Vampiress Review: "Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat"

The Gist: When a man is brought to a town in the middle of nowhere to work on a synthetic blood factory he inadvertently ends up with him and his family in the middle of a vampire civil war

Clarification: There is a ton going on in this film which has quite a few plots.  First you've got a guy named David and his helping out with a synthetic blood factory that leads to a subplot where one of the guys at the factory is an ex schoolmate who happens to be a scorned ex boyfriend of David's wife who not only wants her back but is revealed to be the actual father of one of her daughters.

The other plot deals with the town itself being split into two factions of vampires.  One who is learning to live normally off of the synthetic blood at the request of the owner of the town who is hinted at being Dracula under another name (precursor to True Blood?) and one group who wants things back to the old ways of feeding directly from humans.  The ones who want the old ways plan on murdering the synthetic dependent ones leading to the bulk of the later parts of the film just being 70's/80's action movie style gunfight scenes.

Selling Point: Old school classic film.

Female Vampire Factor: The whole town is vampires with most just being background actors.  The only female vampire with major screen time goes to a 20 year old waitress in the town named Sandy played by Deborah Foreman.

Sandy meets up with Van Helsing (who's there to destroy the towns founder who he knows is Dracula) and immediately falls for him.  She allows him to capture her but eventually gets permission to bite and turn Van Helsing as Dracula sees how she feels about him.

Among the other stars of the film was Miss America 1982 Elizabeth Gracen as Alice.  Alice is half of a couple who stumbled onto the vampire town while camping and was eventually captured by the towns sheriff when they attempted to report their friends murder by one of the residents. They were put in the cell next to their friends murderer resulting in him sneaking over to them and turning them while they slept.

A much older (but strangely more attractive) Gracen would also appear as a vampire in an episode of the TV Series Charmed from Season 4.

This is a pretty decent film that ages pretty well.  It's not laugh out loud funny but does have it's silly moments that aren't dated references so it's not just a nostalgia film   I give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 3 out of 5.