It’s official. John Carpenter is a complete hack. The director who gave us “Halloween,” “Big Trouble in Little China,” “Escape from New York,” “The Thing” and “Darkstar” can no longer escape from his rut of making absolute crap.

The stench of desperate banality in recent films “Village of the Damned,” “They Live” and “Escape from L.A.” is still lingering in Carpenter’s latest offering.

“Vampires” has to be the most pointlessly sadistic and vulgar movie produced since “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn” — only this time we don’t get the characters.

The basic premise is as charming an idea as any in Hollywood today. It’s a western with vampires set in the Southwest looking for an ancient cross that will make them invulnerable to sunlight. Through all this, the vampires are being hunted by a special, Vatican-appointed hit squad.

But the execution in this film is poor — especially for Carpenter, who has done much better work in the past.

His greatest strength as a filmmaker was never in the exposition of the human experience. He was always great at creating a fantasy world and filling it with characters that are deeper than average for fantasy films.

Jack Burton and Snake Plissken jumped off the screen and beat you with their realism.

The atmosphere was always carefully constructed by Carpenter as well. “Escape from New York” was an action movie with plenty of violence to go around., but the strength of the film was in the construction of a believable post-war New York environment.

It was given as much respect as the characters and aided in the creation of tension, which built to an almost unbearable crescendo when the violence struck.

That is powerful film-making.

“Vampires” has none of the classic elements of Carpenter’s better works. But most disappointing is the fact that there are no characters for the audience to get inside of.

James Wood’s portrayal of Jack Crow is nothing more than a freestyle exercise in sadistic violence and vulgar hatred. “Vampires” has more priest-smacking and ho-slapping than your average prison population would find enjoyable.

The most disturbing thing about the violence in this film is the robotic nature in which the actors play their parts. It is as if Woods had been given a short list of attributes with no serious motivation and then Carpenter yelled “action” and he had to fake it.

There have been plenty of violent films to hit the screens in recent years, but rarely has there been one with this level of sadistic violence, which simultaneously made it seem so routine and pointless without trying to make a point of any kind.

It was as if the entire cast and crew was just going through the motions and no one felt a thing.

Perhaps the most ridiculous scene in the film takes place when Crow is questioning Father Adam, the new priest on his team.

He is looking for some withheld information and when he gets no answer from Father Adam he tells him “I killed my own fucking father so if you think I have any problem killing you, you’re wrong.”

Then Crow cuts the priest and beats him until he spills his guts and everyone walks away as friends. It is this kind of unbelievable claptrap that defines the movie.

Woods as well, has done so many films that were so much better than this one. This role was like free-basing all of his psycho routines into one disturbing, yet vastly shallow caricature of himself.

Montoya, played by Daniel Baldwin, gives a performance so chilling and inspiring that it makes that dog on the Taco Bell commercials look like Larry Olivier.

Sheryl Lee was a bright spot, but that was due not so much to her stunning acting performance as it was to her stunning nude scenes.

Overall, her portrayal of Katrina the hooker-turned-vampire was the best one in the film. When she wasn’t on the receiving end of a vicious and senseless pounding, she was doing an admirable job of shaking, as if that conveys what it is like to turn into a vampire.

There are snuff films with better acting, plots and characters than this movie that aren’t half as graphic.

2 stars out of five

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.