New Mexico. Jack Crow (James Woods) heads up a Vatican sponsored hit squad. For bloodsuckers. Children of the night. Vampires. The Roman Catholic church, you see, secretly admits culpability in the "disease": a bungled ritual way back when, the reverse exorcism of renegade priest Jan Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith). Now he's immortal and in pursuit of the McGuffin that will allow his kind to walk in daylight.

Crow's crew - heavily tooled grunts and their pet priest - spend days busting up nests; shooting, staking and frying. Nights are for partying. Until the pissed vampire master himself shows up at the slayers' motel, lasciviously feeds on and turns hooker Katrina (Twin Peaks' Sheryl Lee) and merrily butchers most of Crow's compadres. Using Katrina as their psychic link, he and right-hand man Tony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) recruit new spiritual advisor Father Guiteau (Tim Guinee) and take off to search and destroy.

For all that it's derivative and saddled with a half-hearted climax, Vampires can at least be said to herald something of a late flowering for the less than reliable Carpenter. You can maybe drive a truck through Don Jakoby's screenplay (from John Steakly's novel) - why, for example, has it taken Valek since the 14th century to achieve his quest? - but at least it means you can feast on the remainder as outrageous pantomime.

What we have in essence, you see, is a foul-mouthed, gleefully gory western, beautifully shot in widescreen by Gary B. Kibbe. Carpenter is consciously aping Leone and Peckinpah, and after the cartoonish Escape From L.A. and made-for-TV pap of Village of the Damned, Vampires' harshness is welcome. It also eschews the rubber and CGI nonsense of that distinctly limp-wristed south of the border vamp-fest, From Dusk Till Dawn. Bloody decapitation and gutsy evisceration are the order of the day. In daylight, these suckers go up like roman candles.

Woods is a tough guy by numbers, Baldwin and Lee blandly likeable, and the lofty Griffith doesn't have to much more than draw himself up and spout Anne Rice mumbo-jumbo. Boy stuff. The film is only saved from misogyny by being an equal opportunities abuser.

Better are the occasional flashes of what made Carpenter so good in the first place. The opening roust is tensely handled, while the slayers' attempts to lure Valek's brood from an underground gaol reminds you that here indeed is the man behind Assault On Precinct 13. His score, all twangy guitar and Escape From New York rumbles, is excellent.

Overlong and adding very little to vampire lore (no, sadly, it has none of Buffy The Vampire Slayer's perverse wit), but you do have to admire such cruel, crafted single-mindedness.