One beautiful year in the mid-1990s, we decided to go all-in on movies about vampire sex workers, and Tales From The Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood is … one of those movies.
I spent nearly 30 years holding a fondness for this movie in my heart that I can barely explain, especially after watching it again a few days ago. What made Bordello so special was not the bad puns, the terrible special effects, or the inexplicably poor delivery of every one of Dennis Miller’s lines. It wasn’t the horror that wasn’t horrifying or the comedy that wasn’t comedic.
If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in about thirty years, you’re probably reading that and wondering what the fuck made it special at all. Well, for one, there’s a coffin rollercoaster that shoots you through a cremation chamber into a rocking party full of vampire sex workers spawned by Lilith (let’s not get too wrapped up in the lore). The baby vamps love the horny boys up, suck a little blood, and then hand them over to their madame, who sticks her tongue all the way down their throats and then uses it to pop their hearts out of their chests from the inside. It’s insane and ridiculous, and I don’t give a fuck who you are – it’s really cool. But that’s not it, either.
The plot is simple: The ne’er-do-well brother of an ultra-conservative (but super hot) assistant to a megachurch pastor goes missing, and she hires a sleazy private eye to find him after the police refuse to move on the case due to an overwhelming number of missing people in the town. The PI quickly tracks the brother to a bordello hidden in the basement of a funeral home and realizes that something is seriously wrong. We get to lampoon megachurches, see boobs, hear bad banter, and fight an evil blood-sucking bitch who wants to take over the world.
As I mentioned, though, this was all done pretty poorly (except the tits, I guess). The reason I stayed up late to watch Bordello of Blood in 1996—and why it held a special place in my heart for so long—is a little more complicated. If you’re under 40, what I am about to tell you is unbelievable. If you’re over 40, it’s a truth you’ve probably tried to forget.
In 1996, Corey Feldman was cool as fuck.
Or rather, he hadn’t fully descended into being tragically uncool. He’d already been on and off drugs, and his movies with Corey Haim were in the rear view, but he was still hot. And if you were a weirdo of a certain age, and didn’t know what the future held, you would stay up late with your girlfriends on a Saturday night to watch License to Drive on USA or Bordello of Blood on HBO. Let’s be real – what is Bordello of Blood to a pre-teen girl with a thing for Corey Feldman if not the next logical step after The Lost Boys?
Feldman’s “Frog” in The Lost Boys was innocence cosplaying a badass, but if you were watching at a similar age, he just read as effortlessly cool. This is before The Burbs, which means it was before the drugs, side by side with his real-life best friend, Corey Haim. You can almost believe it was before anything bad happened to either of them (though we know it wasn’t).
His character in Bordello is the polar opposite. He’s the ’90s movie version of badass, which means just straight-up bad. Caleb is what happens if Frog idolized the Charlie Sheen character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and turned to alcohol to cope with the trauma of “all the damn vampires” in Santa Carla. Perhaps most importantly, even with little screen time compared to Miller, he seems to be one of the few actors who showed up to set and remembered he wasn’t at a table read but a full-on movie with a theatrical release planned.
Yes, that’s right. I’m telling you that Corey Feldman was not just a child actor; he was a damn good one. Right up to Bordello of Blood, the last movie you’d be likely to recognize before his slow descent into cringe became a downward spiral.
If you were like me, you showed up for Corey Feldman, and as the movie got progressively worse … you stayed for Corey Feldman. He was dedicated to selling the shit out of the piece of shit brother turned vampire who went from simply spiting his sister to despising everything she stood for. She was a paragon of Christian virtue, and he was a damned soul serving Lilith, after all.
I’m not here to tell you that Bordello of Blood wasn’t immensely fun and exactly what you’d expect from a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It is both of those things (remember, there’s a coffin roller coaster and absolutely tons of tits). But fine filmmaking it is not. This movie isn’t comically bad enough to hang out with camp classics like Plan 9 From Outer Space or novel enough to hang out with my personal favorite 1996 vampire sex worker movie, From Dusk Till Dawn.
But it is special.
Bordello of Blood is one last flash of brilliance from a star that Hollywood and the general public just couldn’t handle, and who just can’t leave Hollywood or the general public alone. Plus, it’s literally about a vampire bordello.
