.
Cinema/TV, Dracula, Film Notes

Your Daily Dracula – Azion Iemekeve as Van Helsing, Scary or Die (2012)

Your Daily Dracula – Azion Iemekeve as Van Helsing, Scary or Die (2012)

This anthology horror has perhaps the weakest linking premise ever – an onscreen menu that suggests these are films posted on some creepy internet site.  Cursor-clicks start them rolling.  The Crossing (d: Michael Emanuel) has some racist Texan vigilantes giving illegal (and legal) immigrants a hard time, taking them out in the desert to kill them – only for a zombie plague to get them, whereupon blunt force trauma social comment teaches them a lesson as they run into border control guards whose job is offing zombies.  The racist thugs are nastily convincing, but the editorial content is cartoonish.  Tae-jung’s Lament (d: Igor Meglic) is also about immigration,with Korean Tae-jung (Charles Rahi Chun) coming to the aid of Min-ah (Alexandra Choi),who seems to be suffering persecution in a depopulated city – but when he meets up with her so she can be grateful, there’s a twist which is spoilered by including this as a YDD (sorry).  ‘Re-membered’ (d: Bob Badway) is an EC skit about a driver (Christopher Darga) stopped by a traffic cop, who assumes he’ll be in trouble because there’s a dismembered corpse in his trunk – only for it to have escaped and got back  together to get revenge.  Clowned (d: Emanuel), the longest segment, uses the extra minutes to build up the character of Emmet (Corbin Bleu), a nice guy drug dealer who is devoted to his little brother and Moms – but it has a pretty basic horror comic story as he’s bitten by a feral clown (Domiziano Arcangeli) and grows pasty-faced, swollen-feeted, red-noses, frizzy-haired and so on, eventually becoming a threat to his family.  It’s a workable idea, creepily played and with nasty clown design – but obvious and protracted.  Also – drug dealer suffers: boo fucking hoo.  ‘Lover Come Back’ (d: Emanuel), an impressionist voodoo anecdote, at least carries on the film’s commitment to representing varied ethnicities in horror.  The fact that Darga shows up in ‘Clowned’ as another character suggests these were shot separately and then spliced into a feature.

Discussion

No comments yet.

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: