|
1998 was a year of vampire hunter movies, with cinema audiences having to choose between Blade (1998) and Vampires (1998). But of these the best treatment of the theme was this British tv mini-series, which was screened cinematically at some film festivals. It is one of the most original and audacious treatments offered of the vampire theme since at least Martin (1976).
Ultraviolet crosshatches vampirism with the British cop show. Indeed this is really more akin to a series like The Sweeney or The Professionals than it is to Blade or Vampires. It comes with a realism of presentation where one constantly has to pinch themself to make sure that it is a vampire series taking place. Accordingly the word 'vampire' is never mentioned once throughout - instead we have casual allusions to 'Code V' and 'leeches'. There is a real conceptual audacity to the throwaway nonchalance of its ideas - of Vatican-funded anti-vampire SWAT teams armed with garlic tear gas grenades and carbonite bullets and the vampires, who fund haemotological research centers, guarding themselves against any stakes through the heart with bulletproof vests. The third episode, 'Sub Judice', reaches a point of positive ingenuity as we encounter a woman impregnated with genetically crossbred vampire sperm - a ploy Ahearne dazzlingly compounds by then throwing in a vampiric twist on the abortion/Right to Life debate - here the Catholic Church sanctions the abortion without even a second question !!! - not to mention having the woman, as she flees the enforced attempts to abort her undead child, unwittingly run into the arms of a Christian group posing as an abortion counseling service. Seemingly determined to stir controversy as much as he reworks the vampire myth, Ahearne, in the subsequent episode has the team unable to decide whether a boy stabbing a priest was the result of a vampire infestation or his turning on a paedophiliac priest - the episode comes with a pertinent lecture by Quast's priest about jumping to conclusions and assuming that just because a priest likes to work with boys that his interest is indecent. The only weak story among the six is episode five where the sickle cell anemia plot never really goes anywhere.
There is some exceptional writing in these episodes. In the fifth episode Corin Redgrave's vampire has a startling speech taunting Quast's priest - "Tell me, father, have you any proof other than our existence that God exists ? In the time since you believed, has God given you any other sign? Doesn't that leave you in a quandary - we are evil and yet we are your only proof that God exist ?" and later tempting him "Do you not understand ? There is no afterlife. We are immortality." In fact the vampires get to present their own side so persuasively that, by the end of the series, their motivations seem so sympathetic that one seriously starts to question whether the vampire hunters may not be misguided in their crusade.
Ahearne's only real weakness in the series is when it comes to action with his various car chases, SWAT team assaults and vampire attacks seeming hurried and confused. Although there is one remarkably tense scene in the fifth episode with Elba locked in a warehouse with a bunch of time-locked vampire coffins about to open and contemplating shooting himself. But this is a series that works on a cerebral level, not an action level, so one can easily forgive Ahearne for this. This is easily one of the most original attempts to rework the vampire myth.
