I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle

“Most good motorcycles run on gasoline. This is a bad motorcycle. It runs on blood”

Everyone likes film (except for people who don’t). Some people like thoughtful European art films that question the nature of existence, and other people like big cheesy Hollywood blockbusters that question the nature of slow-motion explosions. Me, personally, I like films that ask the really difficult questions. Questions like: how would you escape from a futuristic Chinese prison solely by punching people’s heads off? How much substandard punk music does it take to make a mild-mannered artist kill the homeless with an electric drill? What should you do if the vengeful ghost of the man you accidentally killed turns your penis into a mining tool? When, at the end of a day, is an appropriate time to send in The Boys?

The films I will be reviewing in this irregular feature tackle some of these great questions and many more besides. As a starter, we will look at a film that asks a question that has troubled man since the dawn of civilisation: what course of action do you take when you wake up and realise that…

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (trailer)

Country: UK
Year: 1990
Director: Dirk Campbell
IMDB plot keywords: Creature Feature, Talking Turd, Motorcycle, Spoof, Toilet Humor, Lavatory Bowl, Independent Film
Fun fact: Among Dirk Campbell’s other directing credits are nine episodes of the preschool demographic television show In The Night Garden.

“Most good motorcycles run on gasoline. This is a bad motorcycle. It runs on blood”

– Opening lines of the cinematic trailer for I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle.

How can words be bought into service to describe the hearts most profound passions? The inexpressible nature of pure, unalloyed love has confounded writers and poets across the ages. Everyone from Shakespeare to Lorca, Blake to Bukowski, Horace to Rosetti has tried their hand at describing the indescribable; all of them, arguably, failed to some extent. How am I to succeed? For not only do I have the inherent disadvantage of not having one tenth of the facility with words possessed by any of the above, but I also labour under a further burden. For my love is not for a beautiful youth, or a high ideal; it is not for God or fatherland. No, my love is for the 1990 British horror comedy I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle. Oh mysteries of the heart!

To spoil the plot of I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle would be almost impossible. It is a veritable master-class in high-concept film-making. Scruffy bike courier Noddy (Neil Morriey) is after a new set of wheels, and finds the perfect bargain: a 750cc Norton Commando, going cheap. Just some slight damage to the petrol tank. Unfortunately, what Noddy doesn’t know is that, owing to a mishap (shown in the opening scene) involving a biker turf war and a satanic ritual, the motorbike is now possessed by the demon Ahriman, and has become, well, a vampire. The first inkling that something may not be entirely right occurs when Noddy’s skeevy mate Buzzer decides it would be a laugh to steal the petrol cap. In the morning, the cap has re-appeared, but Noddy decides to go round to see him anyway. When he arrives at Buzzer’s house, he finds himself in the middle of a criminal investigation, in a scene that perfectly sets up the deadpan, unremarked visual comedy that is what makes the film so glorious. The cartoonish, perfectly motorbike shaped hole in Buzzer’s door and the bloody tire-marks running up the walls and across the ceiling remain unremarked on, despite all the characters being clearly, uncomfortably aware of them. From this point on, the film goes to town, draining every last drop of surreal weirdness from the utter lunacy of its central premise (Not to mention the slight detour of the justifiably infamous talking shit nightmare sequence which so dominates the IMDB keywords). The vampire motorcycle itself is pure joy: it kills its victims in increasingly beautiful ways. It grows spikes from its petrol tank that pierce the groin of a hapless rider. It pops a wheelie, extends scythes from its front wheel and decapitates two Hell’s Angels simultaneously. Its headlight breaks and turns into a set of glass fangs that eat a traffic warden. It fires crossbow bolts. It kills prostitutes in darkened alleyways. It climbs vertical walls. It extends two tubes from its front forks into the neck of a screaming woman, whilst the camera cuts to a close-up of the petrol gauge swinging from ‘Empty’ to ‘Full’.

Throughout all of this, the film remains wonderfully observant of all the tropes we might expect of a vampire film. When Noddy begins to suspect the diabolical nature of the bike, he gets in contact with the local priest (Anthony Daniels in a non-metallic turn), who, though at first sceptical, assembles his exorcism kit (which, because this is the type of film it is, includes shuriken with crucifixes soldered to the back) and heads on down to the garage. When he tries to wheel the bike out in the sunlight to get a look at it, it at first refuses (becoming unmovable just before its wheel goes in to the light) then, when he persists, it bites his fingers off with its brake lever. In the next scene, Noddy and the priest are sporting bandoliers full of stakes and garlic. The exorcism, like most of the scenes, is played dead straight, except for a knowing sigh or eye-roll from one of the actors, whose characters are constantly aware of the preposterousness of the situation. High camp ensues. The motorcycle is, of course, not quite fully dead yet…

Although undoubtedly the film is carried mostly by its glorious set-pieces (I haven’t even mentioned the wonderful pub brawl that suddenly turns into Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood as the combatants grab replica broadswords and spears from the walls), it has a surprising amount of cohesion. One of the dangers of films like this, which trade so heavily on the ‘rule of cool’, is that they can come apart into an unrelated series of vignettes, interspersed with limp, turgid sections where the film makers can’t really think of anything worthwhile that should be happening. Much in the film’s favour is the quality of the script and of the acting. Although much of the humour derives purely from the absurdity of the situation, every actor, however amateurishly, plays their part to a tee, and carries things off well enough that the many scenes which don’t happen to feature the vampire motorcycle remain largely enjoyable. The tone is perfect, handling the genre switches from vampire flick to biker film to episode of unlikely British-midlands modern-day Western Boon (the sets, cast and bikes of which were essential to the films creation) with a deadpan, blackly comic tone that runs throughout. Mercifully, the film never once tries to be an actual horror film, a misstep that has sunk many similar enterprises; it is entirely self-aware, but without that cloying, post-Scream need to explicitly state its self-awareness, in the hopes that the audience will find this clever or endearing. Had the characters ever sat down to discuss which set of vampire rules they were working under, the film would have been ruined: it’s a fucking motorcycle, for heaven’s sake! Enjoy the ride.

Rating this film seems pointless, because it’s appeal is going to be so starkly limited. In the world of b-movies, there really are no shades of grey. Either you’re the type of person who thinks a film where a vampire motorcycle carves a bloody swathe across Birmingham and Neil Morrissey is choked by a talking lump of shit is one of the best things they’ve ever heard of, or you’re not. Most people, alas, are not. If you are, then that’s all the recommendation you need.