Bloodsucking Bastards (Bloodsucking Bosses)
‘Dammit, Amanda, I’m not trying to commit career suicide. I’m trying to prevent career homicide.’ Bloodsucking Bastards
Essentially, Office Space with vampires this comedy takes a while to go into overdrive – perhaps uniquely pitting its amiable schmoe hero Evan (Fran Kranz) against Max (Pedro Pascal), a villain who is so smarmily obnoxious that the fact he’s a vampire is among the least objectionable things about him (‘remember when I did this to your girlfriend in college without using supernatural powers?’). Evan is a drone in a telephone sales firm, depressed because he’s fouled up a relationship with HR manager Amanda (Emma Fitzpatrick) but mildly hopeful that his boss (Joel Murray) will promote him … only for Max, his old enemy from college, to be parachuted in as his new superior and start making changes to whip the slackers and goof-offs on the team into ruthless shape. Which involves spreading vampirism through the office – a creeping sub-plot Evan is too caught up in his own worries to notice, though his deadpan best friend Tim (Joey Kern) and seemingly everyone else catches on at once but is too flip to care much. At the mid-point, it segues from slow-burn to fast ride as the pasty-faced vampires, who aren’t affected by sunlight because the fluorescent-lit office doesn’t get enough of it to make a difference, gorily explode when staked and Evan rallies the last humans to destroy the bloodsuckers and save his girl from Max. It has gross-out splat and crass gaggery to go with its blunt satire of the workplace, but also a little subtlety – the way Evan doesn’t notice or care that Tim is gay (he’s a graduate of Great to Be Straight Camp, which he says he went to for the archery program) and Kern’s spacey performance. Written by Ryan Mitts and ‘Dr God’; directed by Brian James O’Connell.
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