Review: The Vineyard

James Hong stars as Dr. Elsen Po, a famed winemaker who apparently dabbles in film producing. He invites a bunch of young actors (including Playboy Playmate Karen Witter...who remains clothed) to his secluded island mansion to supposedly audition for a film project. But Dr. Po isn’t all that he appears. He’s a devious and kinky nutjob who is actually hundreds of years old and keeps women chained up in his basement because he needs their blood to retain his youthful appearance (He doesn’t care if they have green eyes or not, however). That’s why his wine is so popular, ‘coz this ‘ol drop of red is really blood. Unsurprisingly, the dopey young actors are all dispatched one by one. Michael Wong plays a nosey journalist who manages to find his way to Po’s poon-tang palatial estate and starts snooping around. Oh, and don’t ask me about the half-buried zombies the film cuts to from time to time without ever fully integrating them into the film. Karl-Heinz Teuber plays an agent associate of the good doctor’s.

When actors decide to try their hand at directing, not all of them hit it out of the park early on like Charles Laughton (“Night of the Hunter”), Mel Gibson (“The Man Without a Face”), Bill Paxton (“Frailty”), Billy Bob Thornton (“Sling Blade”), or Clint Eastwood (“Play Misty For Me”). In fact, quite often one ends up with at best a small ‘personal’ film with limited appeal (Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks”, Emilio Estevez’s “Wisdom”, Sidney Poitier’s “Buck and the Preacher”, Kevin Spacey’s “Albino Alligator”), or at worst a self-indulgent vanity project (Seagal’s “On Deadly Ground”, Eddie Murphy’s “Harlem Nights”, Dan Aykroyd’s “Nothing But Trouble”, etc). This little-seen oddity from 1989 is co-directed, co-written by, and stars character actor James Hong, perhaps best known as David Lo Pan in John Carpenter’s brilliant ode to Hong Kong martial-arts fantasies “Big Trouble in Little China”. Unfortunately, whilst Hong and co-writers James Marlowe and Douglas Condo have given their leading man a slightly Lo Pan-ish role, the film is a dud.

Plot-wise, this should’ve been a slam dunk, with its mixture of Lo Pan and Edgar Allen Poe, it’s conceptually interesting. And although it’s somewhat bizarre that a winemaker would turn filmmaker (or at least pretend to be one for nefarious reasons), it could work as a kind of in-joke about director Francis Ford Coppola, for instance. Unfortunately, Hong, his co-writers, and co-director William Rice have astonishingly turned some interesting ideas into a very blah film that often meanders and isn’t anywhere near as cool as it sounds. Meanwhile, some of the performances are porno-bad, especially Michael Wong, who is also strangely credited as a ‘spider wrangler’. Hong himself isn’t bad, but somewhat disappointing. The role never really allows him to cut loose like Lo Pan did. The FX and makeup aren’t terrible for a low-budget film from 1989, but the rest of the film is cheap as hell.

It has also clearly been made by an egotist. I mean, Hong casts himself as a total pants man, for starters (Indeed!). Lots of hot bods, and a cool scene involving a chick coughing up spiders, but at the end of the day this is easily forgettable, no matter its pedigree.

Rating: C