Vampire Cop was not created so the director could ensnare you within the twists and turns of a police procedural. Nor was it created to explore the moral complexities of vigilantes and justice using the reluctant vampire as a lens. Nor does the movie rush you along on an adrenaline ride of action and gore.
No, Vampire Cop was made so the director could show you two things: naked tits and Ed Cannon’s crazy eyes as he vamps out.
As the titular vampire cop, Lucas, Cannon’s expressions around his eyes create a genuinely uncanny impression of someone going feral. Then he opens his mouth, and your suspension of disbelief has a piano dropped upon it at the sight of the ridiculous fake fangs. And then you hear his dialogue, and all the effort of those eyes is for naught.
Fortunately, all the tits in the movie appear to be real. There is plenty of time to evaluate them, and plenty of tits to be evaluated.
The plot involves a drug lord who kills Lucas’ partner on a stakeout and a sexy television reporter investigating a series of bloodless corpses killed by what appear to be animal bites to the neck. One of those corpses was found at the scene of Lucas’ partner’s death. Soon, Lucas and the reporter, Melanie, are partnering up to investigate the drug lord – and more.
Lucas’ vampirism has him uncontrollably draining his victims, avoiding the sun, and sleeping while hanging upside-down. This is not his only bat-like trait, which leads to one of the only truly delightful moments in the movie: Melanie’s interview with a crackpot chiropterologist who informs us that the animal bites on the corpses are vampire bat bites.
Lucas is a sloppy vampire, not bothering to hide the victims of his vigilante killings or to disguise his distinctly vampiric modus operandi. Fortunately, his fellow police are apparently not real swift. Nor does Lucas bother to make sure his victims are dead, giving the drug lord vampiric prostitutes under his command. (Most of the female characters are sex workers. It’s that kind of movie.)
Not that the vampiric sex worker minions play a role in the plot; they just disappear off into the night. That happens to plenty of other plot elements, including a girl Lucas saves from a rapist in the opening scene, who is living with Melanie as a protected witness, but runs from Lucas in terror when she sees him again. And Lucas himself, who towards the end of the final battle, just ceases to be in the scenes, leaving Melanie and the drug lord to end the fight. Has he flown off into the sunrise? Taken refuge beneath a sofa? Burned to cinders off-camera? We never find out. And honestly, by this point, we didn’t much care.
It felt as though the script were written by a Martian, who had streamed many cop movies and understood the general structure of them, but didn’t really follow how action and consequence worked with humans on Earth. Broad mimicry without deeper understanding of why X followed Y. All in all, I don’t recommend this movie for a B-movie night. The action was slow, the acting was wooden, and Cannon’s expressions are only amusing for so long. If you really want to see tits, there are more entertaining settings for them.