Trash Movie Review - Lesbian Vampire Killers

Lesbian Vampire Killers is an entertaining piece of brain-dead fun found at the bottom of a DVD bargain bin. This is one of those titles that makes you expect the worst, but you have to watch it because it's Lesbian Vampires. The title alone suggests that even if the movie is bad you’ll get to see lesbians and possibly boobies. Plus it has a former Doctor Who in it. So I took some time during a bedridden afternoon to give it a shot. 

The movie starts with a dull Bram Stoker’s Dracula-style prologue. Some 17th-century knight has lost his love to the lesbian vampire queen. He then decides retribution is needed and becomes a vampire hunter, beheading the queen but not before she invokes a curse on his village.From here we cut to the present day where we are introduced to our hapless heroes, Fletch and Jimmy. Fletch has just been sacked from his job as a clown for punching a kid and Jimmy been dumped by his two-timing girlfriend who “needs space” after cheating on him seven times before.

The duo decide to go on holiday to forget their troubles, but lack of money means they end up hiking in the rural village of Cragwich. Naturally they run into a van of Swedish women who happen to be students of folklore and ancient superstition. It doesn't help that collectively they are portrayed as having the intelligence of a bunch of drunk sorority girls. They are really only in this movie to be turned by the ancient curse that transforms all girls in that particular village into the titular bloodsuckers. From there the movie stumbles forward establishing set pieces and apparently a storyline, which I never really noticed.

I honestly felt the best bit of the movie is Fletch. Although he is a chauvinistic male who just wants to have sex, I found myself enjoying Fletch’s observational humour about the situation he was in. Anytime something crazy happened he would make a crass comment and complain. I feel that this is what allot of people would do in his situation. It’s a shame they relegate him to side-kick digging around endlessly in badly-lit graves with former Doctor Who Paul McGann. The movie focuses too much time on his spineless friend Jimmy whose whole performance could have been replaced with a sad face drawn on a potato to save the filmmakers some money.

I embraced the film’s retro-sleaze wholeheartedly. The deliberately cheap sets are obviously filmed on a soundstage with lots of dry ice. At the same time the movie is so slick and over-directed with constant speeding up and slowing down of the action and strange camera angles. 

The whole movie clearly wanted to be Shaun of the Dead but with lesbian vampires. I think this movie could have worked better if the Fletch and Jimmy friendship was better defined. They come across as one-dimensional characters who lack any real depth. The heavy reliance of juvenile humour can only go so far. At the end of the day the movie is a fun if flawed waste of time. 2 out 5 rum and raisin ice-cream covered waffles.