ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voiceover artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.
Ambrogio: The First Vampire is a microbudget horror film produced, executive produced (dude, you shouldn’t credit yourself as both), written, directed, and starring Alex Javo, a young Georgia filmmaker. The short 74-minute feature is, from its press summary, about “Ambrogio, a millennium-old vampire and the first of his kind, [who] encounters a woman who resembles his long-lost love. He calls upon the gods to shield her from rivals hellbent on revenge.” It’s ambitious, perhaps too ambitious, for its own good and tiny budget. Instead of writing a straight review, I’m going to give the filmmaker some notes. There’s some raw talent on display here, and I’d like to see another—and better—film from Javo soon.
Now you’re asking yourself, what qualifies me to give notes to a filmmaker? Well, I’ve studied and written about film all my life (over 5,000 movies in my Letterboxd list). I have a huge collection of books on filmmaking. I’ve also been involved as an actor in corporate training films. And I’m a trained voiceover artist, with a supporting role in an animated feature on the way, and audio engineer. With that background out of the way, let’s analyze this film.
The basic concept of the film about an origin vampire or “vampire zero,” mixing traditional vampire lore and Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, is creative, and the attractive leads, Javo and Angelina Buzzelli, have nice screen presences. Javo gives it his all as the star—he’s not a bad actor and effects a decent pigeon Italian accent. Buzzelli, on the other hand, doesn’t get much to do; her part is woefully underwritten. The attempt to give her character a backstory as a battered woman doesn’t amount to much in the scheme of things. But the biggest issue I have with the film is that it’s a collection of scenes stuck together without transitions. Instead of a smooth, natural progression of a cohesive narrative, we get a bunch of scenes, sometimes like little sketches, separated by blackouts and whiteouts. You could take most of the scenes and reedit them in whatever order you wanted because they don’t hang together. This is not an uncommon problem, even for a huge-budget studio film, like the James Bond film, Spectre.
With this scene-drop approach, the film is a scattershot affair of origin story, doomed love story between human and vampire (an overused trope if ever there was one), and revenge-o-matic with Ambrogio, Dracula, and King Hades. I would’ve dumped the bad cosplay origin and boring love stories and focused on a single plotline with the three oddball supernatural characters. And while on the topic of oddball characters, I found Roland, Ambrogio’s loyal familiar/servant, to be the most interesting. He’s written to have a kind of droll, nonchalant presence in contrast to his master’s over-the-top emotionality. But while Zane Pappas tries his hardest to make something of the part, it’s beyond his grasp. The character, the film’s comic relief, needs funnier lines that hit harder.
As for the other supporting players, I admire their sincerity and dedication. But even compared to other microbudget films, the acting here generally ranges from not good to barely adequate. I enjoy seeing the now-familiar folks who pop up in these Texas-Georgia-South Carolina regional films. Caylin Sams, so good in David Axe’s excellent Left One Alive, is underutilized in a small part. One scene, featuring three characters with their accents really made my head hurt. (What type of accent does Niko’a Salas’s Dracula have? Pigeon Italian? Pigeon Italian-Czech? Todd Slaughter hammy?)
Moving on to the film’s technical credits, I applaud everyone for making, completing, and releasing a microbudget film. While we didn’t call them “microbudget” films back in the 1970s, we had them, and the foremost proponent was filmmaker Andy Milligan. Like Javo, Milligan was a one-man band who did just about everything, including sewing the costumes. He attempted ambitious period pieces set in England but which were filmed on Staten Island. And his films, while beloved by the craziest and most jaded of cult cinephiles (like me), always featured horrendous acting, modern light switches in “Victorian” mansions, out-of-focus shots or shots that cut off the tops of the actors’ heads, and screaming, lots of screaming. Ambrogio: The First Vampire is so much better made than that, but technically, it still has issues.
As previously mentioned, the editing mostly just strings together black-out sketches. The cinematography, while competent, makes the film an overly bright affair, with no atmosphere, giving it the look of a telenovela. It’s also statically shot almost entirely in medium and medium-long shots, making for a tiresome watch: Everything’s too tight. (It’s okay to show actors’ legs and feet.) The film needs color timing to even out the way the shots look from scene-to-scene. In Milligan’s day, that was an expensive lab process, way beyond Milligan’s budget. Today, you can cheaply and easily do it using software.
A documentarian friend of mine once told me that while viewers will forgive a few flaws with video, like lens flares (hell, that’s director J.J. Abrams’s stock-in-trade style), audio mistakes are inexcusable. Unlike a lot of microbudget horror films I’ve seen, the audio here is clear. But in a couple of scenes—one with voiceover narration—the actors literally whistle some of their lines. This is what is known as sibilance, the harsh hissing or whistling sound you get when some people pronounce the letter “S.” (I saw a corporate training film once that had so much annoying sibilance that I had to leave the room; it was like needles in my eardrums.) Milligan would’ve had to rely on expensive hardware filters to remove the sibilance — and he had no money for that. Today, you can use a cheap computer plug-in called a de-esser (get it?) for a cleaner sound. As for the score, it seemed unmemorable to me, but then again, it was lost in the sound mix. That’s another thing that’s easily fixable.
Production design, using found locations, is what it is and is fine. The same with costumes and make-up, not bad at all. The few special effects on display are of the “not good, but I’m okay with it” variety.
Finally, my overarching note. I can only imagine how much work Javo put into his labor of love: drumming up the production money, writing the screenplay, casting, directing, learning an accent, playing the lead, and otherwise hustling on behalf of his film. That unfortunately spread him thin, often a problem with multi-hyphenate filmmakers. (For example, as fantastic as Ed Norton is, he should have limited himself to acting and found someone else to direct Motherless Brooklyn.) For his next project, I would like to see Javo either direct or act, but not do both.
While that may seem like a lot of notes, with more negatives than positives, I like the folks involved with Ambrogio: The First Vampire, and I hope they take my suggestions to heart with their next film. Thanks to Alex Javo for sending me a copy of the film for this review.
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