'Beyond The Rave' is Frightfully Good

You know that sweet blood bath scene at the beginning of Blade with the badass techno beat and the sprinklers raining down vampire candy on a sea of hypersexual, e-ed up, body bumpin’ undead?

Well, the good people at MySpace, the heavyweights at Hammer Films – who gained fame with anglicized, goth interpretations of 1930s classics The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy, but haven’t produced anything in over 30 years – and new media production co. Pure Grass Films expanded upon those best five minutes of any nouveau-vampire story and created a whole new series.

Just replace Wesley Snipes’ title character with a soldier in the Queen’s army, set it in backcountry Britain instead of an American metropolis, make the acting a helluva lot better and you got Beyond the Rave.

Exclusive to MySpace, and inspired by the founders of Pure Grass own rave experiences (people still go to these things?), the creators promise suspense, plenty of blood, and a kind of sexy that’s shy of “gore-nography.” The first three episodes dropped last night and they don’t disappoint. We follow Ed on the beginnings of a 24-hour debauchery that will go horribly wrong when his girlfriend, Jen is captured by a group of hardcore partiers that suck

The 20 four-minute episodes (released Mondays and Wednesdays) will be packaged together as a DVD feature once the online series is complete, presumably to make some cash and because Beyond the Rave is one of the most entertaining things I’ve seen on the web.

Why? Lots of internet TV shows boast “character profiles” and “interactive elements,” but none of them have suck up chunks of my time investigating back story like this. If I’m impelled to revisit my all but defunct MySpace account to friend someone fictional, the show their in gots to be good.