The Vineyard

A centuries-old master of the occult, whose longevity is due to a potion made from the blood of young people, lives on an island where he runs a renowned winery. He uses the bodies of his victims as a secret ingredient and fertiliser, but for whatever reason, the corpses rise from their shallow graves in his vineyard. Under the pretext of making a film about winemaking, he has invited to the island a group of novice actors exclusively comprising young hunks and pretty girls, along with an aspiring sommelier and her friends. Such a premise promises an epic trash spectacle, so it’s all the more surprising that the whole thing was evidently intended much more seriously and ambitiously that one would expect at first glance. The Vineyard is an original project by James Hong, who gained fame as a character actor in American films and television series, appearing in Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China and Chinatown, to name a few. It can be said that he spent his entire life playing stereotypical Asian characters and for some reason had the feeling that a horror B-movie would be the ideal project for demonstrating his acting skill and demolishing the stereotypical depiction of Asians in American films and series. Asians, specifically Chinese, in Hollywood productions are either all practitioners of the martial arts, with which they attempt to resolve every situation, or they are conversely depicted as old men whose defining characteristic is wisdom or, as the case may be, wickedness. Sex is never a consideration in their case, i.e. they are never shown in erotic situations. The Vineyard, however, features a bad guy played by Hong, who indulges in all earthly pleasures and for some reason adheres to Mayan occultism instead of Chinese philosophy. The group made up of his soon-to-be victims, who seem to be a parody of the central protagonists of Scooby Doo, includes a young man of Asian descent played by Michael Wong, who is surprisingly not a master of the martial arts, but rather a well-read journalist with huge glasses. In a certain respect, the film is a bizarrely subversive (or, said more precisely, tiresome) project because it denies viewers the attractions that are there for the taking (the walking dead don’t attack, the main Playmate actress and most of the other pretty girls don’t get naked), instead offering up a series of sequences that are supposed to show off Hong’s acting skill, wrapped up in an utterly twisted narrative. (25.08.2013)