I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle Review

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle
A damaged motorcycle is possessed by the spirit of an occultist murdered by a motorbike gang. When it's repaired and restored, it's vengeful intentions are revealed, and woe betide anyone who gets in its way.

by Kim Newman |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1990

Running Time:

101 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle

Thankfully, no one is ever going to accuse this movie of trying to save the British film industry. Unusually filmed in the unappealing back streets of Birmingham, this horror skit has something of the flavour of the tatty Pete Walker (Frightmare) or Norman J. Warren (Satan's Slaves) films of the 70s, representing a trashy but sometimes vital British horror tradition diametrically opposed to the Home Counties politeness of the Hammer Films.

Dispatch rider Morrissey buys a sinister motorbike that used to belong to a murdered Satanist, and gradually realises that the machine - which only works at night, runs on blood, sprouts deadly spikes and is repulsed by a cruciform road sign - is, in a very real sense, a vampire. The bike murders a mechanic who has stolen its petrol cap, leading to a series of blackout nightmare sketches -the most bizarre and repulsive of which finds one character reincarnated as a giant turd that leaps out of the toilet bowl and crams itself down Morrissey's throat - and then to a more traditional set of action/splatter sequences as it goes after the cycle gang who murdered its former owner and then the hero's girlfriend (Noar).

When priest Anthony Daniels' exorcism fails, it's down to garlic-breath copper Elphick and a sun-lamp to face the killer machine in a scrappy climax. The title is deliberately in the tradition of those sleazers that get announced at Cannes but never made, but - as usual in Surf Nazis Must Die! or Space Sluts In The Slammer movies - the wild promise of the come-on actually proves rather limiting.

With its makeshift action sequences, this is at least 20 minutes too long, but the dopey performances and defiantly grotty, British-flavoured jokes make it vaguely endearing.

It's not exactly great, but it is unusual, and a damn sight funnier than Nuns On The Run
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