Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter V

Vampire Hunters (2002) is in Chinese with English sub-titles. A gang of 17th Century Chinese warriors goes out to hunt zombies, which turn into vampires. After a big battle with zombies and the vampire king, 4 warriors end up working as domestic servants at a house beset by bandits, who are sent by the brother of the young master's bride to find the old master's gold. Lots of fighting and people meeting horrible ends, and a spot of humour for Chinese speakers.
The house is full of corpses preserved in wax, including the young master. The evil brother in law gets a zombie wrangler to wake up the corpses to cause chaos while he hunts for the gold. The vampire king also turns up – and he looks long buried and festered rather than still human like Count Dracula.
The vampire king can't endure daylight and he can't see people when they are wet. But he can survive being chopped to bits with swords, growing new body parts including a head. A good dose of dynamite settles his hash and one of the warriors gets the young master's widow.

Vampire In Brooklyn (1995) Eddie Murphy (& LOTS of f-ing & blinding) A runaway ship brings Maximillian the vampire to New York. Everyone aboard is dead. Max saves Julius from some gangsters, ripping the heart out of one of them, and turns him into a ghoul, which results in progressive loss of body parts, and his driver. He's looking for a female vampire, Rita, who's a cop. She finds Max's coffin on the ship and Max finds her.
Rita & her partner are warned that they're dealing with a vampire. Max sees off Rita's sex-mad flatmate and impersonates her preacher, telling the congregation that 'Evil is good'. Rita & her partner fall out big time. Max gets close to Rita and she decides she doesn't want to embrace her heritage and become a vampire. Max tells her some facts of life about herself.
Her partner is told that Max has to be killed before Rita starts feeding and breeds with him. The partner is a flop but Rita manages to do Max in in spectacular style. Julius cops for Max's vampire ring, and un-ghoulifies. So a happy ending for everyone but Max.

Van Helsing (2004) has a lot in common with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Peasants in black & white attack Viktor Frankenstein's castle. Shock, horror! Dracula is sponsoring his work and he wants to take over. Chomp! Dracula drinks the blood of Frankenstein before the monster takes his creator's body to the windmill, which the peasants set ablaze.
   1 year later in Paris (in colour), Van Helsing meets Mr. Hyde and hacks him about a bit. He is called a murderer when Hyde turns back into Jeckyll. VH, the most wanted man in Europe, is working for a secret order in the Vatican; he arrived there with amnesia. His next mission is Count Dracula in Transylvania with a fragment of a document showing the same emblem as the one on his signet ring.
   The Vatican's Monk Q gives VH some useful anti-vampire gear, then finds that he's going, too. They have to help a gypsy family, which has been fighting Dracula for 400 years. There are just 2 left; a brother & sister. The gypsies make a total bog of killing a werewolf and the brother goes over a cliff. VH rescues the sister from female vampires after a lengthy battle.
   Dracula, who has a cure for werewolves, is hoping to use Frankenstein's electrical gadget to give life to his dead children. Being staked does him no harm but his first brood is wiped out and VH and the sister hide out in Frankenstein's castle, where they meet the monster. He is the key to bringing life to Dracula's offspring. VH decides that the monster isn't evil and he won't kill him.
   He tries to take the monster to Rome. The lady vampires come unstuck when they attack him. So does the werewolf brother, but he bites VH. A vampire grabs the sister and Dracula offers to swap her for the monster at a Halloween party. VH stashes the monster, Igor finds it, the Pope wants it dead and VH starts turning into a werewolf.
   VH takes the sister and Monk Q through a magic doorway and finds Castle Dracula. The only thing that can kill a vampire is a werewolf. So werewolf VH battles Dracula and causes a mass extinction of vampires. He learns that he's Gabriel, God's Left Hand and the bloke who does the Almight's wet jobs. VH gets the cure when Dracula is dead, the gypsy sister croaks and VH and the monk head back to Rome.

