Director: Phil Claydon
Cast: Matthew Horne, James Corden, Paul McGann, Myanna Buring, Silvia Colloca
Plot: Newly dumped, Jimmy (Horne), suggests a hitch-hiking trip to his best mate, Fletch (Corden), accidentally wandering into the paths of an age-old vampire queen, intent on resurrecting herself.
There is a point in Lesbian Vampire Killers where your hopes creep up. Namely the first five minutes, before we realise the B Movie mess that is waiting for us in the second act. Claydon gives the impression that he is a sharp director, making a low budget Brit-flick seem like something out of a Hollywood movie. Talking head scenes are made interesting through the use of zoom-cuts, livening sound effects and a creative style. It comes across as the next Shaun of the Dead â a British director who thinks outside the box making a horror comedy with two likeable British TV stars. Matthew Horne and James Corden are the other highlight on offer here. They have already proven themselves a hit success with Gavin and Stacey. Perhaps we should have read in between the lines for those first few scenes. The script doesnât give them jokes as much as Horne and Corden make something out of nothing. Their chemistry is sharp, they bring a laid-back humour to the introduction scenes and they seem to be far more in tune to what the audience want than anyone else in the creative process of this movie.
The bad starts creeping in, when we leave the familiar British setting. Horne and Corden meet up with some foreign, forgettable hitch-hikers, who happen to be attractive women. They head to a cabin in the middle of the woods (yes, I rolled my eyes too), and then the women are picked off one by one by vampires who have a taste for female blood. What unfolds is, quite frankly, embarrassing. The worst thing about this movie is the guilt the viewer feels for watching it. Lesbian Vampire Killers is the kind of title that hints at a witty parody film, where sexploitation is used to poke fun at the genre. I can think of several independent movies that succeed on this front. However, as the movie progresses into something you would expect a Lad Mag to come up with if they could rustle up a movie budget, you end up feeling ashamed that you bought something called Lesbian Vampire Killers. When it becomes little more than trashy bad humour and naked vampire ladies parading around the forest, you wonder what you even went in expecting. The jokes do not work and after a while, even Horne and Corden cannot save the scenes. Their witty back-and-forth is replaced with Corden swearing at the top of his lungs and Horne falling back onto stereotypical horror movie hero qualities. The red shirts are killed at such a rapid rate, you wonder why they were even written into the story in the first place. It essentially becomes just another Cabin in the Woods movie, but one that has no idea what it is doing with itself. When they bring in one of the old Doctor Who actors as a vampire-slaying Vicar with a sword shaped like a penis, only the most hardened movie critic will be able to not get up and switch this awful piece of film-making off.
Final Verdict: I hope other countries donât judge British movies in this light. Do yourself a favour and just watch Shaun of the Dead again.
One Star