Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires Review

Have you ever seen a trailer for a movie and got pumped for the release all for a delay of over 5 years? Yeah I been looking forward to this one for a while and purely from a visual criteria, Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires was certainly more than worth the wait. 

Living in a Michael Mann vibe apartment, Chuck Steel is the classic man’s man, cop’s cop, whatever. When his enemies aren’t being paired a random assortment of rookies, they’re vampires that feast exclusively on the blood of the drunk. A descendant in a van helsing-esque family is the only real assistance Chuck has in defeating the ‘Trampires’.  

The stop motion in this is honestly the best of this style of animation I have ever seen. The way it’s complimented with the cinematography and vfx shows me that for as much as I liked iconic studios like Aardman and Laika that there is better our there. With the idea of the story striving to be the epitome of the 80s, it truly is the best bar movie ever made. 

I emphasize the excellence of everything you see in this movie because the rest of it ranges from being passable to kind of embarrassing. The voice acting (except for a few) does not match the characters at all and the writing specifically for the jokes are generally misses. That exact combination of criticisms reminds me very much of that YouTube series Dick Figures which woulda been great to me if I was 11 years younger. 

For as bad as the bad gets in Chuck Steel, the good vastly outweighs it to the point that I do gotta recommend it. From an artistic standpoint this is a once in 28 years achievement. A sequel is teased at the end and if I gotta wait 7+ years for that to be slowly distributed then I certainly am gonna wait. If you’d like to check out Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires, you’ll be happy to know it’s on VOD services like Amazon now