A Return to Salem's Lot

A Return to Salem's Lot is a 1987 American horror film co-written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Michael Moriarty, Andrew Duggan and Samuel Fuller. It is a sequel to the classic 1979 miniseries Salem's Lot.

Plot summary
Michael Moriarty plays an amoral anthropologist who has been lumbered with his dysfunctional adolescent son (Ricky Addison Reed). He returns to Salem's Lot, the town of his birth, to find that it has been taken over by the undead. A few living people are kept around to provide blood for the vampires and to operate the gas station and shops in the daytime. Knowing of the anthropologist's refusal to moralise about other people's lifestyles (in the opening scene he is seen refusing to interfere in a human sacrifice and concerned only for the quality of the film he is shooting), the vampires employ him to write their story. As the vampires' evil nature becomes clear, the anthropologist is joined by a Nazi hunter (played by Samuel Fuller) who helps him save his son, and at the climax the master vampire is impaled on the American flag instead of the traditional stake. As the trio escapes Salem's Lot, the vampires are left in the sun to burn along with their homes.

Cast

 * Michael Moriarty as Joe Weber
 * Ricky Addison Reed as Jeremy Weber
 * Samuel Fuller as Van Meer
 * Andrew Duggan as Judge Axel
 * Evelyn Keyes as Mrs. Axel
 * June Havoc as Aunt Clara
 * Jill Gatsby as Sherry
 * Ronee Blakley as Sally
 * Tara Reid as Amanda
 * Brad Rjin as Clarence
 * Janelle Webb as Sarah
 * Robert Burr as Dr. Fenton

Production
Filming took place in Vermont.

Release
The film was given a limited release theatrically in the United States by Warner Bros. in 1987. It was released on VHS by Warner Home Video the following year. The film was released to burn-on -demand DVD by the Warner Archive Collection in 2010.

Critical response
The Des Moines Register gave the film a zero-star rating, referring to it as "a festival of bad acting" and "quite possibly the most amateurishly made vampire movie in memory," adding: "Return, in fact, plays like a movie made by people who've heard about how movies are made but who've never seen one." Jim Schembri of The Age noted that the film "outstay[s] its welcome after about five minutes."

DVD Talk commented that the film was "Too interesting to miss, but regrettably not very scary."