Your Daily Dracula – Vampires vs the Bronx (2020)
Real estate agent Frank Polidori (Shea Whigham) is buying up businesses in the Bronx for silly money in order to establish a nest for vampires. Vivian Tyrrell (Sarah Gadon), the apparently nice new white lady resident who wants to preserve the feel of the neighbourhood is of course a vampire queen – and the aspect of the Bronx she wants to keep is no one caring whether anyone who lives there disappears. She has a casket containing the ashes of her father, the first vampire – who is archly unnamed, though we notice Murnau Properties has a portrait of Vlad the Impaler as a logo.
Young Miguel (Jaden Michael) and his pals Bobby (Gerald Jones) and Luis (Gregory Diaz IV) are ethnic Goonies – they start out running a campaign to keep open a local bodega but catch on to the evil scheme and become the usual bunch of kid vampire-busters, which imposes a certain mildness on the film which mitigates against its monsters being terribly scary. Each kid gets a character archetype – Miguel is the leader, Bobby is being drawn into a gang, Luis is ‘Puerto Rican Harry Potter’ (ie: asthmatic nerd – he’s seen reading ‘Salem’s Lot, so he really ought to tumble to Polidori’s knockoff of Richard Straker’s act from the novel) – and there are some sweet jokes about would-be tough kids with domineering mothers or who can fight off a monster invasion but still get shot down by the slightly older girls they hope to impress. The British Attack the Block features actual bad kids who band together to resist an alien invasion – this trio would never mug a nurse, and even the local gangbangers just seem to hang out rather than, say, sell drugs or do drive-by shootings. The one gunplay scene is a joke, and it’s okay that the gang shoot four people because they’re a) white, b) vampires and c) not even hurt.
In Vampires vs the Bronx, vampire invasion is a metaphor for gentrification – which neatly inverts the reading of Dracula as a metaphor for uncontrolled immigration – as local businesses disappear to be replaced by vampire/yuppie-friendly chains, with local businesspeople (Zoe Saldana cameo as a manicurist) also disappearing. Whigham and Gadon handle the villainy well, though the quartet of supposedly fearsome vampire warriors who are the spearhead of the invasion don’t really get much characterisation and are defeated a little too easily by community spirit and non-caucasian mojo. Besides the Goonies/Lost Boys/Salem’s Lot axis, there are ton of references to Blade as a vampire movie touchstone. It dropped on Netflix, and isn’t free of that slightly blah feel of a lot of streaming product – it’s solid, entertaining and makes its points, but it’s also small-scale somehow, slightly forgettable, and is mildly everything … a bit funny, a bit clever, not that scary. Written by Blaise Hemingway and director Oz Rodriguez.
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