Rish Outfield's reviews
The best thing about this movie was its title. Jugular Wine: A Vampire Odyssey was a literate, sensual, appealing title. Tyranist and I really wanted to see it, since we imagined it would be about the attractiveness and forbidden sexuality of vampirism. Vampires are sexy things, after all. They are monsters, but shapely, immortal, beautiful ones. They represent the dark side of humanity, but in a way that draws us to it, offering temptations that can be more or less unspeakable, but nonetheless appealing. Plus, the video box said this had Stan Lee in it.
We regretted seeing it . . . wholly. This flick was not just Horror at its worst, it was filmmaking at its worst. I LOVE movies . . . with all four letters capitalized, but Jugular Wine is that rare piece of celluloid that makes me wish film hadn't been invented. It's like when a devout believer in God (a Nun or a Rabbi or a Sunday School Teacher or something) sees something so abhorrent that they lose their faith completely. In these pages, we've mocked movies that were pretty terrible (Sorority House Massacre, Friday the 13th:3-D, Leprechaun, or Watchers Reborn, for example), but almost nothing compares to the offense and stupidity of this one. If I had known, years ago, that I would see something like Jugular Wine, I don't know that I would have bought a VCR. I'd watch a half-dozen Witchcraft movies before turning this one on again.
I don't know where to begin in describing how horrible, truly horrible this thing was. The story, if one existed at all, was told in such a way as to render it unintelligible, incomprehensible, and utterly unwatchable all at the same time. There was never really a threat because I never understood what was going on. I never felt for the characters because they never did or said anything with any motivation or humanity or intelligence or logic involved. Scene followed scene consisting of varied images (many of them stock footage, unrelated to the narrative and/or repeated from earlier in the film) and voice-over narration chanting indecipherable, useless words. All this, and it managed to be unbelievably boring too.
I know vampires were involved, but I couldn't tell you how many or who was and wasn't one or who they worked for or if there was a direction to their behaviour. I know that a few people died, but many times the scene was so poorly lit, ineptly shot and abominably edited that I often wondered who was talking, who was this happening to, where, and if it was really happening, had just happened, would happen in the future, or was a dream. I asked aloud, "Would it kill them to simply have a character talking and show the character talking and the person they're talking to, rather than have it narrated while showing a dance club interspersed with a family mixed with stock footage of snakes and the moon and a naked woman crouching and someone's eye?" It was as if a five year old boy raised by grasshoppers had found two rolls of film in a lost language and edited every single bit of footage into a movie (many times at random), then handed it over to a blind old woman to narrate. This may sound like an exaggeration, but I'm simply trying to vocalize the foulness of this picture.
Yes, someone I respect so much as to capitalize His pronoun, Stan Lee, appears in this film, but I think He sometimes probably cries at night because of it. He knew not what He was getting into. And His parts are among the most coherent of the piece. Still, Stan Lee fans--STAY AWAY!
Understand, there was nothing provocative or evil or frightening about Jugular Wine to make me hate it so, it was just terrible filmmaking. On a scale from only one to ten (or one to one hundred), it would merit a zero. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.
And bad again.
Best Scare: No scares. Not even close.
I'd Recommend It To: No. Do not see it. I'm serious as Rectal Cancer. If you have inclinations toward seeing it, even for masochism, I will call you personally and try to convince you otherwise. I shit you not.
(Of course, if someone takes me up on this, I may have to remove the vow, but for now, it stands)

The tyranist's thoughts
I dreamed about this movie the night after we watched it. The dream consisted mostly of my mind still trying to figure out what happened in the movie. It couldn't. Once my mind figured that out, it went on to a dream about Glenn Close and a bunch of lions on the veldt.
If there is a key difference between Rish and I it is that I am much more into the surreal and cerebral environments that occasionally inhabit movies (take Cemetery Man for instance). This often leads to debates and questions over exactly what happened in a movie and was it worth the mental effort required to get that. We rarely agree.
However, there are moments. Jugular Wine seems to me to be a terrible attempt at making a surreal portrait of what becoming a vampire is like. It failed miserably. The movie was utterly confusing and pointlessly dull. Just as they would have enough dialogue or continuous imagery for me to start to figure out what was happening the scene would shift and everything I had figured out would be invalidated in a heartbeat. I did manage to keep a couple of characters straight along with their relations to each other, but even that didn't really help me in the end. Do you remember in Angel Heart when they had the recurring images of the fan and the bountiful mysterious flashbacks? I thought they were poorly done, but they accomplished their effect all the same. In Jugular Wine the same approach is used in a completely destructive manner. There were moments in the film where I literally wanted to turn it off to make the headache go away.
You should NEVER see this movie. Ever. And to think that Rish and I wanted to see this so badly that we actually asked the clerk when it would be returned. We should have taken the hint when we popped it in and found that it had been stopped less than half way through. There are many things wrong with film, but none of them are so wrong as this.