Vanishing Point (1971) has achieved classic status now. A guy delivering a souped-up car tangles with the law, refused to stop and gets himself into a whole heap of trouble. Along the way, we get slices of his life story as allies help him and the police set up the final, explosive confrontation.

Vantage Point (2007, Dennis Quaid) An anti-terrorism summit in Salamanca; someone shoots the US president! Then a couple of bombs go off. Rewind 23 minutes to follow Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service agent who had already taken one bullet for the pres. He survives the bigger bomb after tackling one of the terrorists. Rewind to follow the terrorist tackled by Barnes, who escapes from custody after the 2nd bomb.
Rewind to the black guy with the camera, who follows the escaping terrorist, filming him as he goes, as far as the guy being shot down. Rewind to the President, who's being harassed by the CIA over bombing terrorists in Morocco and who's represented in public by a double. Only the terrorists know about the double.
Rewind to the terrorists, whose plan is to kidnap the US president and sneak him away in an ambulance. Only Barnes spots that fellow Agent Taylor is one of the terrorists and chases him. Barnes has a big crash. So does Taylor. And then the ambulance crashes when a stupid little girl wanders out into the road and the black guy saves her. Barnes then kills the last of the terrorists in the ambulance and rescues the president.

Velocity Trap (1997) A cop called Stokes is set up for the murder of a special investigator after blowing the whistle on corruption at a mining colony. He ends up being sent back to Earth, a 6-month trip, with $40 billion in cash. Crime has put an end to electronic banking, people insist on trading with real money and Federal Courier 397 has collected cash from 30 banks for return to Earth, captained by Det. Belker from Hill Street Blues.
   3 months into the trip, a collision alarm goes off and the ship is boarded by thieves (including Alice alias Sarah Sidel from CSI: Las Vegas), who deflected an asteroid into its path. Their plan is to remove the $40 billion and let the ship be wiped out in an apparent accident. Stokes wakes the stroppy female navigator and spaces one of the bad guys.
   The ship's engineer is also revived, but he turns out to be in with the bad guys. Stokes and the navigator realize their only hope is to get onto the bad guys' ship, so they try to fly over in a shuttle. Alice chases them but crashes. Stokes and the navigator get aboard the other ship and Stokes shoots the last bad guy. Then they get the hell out of the way.
   At the end, some mysterious person buys the mining colony and the new owner fires Dawson, the bloke who sacked Stokes. And Federal Courier 397 is listed as lost in space.

V For Vendetta (2005) is a DC comic strip translated to the big screen. America has been destroyed by a plague which affected only parts of Britain. England is now ruled by a High Chancellor as a police state after all undesriables have been rooted out. But someone in a Guy Fawkes mask (which looks a lot like Capt. Picard of the Enterprise) is sorting out the bully boy cops. He's a loquacious thespian out for revenge.
   V rescues Evie, a victim of the regime, and gives her a Bonfire Night treat by blowing up bits of London to the 1812 Overture. He promises to do Parliament in a year's time. The Chancellor applies his spin to the explosions so V hijacks the TV system to broadcast a message of defiance.
   V kills the government's TV Lord Haw-Haw. A bishop, who worked at a concentration camp, is done in next. V is working his way through the people who made the regime possible. DCI Finch, who's hunting V, learns that the Chancellor released the virus deliberately in England and killed 100,000 people.
   Evie is captured by the regime? No, it was V torturing her because she wanted to become fearless. Anarchy grows as November 5th approaches and the regime tries to make itself needed. V lets Evie decide if the Parliament building should be blown up and he goes off to tackle the last of the regime's leaders. The Palace of Westminster becomes V's funeral pyre with fireworks and the 1812 Overture.

Vibes (1998) is a daft comedy featuring a very young Jeff Goldblum and Peter 'Columbo' Falk. There is supposed to be a city of gold in the mountains of Equador, but a bad guy (with the inevitable English accent) is manipulating 2 psychics to find an ancient source of psychic energy. Object: world domination. Daft but fun.

