"Well this is fun, Rutger, but are you sure you can get me Harrison Ford's autograph?"

Irony of ironies: a film in which Rutger Hauer rightfully should have sucked, and did not.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hauer plays the main vampire villain Lothos. Vampires, as we all know, suck blood, but Lothos never seems to get around to doing so, at least not on screen. Hauer really hits the right notes in his performance as Lothos (even if most of his scenes seem to have been left on the cutting room floor), and so it's a shame that we don't ever get to see him chow down on anyone.

These days when you say Buffy, people think of the TV series, and rightly so. The series is consistently one of the funniest and scariest shows on tv. While it is widely thought that the series is based on the movie, that's not quite true. Joss Whedon, writer of the movie and creator of the series, based the series on his original script for the movie which is quite different from the filmed version. For example, there are often references to the fact that Buffy burned down her previous school's gym. But in the movie, Buffy leaves the gym relatively untouched. Luckily for us Buffy fans, Whedon's original script is being adapted in to comic book miniseries called Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin.

Perry and Swanson check the acting classifieds for their next jobs.

Enough digression: on to the movie. Buffy opens with the obligatory flashback to Europe during medieval times, where we see vampires attacking a serving wench who is not as defenseless as she appears. Fast forward to Los Angeles during the "Lite Ages", where a valley girl named Buffy (Kristy Swanson) lives a typical high school life. She's the high school's head cheerleader, she has a popular boyfriend, and she and her friends freely denigrate the less fortunate. What she doesn't know is that vampires have come to town, and that the weird dreams she's having are because she is one in a long line of female vampire slayers who are reincarnated from generation to generation. The slayers are trained by Merrick (the ubiquitous Donald Sutherland), who is also reincarnated every generation.

There isn't much more you need to know: Buffy trains to fight vampires, and the vampires choose the senior dance as the time to make their presence known. Romance comes in the form of Pike (Luke Perry), a bad boy with a heart of gold. The villians are Lothos and his lap dog Amilyn, played by Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens.

For people seeing the movie now, Kristy Swanson is put in the position of being compared to Sarah Michelle Gellar. Perhaps that's not fair, but what are you going to do? We can say this about Kristy Swanson: she can't dance. We were informed of this fact by a former cheerleader who watched the movie with us and spent most of her time snickering at Swanson's meager dance attempts. Swanson is, however, enough of a martial artist to pull off her butt-kicking scenes and a good enough actress to pull off Buffy's conversion from bubble-headed bunny to scourge of the undead.

"Dude, I think I'm gonna ask Courtney Cox for a date!"

Many of the supporting actors in Buffy will look familiar. David Arquette, who seems to have been in every film made from 1992 on, plays Pike's toady who quickly becomes a lost boy. Oh, and let's not forget player number 10, who may or may not be Ben Affleck.

The problem with Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that it is supposed be both a horror movie and a comedy, but it doesn't do either very well. Whedon has said that the studio changed his script, reportedly to make the movie funnier, and presumably less scary. We suspect that most of the changes were made to the villains, reducing their parts quite a bit, because the subplot about the connection between Buffy and Lothos never comes completely into focus. Meanwhile the villains have been camped up beyond necessity, though Rutger Hauer avoids the temptation to be too silly until his last scene. Don't get us wrong: Paul Reubens' mugging of the camera, especially once he gets staked, is very funny. But Buffy the TV series proves every week that the humor is funnier when it is contrasted against serious threats. On its own, Buffy the Vampire Slayer might have received three lava lamps, but it so pales in comparison to the TV series that our estimation of it can't help but suffer.