Thursday, October 29, 2015

Lesbian Vampire Killers

Rotten Tomatoes
One instance where the title says it all, Lesbian Vampire Killers finds screenwriters Stewart Williams and Paul Hupfield and director Phil Claydon plunging headfirst into guilty pleasure territory with an unrestrained, sex-laden horror comedy. The picture stars Mathew Horne and James Corden of the UK series Gavin and Stacey as (respectively) Jimmy and Fletch, two buddies who wind up in a British village with dozens of women caught up in a Sapphic vampire curse - driven by a lust for each other's bodies and an insatiable craving for human blood. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

IGN

LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS REVIEW

Fangs for the mammaries.

BY ORLANDO PARFITT How any film with the words 'Lesbian' and 'Vampire' in the title can be so unentertaining, so unsexy and so damned unfunny is almost beyond us at IGN.
Lesbian Vampire Killers stars two of the biggest stars in Britain at the moment, James Corden and Mathew Horne, who have not only have attained national treasure status off the back of hit British BBC comedy Gavin and Stacey (which stars the pair, and is co-written by Corden), but also have a new sketch show out.
In Lesbian Vampire Killers, the duo play buddies Fletch and Jimmy - one has just been sacked from his job as a clown and the other's been dumped by his girlfriend. They decide to go on holiday to forget their troubles and, due to a lack of money, end up hiking in the rural village of Cragwich. Naturally, when they arrive, they find the village is under an ancient curse that transforms all girls over the age of 18 into the titular Sapphic bloodsuckers.
LVK is clearly intended to be a lovably eccentric parody of Hammer Horror films, but replaces the wit and genuine creepiness of those movies with tawdry, puerile humour that - put simply - just isn't funny. For example, one of the (most laboured) gags in the movie revolves around an enchanted sword needed to kill the queen vampire. For starters the weapon is called The Sword of Dialdo because, hur hur, it sounds like 'dildo'. Brilliant. Even better, it has a handle that's shaped like a penis. It's a joke that's not funny the first time around but after the umpteenth time, when James Corden says: "I still can't get over how the sword handle looks like a cock!", it's just depressing.
We love silly, smutty humour but gags such as this are just lame. The whole affair, as with most British film comedy in the last 10 years, decides the best way to cater for the beer-swilling, lads mag-reading demographic is with knob gags and breasts. This is despite the fact that this sub-section of the movie-going public quite happily consumes far more sophisticated television comedy like The Office, The IT Crowd, Peep Show and indeed Horne and Corden's very own Gavin and Stacey.

This scene was nowhere near as exciting as it looks.

Even the bevy of hot girls in the movie, most of whom obviously engage in lesbian activities at some stage, are rendered considerably less sexy because it seems none of them have ever acted before.
Indeed, virtually every aspect of the film is misjudged: the film's production design is (we assume) deliberately cheap and garish looking, obviously filmed on a sound stage with lots of dry ice. Yet, at the same time, the movie is so slick and over-directed, with constant speeding up and slowing down of the action and strange camera angles, it totally negates the idea that this is a genre parody.
It doesn't help that the dreadful script is banal and unfunny. We've nothing against raucous expletives but, here, the writers apparently decided that proper jokes weren't even necessary, relying on swear-words to deliver the belly-laughs. Trouble is, they don't.
Overall, the entire project is a crushingly lazy attempt to create a piece of titillating, exploitative horror-comedy that manages to achieve none of its aims. A mirthless, joyless experience, Lesbian Vampire Killers is a movie with absolutely nothing going for it, save the title.