My notes on the vampire movie.
‘You couldn’t die enough to make me happy, and one last thought … I’m gonna spend til dark nursing on your wife’s carcass!’
How can a film in which God is a lesbian played by the woman (Angela Lindvall) who was Dragonfly in CQ and creates vampires to eliminate evil from the world be as blah as this thing … which has been called Pearblossom (after the highway), Murder World (after a gas station) and Life Blood (because of vampires). In 1968, as signified by some cool cuts (‘Mellow Yellow’), British lesbian babes Brooke (Sophie Monk) and Rhea (Anya Lahiri) are at a New Year’s Eve party, when Brooke finds a movie star (Justin Shilton) on the point of raping a girl (Scout Taylor-Compton) and stabs him dozens of times. Brooke and Rhea drive off into the desert, arguing about the killing and whether it was justified, when Brooke runs over a possum (an explicit possum-squishing shot is included) and Rhea throws a wobbly that this second death tips the evening over from being annoying into existential misery. God shows up and transforms Rhea into a killer angel because she’s pure enough to do the job, but oddly extends the gift to her psycho bitch girlfriend too.
Forty years later, the girls crawl out of shallow grave-cocoons in the desert wearing grubby negligees and looking a bit bruised, whereupon Brooke resumes her killing spree by biting the neck of a passing bowler (Mark Hodos) and a handsome hitch-hiker (Chris Payne Gilbert). On New Year’s Day, the Sheriff (Charles Napier) and his dwarf deputy (Danny Woodburn) are distracted from watching the TV special ‘Chicks Chasing Chickens’ by the bodies on the road, while the girls crash a gas station operated by chubby nerdy lech Dan (Patrick Renna) and continue their argument about the finer points of killing men who either do or don’t deserve it and Brooke goes psycho-diva breaking her friend’s neck, scarring half her face in direct sunlight, and offing people who come by, including a woman (Gina Gallego) who wants to use the rest-room, her obnoxious husband (Marshall Manesh) and Deputy Dwarf (‘you fucking bitch, you killed my little friend Shoe!’). After dark, God brings Rhea back to unlife with a lesbian clinch and some wrist-biting action – and she sets out after Brooke, who is continuing her feminist vigilante act by terrorising an abusive idiot in front of his dumpy goth girlfriend. Rhea thumps Brooke and sends her flying across the road to be impaled on a road-sign, then vows to ‘rid the world of evil and all those who wish others harm!’ She also gets a new girlfriend (Electra Avellan), daughter of the murdered whiny couple.
It has nice ideas, like the way the girl Brooke saved from rape is now on TV specials bigging up her love for the dead rapist and demonising her already-demonic rescuer, but it also has a lot of really terrible notions and no idea about how to put it all into anything like a plot. It’s too pretentious and eccentric to be a straight-ahead lesbian vampire exploitation movie, but is more baffling than anything else. Most of the performances are, to be generous, over-insistent – and Monk chews the scenery, admittedly in a role which asks for it. Written and directed by Ron Carlson.
Dave Chojin sounds fun like one of them bad 80s movies that you find in the pound shop
Billy Houlston cool review, Kim… i found the film pretty poor xxxxxx
Kim Newman Yes, poor … and disappointing, in that it seems to be much more ambitious and unusual than it actually is.
Posted by kimnewman | July 7, 2017, 1:02 pm