Bad Movie Diaries: Mom's Got a Date With a Vampire

Would you date this vampire?

            Though Disney’s cinematic output was having the opposite of a renaissance when I was a kid, their brand remained strong enough that my parents associated them with quality entertainment, and so all through elementary school I watched a whole lot of Disney Channel. With the exception of stone-cold classics like Kim Possible, I can’t say I loved any of the shows – it was just that they were on and they were safe. But the movies, the DCOMs that is, were something else.

            As trash made-for-TV movies go, DCOMs have a special place in my heart. The very first DCOM, Under Wraps, was released the year I was born. The early 2000s were a heyday for the genre, as Disney pumped out something like ten a year. Cheaply made, they mostly fit into easy, recognizable templates, sports movies and family dramas and of course Halloween movies like Under Wraps, and then there were a few infamously batshit ones, featuring teenage boys turning into mermen and leprechauns and vengeful smart houses that come to life. While there were star vehicles like Cadet Kelly and Get a Clue, the pre-High School Musical entries to the DCOM canon (and many that came after) were unusually janky and weird for the excessively squeaky-clean Disney brand. And while I was too young for many of these early DCOMs, they reran frequently on the channel, especially the Halloween ones which ran nightly all through October. As a horror-curious kid who was petrified at the very idea of a real horror movie, I couldn’t get enough of these, and an obliging family friend taped a bunch of them for me. Which I why I have a VHS copy of Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, recorded from its October 2007 airing.

            While our last few bad movies aspired to more than simple badness, meant to be star vehicles and shiny musicals or glossy thrillers, DCOMs are a different kind of badness. If we turn to our Bad Movie Taxonomy, the DCOM is a clear example of a modern B-Movie. Cheap and disposable, made for an undiscerning child audience, these films had no ambition other than to keep kids on the channel. Before HSM made DCOMs merchandising juggernauts in their own right, DCOMs were among the humblest of the Disney output, designed to simply provide a passably entertaining, kid-friendly 90 minutes. And so while the last few bad movies are fascinating failures, Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire is by its own standard a success. It does exactly what it’s set out to do. Its dopey titles provide a promise – and the movie delivers!

            MGaDwaV features a visual namedrop of The Lost Boys, which I haven’t seen (I know, bad horror movie fan), but it reminds me a whole lot of a different ‘80s vampire classic, Fright Night. We’ve got the horror-fan kid, here aged down to a pint size and blissfully presexual thirteen, who loves his classic vampire movies. We’ve got an old-school vampire hunter, here less reluctant, and a suave and charismatic vampire who takes a romantic interest in a woman in the protagonist’s life, in this case not his girlfriend but his mother. The plot is straightforward. Adam and his sister Chelsea are grounded for petty reasons by their recently divorced mom, Lynette, and decide to set her up with an internet stranger who turns out to be the titular vampire. When littlest brother Taylor catches the vampire turning into a bat, the kids put their own nights out on hold and tail their mom from restaurant to rockabilly bar to harvest festival to the vampire’s lair until the vampire hunter pops in to save the day. It is an inoffensive and riffable little romp, featuring cute performances by the adults and performances by the kids which, if bland, are at least not annoying.

            Though the film in its first act sets up a buffet table of possible subplots, including several potential love interests for sister Chelsea and a scheme to get into a concert by a band called the Headless Horseman (who I’m very sad we never got to see), it quickly jettisons these possible hijinks to just get this over with, but also to linger on the family story. At first, the movie seems like it will base its emotional core around the kids dealing with the divorce of their parents, a dad who’s getting remarried, and a mom who’s finally putting herself back out there. But the kids take the divorce, remarriage, and their mom’s potential dating life in stride. The real arc belongs to Lynette, played by one of the aunts on Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Lynette starts the movie convinced that, post-divorce, her life is through except for being a mom. Over the course of the movie, she discovers that it’s fun to go on dates with handsome guys, ride bumper cars, sing rockabilly songs, and forget about her kids for a little while. It’s a story about a middle-aged woman discovering that she’s a complete person, not just a mother. She even gets a lovely speech to her unreceptive vampire date about how she’s met someone really special over the course of their night – herself! I definitely wasn’t expecting a mom’s emotional arc to be the center of a Halloween DCOM, or for the moral of the story to be that moms need to have fun once in a while, but it’s unexpectedly touching.

            The vampire himself is adequate. You can get why a divorcee who hasn’t been on a date in a minute would be delighted to run into him in a grocery store. There’s a very cute bit, taking the place of the fake holy water test in Fright Night, where the skeptical older kids try to prove to Taylor that he’s no vampire by having him balance a spoon on his nose, only for Adam to realize the vampire casts no reflection in the mirror. The vampire lore is standard issue stuff that would be right at home in What We Do In the Shadows, vampires turn into bats (through wonderfully cheap special effects), walk up walls like in the High Hopes music video, hypnotize mortals, sleep in coffins, hate garlic, and can be killed by a stake through the heart. To keep it extra kid-friendly, the vampire’s principle objective isn’t finding a bite to eat but a bride to hypnotize and keep in his castle, which is maybe a metaphor for kids’ anxieties around divorced parents’ remarrying, though the movie doesn’t try to hammer this point home. The notion of a vampire using Craigslist personals to find a victim is very cute.

            Indeed, everything about this movie is cute (except the kids, who are bland as can be). It’s a great starter DCOM, basic and silly and easy to riff but with a good heart, basically the himbo of movies.

 

Trivia:

·       One of the quickly abandoned side characters is a man who looks to be in his twenties but seems to go to school with and hang out with thirteen-year-olds. His name, I shit you not, is Boomer. He is my son.

·       Another side character, Adam’s best friend, is named Duffy. Sadly a Duffy the Dampire Slayer joke is never made. Why do all these middle schoolers have such absurd names? Are they the children of minor celebrities?

·       Speaking of which, I was hoping that one of the child actors in this movie would have had some kind of ridiculous career but none of them did. Most of them are prolific minor TV actors. Good for them.

·       Despite the fact that my dad was in a rockabilly band for much of my childhood, this movie was how I learned what rockabilly was, and I couldn’t tell if the movie thought rockabilly was good or bad.

·       The vampire slayer is portrayed by one of the lesser Carradines.

·       Because this movie is so aggressively for children, the vampire isn’t staked at the end but trapped in his coffin. The vampire slayer plans to send him to Finland for some reason.

·       This film’s director, a prolific director of DCOMs and television, began his career as a stunt performer in such films as Apocalypse Now and True Romance. Neat!