Rent Vampires (2010)

Bloody Awful - Vampires review by Count Otto Black

Once upon a time in a land far, far away from Hollywood, a little-known director made a low-budget mockumentary about a film crew recording the everyday lives of a dysfunctional household of modern-day urban vampires, and it impressed everyone so much that the lucky fellow soon found himself in Hollywood directing a megabudget superhero blockbuster. Of course, I'm talking about Taika Waititi from New Zealand and "What We Do In The Shadows", not Vincent Lannoo from Belgium and "Vampires", because although it was Lannoo who had the idea in the first place, it was Waititi who knew what to do with it so much better that very few people even noticed, let alone cared, that his breakthrough hit was a reboot of an obscure flop made by somebody else only four years previously.

Which in itself tells you a great deal about this film. Waititi understands several key points that Lannoo doesn't grasp at all. Notably that comedy, however black it is, needs to be funny. And the laughs in "Vampires" are few and far between. The idea of a sulky teenage vampire rebelling against her parents by becoming a sort of anti-goth who dresses in pink and wants to be an ordinary mortal is quite a good joke, but unfortunately it's almost the only one in the whole film, just as her pink coffin is used on the DVD packaging to sum up the entire movie because this inanimate object is the funniest thing in it.

These vampires aren't Waititi's lovably inept bumbling bloodsuckers trapped in house-sharing purgatory forever because they can't grow up; they're cynical monsters whose vices include extreme racism, pedophilia, casual murder of children and babies, and all-round sadistic contempt for their victims. We're supposed to be amused by the ex-prostitute whose marginally better new job involves living in the vampires' kitchen and answering to the name of "Meat", a "joke" that outlasts its welcome long before Lannoo tops it with a truly jaw-dropping "meat and vegetables" gag which has to be seen to be believed. Incredibly bad taste is not in itself funny, and making a heavy-handed political point by portraying the social class you hate as literal vampires is nowhere near as ground-breaking as Lannoo obviously thinks it is.

He also fails to grasp that in a comedy, the audience need to like the protagonists on some level, and this lot are simply horrible. Waititi's vampires work as comedy characters because they're irresponsible young men chaotically sharing a house who just happen to be vampires. Lannoo's don't because they're vile inhuman parasites who just happen to be middle-class Belgians. This is an ugly, mean-spirited film that leaves a nasty aftertaste. As for its "message", if you need to watch a movie about white people literally having black people for dinner before it crosses your mind that racism might be wrong, you'll probably side with the vampires.