B-movie librarian to the rescue!

Made-for-TV and direct-to-video films are the B-movies of our time. Way back when, theaters showed double features (2 movies for the price of 1); one of those films was usually a grade-A, big-budget Hollywood studio movie, and the other one was a shorter movie, made on the cheap, usually a scrappy little genre film (crime, Western, horror). Even into the 70's such movies were still being made for the theatrical market--often for showing at drive-ins, where double features continue being shown to the present day. Now, such cheaply made genre films are still getting made, but they're mostly shown on TV or sent straight to DVD.

The Librarian is a film series which airs on TNT. Not only is it reminiscent of B-films in terms of its budget, but also because the films play out like TV versions of Indiana Jones movies (which themselves were directly inspired by B-movie adventure serials of the 30's and 40's). Noah Wyle is Flynn Carsen, a cute nerdish guy who winds up as a "librarian" for a secret museum which collects and protects magical, mythic artifacts (the sword Excalibur, Noah's Ark, etc.). His bosses (Bob Newhart and Jane Curtin) send him on missions, sometimes drab, sometimes life-threatening, to bring back such artifacts.

There have been three such movies so far. In this most recent one, Curse of the Judas Chalice (now on DVD), Wyle is sent on vacation to relax. He goes to New Orleans, falls for an exotic singer (Stana Katic), finds out she's a vampire, though a benign one who drinks her blood from refrigerated pouches, and helps her to protect the fabled Judas Chalice, a cup Judas Iscariot drank from, which supposedly holds power over all the undead. [Sorry for all the commas in that sentence, but it just feels right.] The plot is not particularly tight, and the effects are about as good as you would expect from a made-for-TV movie, but Wyle makes an engaging hero, equal parts smartie, doofus, and cutie-pie. Katic's accent, which is part French, part Transylvanian, is good--she has no accent on Castle, the Nathan Filion cop show she's on (better catch it soon, because it won't last)--though she and he don't have much chemistry. Parts of the film appear to have actually been shot in on location, which adds to the atmosphere.

Ultimately, it was the vampire element that kept me with the movie to the end. These vampires, unlike most in today's pop culture, are much closer to what I think of as the "classic" vampire figure, as in the Universal movies of the 30's and 40's--Bela Lugosi, fog, crucifixes, can't stand sunshine, etc. The movie's positing of Judas as the very first vampire is not, I think, based on any authentic folklore (most critics trace the vampire figure back to Lilith, a folklorish figure from the non-canonical Garden of Eden), but is fairly ingenious just the same. The tone of the movie is appropriately light; I never laughed out loud or really felt like Wyle was in mortal danger, but overall it was satisfying. Wyle is a bit passive and insubstantial for a leading man, but he's cute and quite charming, and my work days would be a bit more fun if there was more eye candy like him working with me at my library.