Vice (2015) There's a pleasure palace full of human clone dolls, who can be killed and tortured to let real people live out twisted fantasies, and a rogue cop, who's desperate to shut the place down, which his captain doesn't want because of the taxes the owner pays.
   One of the dolls retains memories of being killed after repair and does a runner with a lot of shooting. The goons fail to catch Kelly, who ends up at the home of a guy who removes her tracker. She was made in the image of his dead wife; he created the technology; only to have it taken away by evil Bruce Willis.
   The cop crashes in. So do goons. The targets get away as far as another mad scientist; a computer nerd. The cop sticks his nose in again. The goons arrive. Shoot-shoot-shoot. Kelly's new pal is killed. The cop wants her to help him take down Vice once and for all. Kelly gets an upgrade from the nerd.
   Willis is unshootable. The cop frees all the artificials and Kelly puts a virus in the computer system. Pandemonium. The cop tries to kill all the goons. And shoots Willis. But his eyes open again just before THE END.

Vipers (2008) Bad guys try to steal some really vicious vipers from a secret lab but succeed only in releasing them. Meanwhile, Dr. Collins is using viper venom to cure cancer. Her biotech firm runs the secret lab, which she knew nothing about. The boss tells her to sort out the snakes. An island in Eden Cove in the Pacific North-West is about to get the shock of its life when the snakes arrive.
   Cal, the inevitable ex-Ranger, arrives to take over the doctor's practice. A couple disappears, eaten by the snakes, which are also eating the fish and leaving floating heads. A kid is taken off the island after being bitten. The snakes attack and everyone ends up at the hotel.
   Dr. Collins arrives with snake-subduing gas when the doctor returns. A bunch of people won't listen to good advice and get themselves killed. The Security guy with Dr. Collins admits he's there only to grab some snakes and Homeland Security is going to gas everyone on the island in the morning.
   Cal comes up with a plan to take out the snakes by blowing them up. The survivors get off the island and Dr. Collins gets to expose her boss to the meeja for conspiring with HSD to kill the people on the island. And someone puts a viper in the boss's car at the end.

Virus (1999) begins with a UFO colliding with the Mir space station and energy beings beaming down to a Russian science ship. 7 days later, a tug captain loses his uninsured tow in Hurricane Leilah but he comes across the deserted Russian ship in the eye of the storm. But when he tried to salvage it, the ship's computer drops an anchor on his tug and sinks it.
Then a Russian survivor shoots up the sickbay. She says something homicidal from space killed the crew. And there's an alien intelligence in the computer creating Replicator-type robots and creating Borg-type cyborgs out of humans. So the humans decide they have to blow up the ship, which has missiles and all sorts aboard.

Void, The (2001) features Amanda Tapping [Major Carter in Stargate SG-1] as a scientist struggling to stop Malcolm McDowell from destroying the world. He killed her father by creating an exploding black hole eight years before and, dying of cancer, he's all set to do the same again. Ms Tapping thinks the black hole might oscillate about the Earth's core in the planet's gravity field and eat it up if it doesn't explode like an H-bomb.

Volcano (1997) is an incredibly silly disaster movie. Magma is seeping up through a fissure under Los Angeles after an earthquake. Soon, lava bombs are flying around, setting fire to buildings, and a Hawaiian-style fire fountain burst out of the tar pits. The city's emergency bloke (Tommy Lee Jones) builds barricades of vehicles and stuff, and stops one lava flow with the aid of helicopters loaded with water.
Then he tackles a flow through the subway system by dropping a brand new building in its path. The characters in the film are doing the dumbest things to put themselves into harm's way but their stupidity is quite comical at times.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) The film spawned a TV series of the same name, which is freely available as a box set: the Submarine Thing used to be required family viewing back in the mists of the 20th Century. The science behind the film is total tosh, of course, but that's not the point. It's a triumph of an American hero (the admiral) over foreign defeatism and obstruction, and even the treachery of fellow Americans in the crew, including the captain of the submarine which the admiral created. Jules Verne's giant squid, crossed with an octopus, gets to make a guest appearance, too!