ScreenWize

With a name like Lesbian Vampire Killers, you imagine this film is going to go one of two ways – either a Sapphic Van Helsing who kills heterosexually identifying vampires, Lesbian Vampire-Killers, or about people who kill gay vampires, Lesbian-Vampire Killers. This is the later. These aren’t your Tarago-driving, Folk Festival ticket holding lesbians, however. These are the mythic lesbians as imagined by FHM-reading blokes, lesbians who can’t go on a night of blood-sucking evil without dressing up like they’re starring in a Samantha Fox film clip in frilly French knickers, no tops and a full face of make-up. Sure, the whole thing sets gay rights and feminism back 40 years, but Lesbian Vampire Killers doesn’t mean to offend. It is, in fact, all rather tongue-in-cheek, very much in the tradition of Sean of the Dead or Lair of the White Worm.

The film begins somewhere in Britain in the middle ages where vampire queen Carmilla (Silvia Corlocca) rules the night, taking the choicest girls as her lovers and the men as her dinner. One night, she takes the wrong man’s wife, a brave knight, and he slays her with a mythic sword, but not before Carmilla curses the girls of the village to the vampiric life when they turn 18. Fast forward to the present day, and the knight’s descendent, Jimmy (Matthew Horne) is a bit of a doormat for conniving girlfriend Judy (Lucy Gaskell). When she dumps him for the seventh time, he takes best mate Fletch (James Coden) on a hiking trip where they hope to meet some girls and drink some beers. The boys of course find themselves in the cursed village with a bus full of beautiful European students, who all find themselves on the local dinner menu.

The script, by Paul Hupfield and Stewart Williams, is good fun without being quite up to the wit of Sean of the Dead, while director Phil Clayton plays with all the conventions of the genre, with outlandish sound effects, hyper-realised movement, lots and lots of fog, and some inventive and messy gore. The acting is bad in just the right places, though James Corden and Mathew Horne (who work together on the sitcom Gavin & Stacey) are superb. Quite a bit of the humour relies on a well-placed curse word coming from an unexpected place, like the narrator or a priest. Not exactly Oscar Wilde, but it had me laughing.

CK
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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon