Van Pires (1997)

Ooohh fuck me. Thank you to my friend Dempsey for sending these dvds my way.. I think thank you?

Terrible cgi crosses with live action in a sense of Superhuman Cybersquad but fully on LSD with more puns then any human can handle. A meteor crashes into a junk yard possesing cars and random garbage with demon souls. Conveniently four teenagers that seem to love 80s metal get blasted and get the powers to turns into half car half human but only after dark. The evil junk monsters need to suck gas to live so the amount of times the characters make weak jokes by saying suck gas and kick gas is mind boggeling. Cgi similar to the worst episodes of Beast Wars blur everything and the live action scenes are so weird and silly you will have no idea what you are watching. I claim the evil Vanpires will be a back up army for the 4 horsemen of the children's movie apocalypse. This was a show that show how aired on the WB and Fox and we all blocked it out of our minds, probably from trauma. There are several volumes of dvds cause this got a full season some how. I recommend episode 2 with the cheesy fake Motely Crue in it. However the end of the first episode ends in fart jokes as they need to drink fuel to survive but when then turn back to humans in the sun light they all suffer from gas.. get it gas..do you get it? DO YOU get it.. gas.. fuel.. farts?

Kill me.

Non stop puns only get worse by the old guy that manages the heroes who is a burnt out rocker in a fake English accent making family friendly stoner jokes that goes by the name of Van He'llsing saying the last name is pronounced like He will sing cause he used to hang out with the Rollingstones. It gets worse with different songs in the credits that sound like terrible Christian rock songs. I don't think this is religious but it does feel like Bibleman quality and dorky humor to the max. Or the people who made this were just super high and cry everytime they watch this sober. The company is the Gentile entertainment group, which is just a family last name that appears all through the credits.

Im watching episode three and the evil leader Count Trakula tells his henchmen to "stop idling " and I don't even think they know they made a pun this time. Oh and yes the villain is called Count Tracula and looks just like Megatron from Beast Wars. In this episode Trakula bites a tank and makes it turn into a demon l that looks like a giant take on Torch from Puppet Master. I know i make shit sound fun when often its really shit, so beaware , this is shit. The live action scenes when the heroes aka the Motorvators hang out and make teenage rock n roll puns while hanging out with the old man with acting skills of an anti drug psa are way more fun then the cartoon action scenes ... aaand yet.. those scenes still suck gas.

One character says to his friend that's getting angry "hey man cool your engines and shift gears , no need to cause a 50 emotion pile up when we can throttle out of here and put the breaks on these guys" Every line is a car pun , EVERY fucking line.

However mind blown that the line "Dont truck with Trakula" is murmured.

So bad that it needs to be seen. But as I finish disc one I feel maybe even I dont have the strength to keep going... pressed play on disc two is like turning the ignition on my mental meltdown revs 0 to 60 death race. See I can do it too.

Random facts:

John Entwhisle added some music to this and their is a rpg of it. What the fuck?

Also the old man Van He'llsing is credited as himself in the credits and has no imdb listening. He is in a wig and fake mustache leading to an internet rumor that he is secretly Gary Oldman, which is fucking hilarious.

In closing may I say They don't even transform into cars!! 

When I think back about the Saturday morning TV shows that had a profound impact on me while growing up, a handful of series like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and Digimon come to mind.  But let me ask you a question: do you remember Van-Pires, a show about... well, teen/vampire/car hybrids?

Van-Pires is one of those weird kinds of shows you end up suppressing like a traumatic memory only to have it bubble up to the surface of your consciousness every so often.  I don’t quite remember where I was when I first saw the show, but a recent trip down a YouTube rabbit hole brought me back to 1997 to re-experience the story of how four teens were transformed into vampiric, vehicular robot beings who needed to consume gasoline in order to wage war on a villain known as Tracula.

Even as a kid I distinctly remember thinking to myself that the show had to have begun as a throwaway portmanteau joke someone thought was entirely too funny.  While the idea of a gas-guzzling monster car isn’t exactly lame in and of itself, you get the very distinct sense that Van-Pires co-creators John and Anthony Gentile didn’t fully think the concept through before they successfully pitched it Fox.  Part of what makes describing Van-Pires so difficult is the fact that, like lots of kids television programming from the ‘90s, it barely makes any sort of narrative sense.  The show’s opening credit sequence makes a valiant effort at trying to explain what the hell is going on, but the more you try to follow along with the exposition, the less sense Van-Pires makes.

Axle, Snap, Nuke, and Rev, the series’ four teens with attitude, are inexplicably given the same sort of names you’d expect to hear during at an Axe bodywash brainstorming session, and their reliance on gasoline comes across less as “vampire cars need sustenance” and more like “these kids somehow got addicted to drinking and huffing gas.”  When the kids aren’t fighting Tracula and the other evil van-pires, they spend their time hanging out in a junkyard with their mentor Van He’ll Sing, an aging hippie who’s credited as “playing himself,” though the actor bears a striking resemblance to Gary Oldman wearing a bad wig and a Rastafarian hat.

If you squint particularly hard and tune every third line or so out, you can sort of convince yourself that Van-Pires, on some level, was at one point an attempt at educating kids about our over-reliance on fossil fuels and the necessity of protecting the world’s resources.  But that message often gets buried beneath Van-Pires’ oppressively bad CG, dozens of car puns, and a flurry of music and sound cues that feel like they’re actively trying to keep you disoriented.  (Something that shocked me reading up about the series now is that somehow The Who’s John Entwhistle became involved with the production and ended up writing a number of songs for the Van-Pires official soundtrack.)

It’s obvious that Fox wanted Van-Pires to recreate the type of success that it’d seen with Saban Entertainment’s Power Rangers franchise, but there was something missing from Van-Pires that almost assuredly guaranteed its cancelation.  Sure, the show’s writing, acting, and production values were all alarmingly poor, but more than that, Van-Pires somehow managed to be both horrifying and boring at the same time.

As an adult, I can appreciate the show’s mild flirtation with elements of body horror, but Van-Pires never really gets around to playing with the sorts of ideas about mortality that make non-vehicular vampires interesting.  That might seem like a rather lofty expectation from a Saturday morning tv show, but it’s not like kids aren’t able to comprehend those sorts of ideas.  In some alternate universe, Van-Pires is a weirdly clever, progressive attempt at getting young people excited about renewable energies and environmentalism.  In this one, though, it’s just a mess of a show that thankfully died off in the ‘90s.

IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS GOD DAMN SHOW FOR YEARS! YEARS!