Vampires

Be warned that this review contains spoilers.

A mockumentary about creatures of the night, Vampires is as good an example of this axiom as I’ve ever seen. Do not confuse this movie with What We Do In the Shadows, another pseudo-documentary about bloodsuckers. Set in Belgium and Quebec, Vampires is in French with English subtitles and is more satire than horror movie. I didn’t laugh at  the jokes, but I might not have understood some of the cultural references. If you think vampires slaughtering minorities, children and handicapped people is funny, then this is the movie for you.

The plot: a film crew documents the exploits of a vampire clan – family head George, his wife Bertha and their two children, Samson and Grace. The kids aren’t George and Bertha’s biological children. I think ‘children’ means that they’re of the same bloodline, although this is never explained and I never saw the movies or TV shows the filmmakers are referencing. Sloppy writing is a problem throughout Vampires – dumb characters, dangling plotlines, unexplained incidents and utter impossibilities.

Bad writing aside, the main problem I had with Vampires is that George and Bertha are boring. They behave like middle-aged swingers who think they’re cool and end up embarrassing their kids in front of their friends. George is a self-satisfied prick and Bertha acts like she’s high on prescription meds. I will say that the nosferatu couple that lives in their basement is even worse.

Grace and Samson are more sympathetic than their ‘parents.’ Samson goes to vampire school to watch torture porn movies and practice his bite on a CPR dummy. His best friend is an ex-member of The Doors, who died and was reborn speaking fluent French. Grace likes pink and has a pink coffin because her dad spoils her. She keeps trying to kill herself because she can’t die, although she can die: just step into the daylight. So it’s not clear if Grace  wants to die or if she wants to be human. She has a human lover, who appears in the middle of the movie and just as suddenly disappears.

Samson has sex with the head vampire’s wife, which gets the whole family banished to Quebec. George has to get a real job. Samson falls in love with a human woman and becomes a subway busker. Grace starts transforming back into a human, for reasons way too muddled to go into. That’s one of the utter impossibilities I was talking about, and I’m not going to waste another hundred words describing why. Trust me on this one.

Not recommended.