John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)

John Carpenter's Vampires could have been really cool: dark doings among the undead set in the contemporary New Mexico desert under a John Ford sky, orchestrated with loving attention to Western conventions and gothic niceties by a genre veteran. Instead, after a promising opening — vampire slayer Jack Crow (James Woods) and his posse root out and burn up a nest of ''goons'' but can't find the master (Thomas Ian Griffith)— this gummy mix of fake-Catholic mumbo jumbo and teeth-in-neck horror goes limp. The romance subplot featuring a hooker (Sheryl Lee), bitten but not yet fully vampiric, and Crow's sweaty sidekick (Daniel Baldwin) doesn't provide much diversion, nor does Crow's profanity-packed wise-guy banter. The goons themselves, though, look rather chic, flying through the air in Galliano-goes-to-hell garments straight out of Vampire Vogue. C-