Writers: Dr. God, Ryan Mitts
Director: Brian James O’Connell
Work. It sucks the life out of you.
Bloodsucking Bastards is, as the name suggests, a vampire based comedy horror movie. However the most horrific part of the film, for me, was before the vamps showed up…
The main character is Evan (Fran Kranz), a nice guy working as Assistant Sales Manager in a company that seems to specialise in cold calling people to flog them pills. It’s a dreadful position in a dreadful office full of dreadful people; which is my main problem with the film.
The first twenty minutes or so is set-up. Here we’re introduced to the main characters and most of them are obnoxious. Presumably this is to make us happy about what happens to them later, but they were too unpleasant for me; these people made me want to hang out with the characters from The Office. Their antics were clearly intended to be funny, however the humour wasn’t too my taste. For the first part of the film, the comedy is as broad and tasteless as the characters themselves. I came close to giving up.
Things change when the slimy Max (Pedro Pascal) – with whom Evan has a long-standing mutual enmity – arrives on the scene. Soon after this people start disappearing or… changing.
Once Evan works out what’s going on, it’s up to him, his friend Tim (Joey Kern) and the security guard Frank (Marshall Givens) to try to stop the vamps and rescue Evan’s girlfriend Amanda.
Which results in a very amusing final half hour. With the three of them against the horde, the whole style of the film and particularly the humour changes. Instead of crude, obnoxious characters we get witty one-liners and sight gags plus a lot of blood. It’s still not exactly subtle – the allegory is practically spelled out – but it is funny.
So I’m glad I kept watching, but the first act was hard work. The characters are too unpleasant, it’s hard to find anyone to like. Even Evan himself is nice to the point of being an annoying wimp whilst Tim is as irritating as the others. The best character by far is Frank, who takes his job way too seriously with Givens doing a great job playing the role completely straight-faced.
The film’s different styles and lack of consistency might be connected to the fact that ‘Dr God’ is a group of five. Full marks to whichever of them wrote the final act, early gong for the first.