While filming a tribe that lives in the deepest Amazon, Joe is called back home by his ex-wife. It seems their son, Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed), is troubled and either Joe takes the boy or the kid will end up at an institution to bring his behavior under control. Joe and Jeremy head off, with Joe having the great idea to take his son up to Jerusalem’s Lot, the old town he’d spend time in with his aunt, back before she died. She willed him her old house, and Joe thinks it would be great to be up there, out of the way, so they can bond and fix the place up.

The only problem is that Jerusalem’s Lot is filled with vampires. They moved in at some point, way back, and have been running the whole town ever since. And they want Joe, engineered his return so that he could study and document them all before writing a bible of their vampire religion and history. While there, the ruler of the town, Judge Axel (Andrew Duggan), promises that the vampires won’t kill humans, that they’ll live off their supply of cow blood fresh from the animals they raise. But still, Joe doesn’t trust them, and he doesn’t want to live in a town of vampires. Plus, Jeremy is falling for a young vampire girl, Amanda Fenton (a very young Tara Reid), and he wants to get his son away from all these monsters. Escape is the only way out… if he can just find a way to pull it off.

For anyone that watched the miniseries that came first this film has to feel very disconnected and out of place. And that’s because it is. Warner Bros. commissioned Larry Cohen (who had previously written a rejected screenplay for the previous miniseries) to write and direct this sequel, banking on the name recognition of Salem’s Lot to sell the film. Cohen took the offer, but basically ignored everything that came from the first production, instead getting inspired by stories of small town life to try and use this tale of vampires to tell something of the human condition. What he came up with, though, is ridiculous.

Seriously, once you get past the fact that this film has nothing to do with the previous miniseries, you then settle into a long bout of “what the hell am I watching?” Vampires living in Jerusalem’s Lot after fleeing Europe, raising families and having little immortal vampire kids who get married and live forever and drink from cows but stalk 1980s punks when they drive through town and they also want a Bible of their faith and… yeah, it’s too much. On and on the film adds more details and more contrivances and more story, desperately trying to explain what it means and justify its own existence. It doesn’t work at all.

Hell, the whole plot of the film banks on a series of coincidences setting up its story. Joe has to get called back to take care of his son instead of his ex-wife just committing the boy to an institute or a boarding school. Joe also has to care enough to stick around and not go back to what he was doing before since he hasn’t seen his son in three years and clearly doesn’t care that much. Then Joe, all on his own, has to decide that moving up to Maine with his kid is the best course of action instead of, you know, going literally anywhere else. And this was the vampires’ plan. They literally say, “we engineered all this so you’d come here, Joe.” Really? This was how you wanted it to work? That’s a master class in stupidity.

But it is just so crazy and dumb that it’s kind of fun all the same. It’s around the end of the first act, when an ancient monster vampire that is really just a dude in an obviously shitty Halloween mask appears on screen, that you realize what kind of film it is. Nothing has to make sense because this is a crappy B-movie. Monsters attack punks, vampires get pregnant, tiny children vampires get married, and it all kind of washes over you because it’s just daft. Nothing matters so don’t worry about it. Just enjoy the ride.

Hell, the ride is pretty fun, all things considered. The film is only 100 minutes long, moving at a fast clip and it burns through all its idiotic storytelling. Around the point that a Jewish Nazi killer shows up and decides he’s down for annihilating a town full of vampires, you’re like, “sure, that makes sense.” Murders and gory and nudity all are supplied regularly to keep your lizard brain engaged, and the film keeps just chugging along, never making a lick of sense and never really caring if it does. It’s a bad B-movie, but a great time to watch if you can just click your brain off.

There’s an obvious reason why no further sequels to 1979’s Salem’s Lot were produced: this film was so bad it totally soured the well. After this no one trusted the brand name and everyone would have avoided anything further in the series. It took another 15 years for a new version of the story to come out, and that was a full reboot that tried to ignore this film and everything else about Salem’s Lot that came before. Everyone attached realized this had been a terrible idea and so they all acted like it never happened. Let’s all just move on.

But, really, could any follow-up have even reached the shitty, majestic quality of this film. Any other movie would have tried too hard to be shittier, and failed, or it would have taken itself too seriously and lost the magical charm of this cinematic turd. This film is terrible and I don’t want to watch it again, but at the same time I had a lot of fun with it while I did. It’s so bad it’s almost nearly good… but not quite.