John Carpenter's " Vampires."

This has got to be one of the top three vampire movies of all time for having a realistic feel. From the panoramic opening shots of dawn in New Mexico, the oppressive dryness of the day and the emptiness of the desert come alive. We don't know it yet, but we are witnessing the start a long, hot day of vampire slaying. Crisp, rumbly Western guitar electrical music introduces the swaggering approach of James Wood's Vatican-backed Jack Crow and his redneck crew of slayers. Crow's first words are profane, irreverent, and identify him as a cynical and experienced vampire hunter. The team arm themselves with a variety of high-tech anti-vampire weaponry, bundles of guns and don body armour. They appear to be tough and utterly ruthless as the score prepares us for a frontal assault... that never comes.
These men are scared. Jack leads them quietly into the abandoned ranch house; he is ultra-cautious, and takes the advance guard as they break into the ranch. This and the obvious nervousness of the slayers humanises them for me, and I worried about them from the outset. It is very quiet. When the violence comes, it is nasty enough, and the vampires are nasty enough (to human eyes), that I continued to fear for the lives of the team as they clear and slay their way through the house. As the day lengthens and turns to dusk I felt relieved that the expected bloodbath has not occurred - and I anticipated it more eagerly for all that. There is no master vampire in the emptied nest. This is unexpected and ominous to Crow.
So far, so atmospheric. The world of this film is gritty, tawdry, and the vampires are foul enough to be real without the grossness of some splatter-films I could name.
All is not well indeed; the team is compromised and Jack and his comrade Anthony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) soon find themselves without their slayer weaponry and on the run from a terrible enemy. They have one thing going for them at this point; a recently-bitten prostitute Katrina (Sheryl Lee). She has not turned yet, and Crow plans to use her growing psychic link to a master vampire to find and kill him.
The men separate - Montoya to lie low and guard Katrina - whilst Crow returns to headquarters in Monterey to explain that he has been betrayed and to re-arm.
His boss, Cardinal Alba, briefs him that all the other Vatican-supported slayer teams worldwide have been slaughtered, and so Crow is on his own. We also learn something about their particular adversary ( Jan Valek; a former priest, religious reformer and rebel) and, equally interestingly to me, how and why Crow became the ruthless slayer he is today. Hard-bitten isn't in it.
Accompanied by the bookish and naive Father Guiteau who has been foisted on him by the Cardinal as chaplain for the team, Crow sets off to recover Montoya and the ever-more sickly Katrina. He intends to use her to read the Master's thoughts and track him . We discover that the vampires have been searching for the Cross for centuries and it is a long and bloody race to find it before this particular Master does.
The denouement when it comes is the set-piece shoot-out I had anticipated in the opening scenes of the film. It is tightly-paced and works brilliantly to build up and then to sustain the tension until the very last moments of the film. We discover the cause of the mission's betrayal, the origins of the vampire species and also Valek's plans for the world. Valek is an ambitious boy.

The film works as an adventure and as a horror movie because there is plenty of action interspersed by brief and clear scenes which move the plot along. Soundtrack and scenery put us in places we can identify and think we recognise from the very beginning. The characters are imperfect people and have motives of their own which are not always wise and professional, and thus we have the human-interest sub-plot concerning Katrina's struggle with the vampire infection contrasting with Crow and Montoya's different plans for her. At 108 clear-cut and enthralling minutes, John Carpenter's Vampires is small masterpiece of exciting storytelling and engaging characters. I don't watch vampire films for the gore and the violence alone; well done and plentiful though they are. Carpenter has made his world and his monsters convincing, his heroes sympathetic enough to worry about their hurts, and weak enough to want to kick them sometimes.
A gem. See it.