Horror Movie Review: Mutant Vampires From the Planet Neptune (2021)

Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune… it should be so much fun, yet somehow, writer and director Calvin Morie McCarthy has crafted a schlocky slice of b-movie dullness.

It’s such a shame, as it begins in solid fashion. A guy and a girl are camping in the woods. While they are fooling around in their tent, they notice a meteorite go passing by, but ignore it. That meteorite crashes nearby and from it, emerges a spacesuit wearing figure.

Which you might think is going to be a big problem for the horny couple, but instead, they are attacked by an escaped asylum patient. He kills the guy with an axe, but before he can get to the girl, the figure in the spacesuit stops him. Is it a hero? No, of course not, it’s a mutant vampire from the planet Neptune.

This opening is both dumb and entertaining, setting up what should be a silly, fun, bloody, and campy horror experience. That’s not what we get though. Instead, spending an inordinate amount of time in the company of vapid and uninteresting characters. The vampire is absent, aside from stalking shots, for so much of the film.

A group of friends/couples are going to stay at a cabin in the woods to party hard. That’s about it for the story detail. There are some personal issues here and there, but most of these are inconsistent and when it comes to getting drunk, all issues go out the window. Fancy seeing really long-winded scenes of young adults dancing to music in semi-slow motion? Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune has far too much of this.

Around the halfway point, it becomes painfully clear that Calvin Morie McCarthy has got the pacing completely wrong here. The film doesn’t just grind to a halt, the gears spin off and destroy the local orphanage. It’s genuinely surprising to see it collapse in on itself so severely. For some reason, the writing seems to think you’ll be ok with energy sapping sequences if there is a brief bit of mutant vampire action here and there. It’s not ok, especially as the mutant vampire parts are hardly worth getting excited about either.

Although props to the severed penis. We love a severed penis around here.

This review might sound like it’s being really harsh on Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune, but it is deserved. This could have been so much better; it should have been so much better. You can’t call your film Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune, open like it does, and then deliver something so dull.