brandon ledet

The Other Vincent Price Masque: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

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masque

Vincent Price’s fey, effete, menacingly campy persona made him a natural for old-school horror. It was a persona he intentionally cultivated. In his transition from 50’s monster movie classics like House of Wax and The Fly to the 60s Corman-Poe Cycle that made him infamous, he gradually ramped up the eccentricities in his voice & mannerisms that established him as a horror staple. By the 70s Price had devolved into delicious self-parody. His playful demeanor was perfect for the horror genre: his characters were not only evil; they took great delight in their wicked deeds, proudly snickering at the depths of their own cruelty.

It was this persona that made Price perfect for the Prince Prospero role in February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death. The film’s masquerade setting not only afforded Price the chance to be sadistic to a large group of costumed guests, it also gave the sadism a party setting. That mischievous combination of pleasure & pain was positively ideal for the Vincent Price aesthetic. The masquerade setting was so perfect for Price, in fact, that it was recycled years later in another one of his iconic roles: 1971’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

By the time Price starred in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, he was in full self-parody mode. Where Corman’s Masque is a trippy horror show with occasional, unsettling touches of humor, Dr. Phibes is a full-on horror comedy. Price’s Phibes is a horrifically scarred car crash survivor hell-bent on avenging his wife’s death against the surgeons that failed to save her life. The pattern of his revenge mimics the seven Biblical plagues. Despite that disturbing premise, it’s a deviously fun film and one of Price’s most memorable performances. Phibes himself wears a prosthetic mask to hide his facial scars, but that’s not the common thread it shares with Masque. In the film’s best scene (or at least my personal favorite) Phibes offs one of his deceased wife’s doctors at a masquerade ball. His murder method? He supplies the doctor with a mechanical frog mask that crushes his head. The frog mask is not only a beautiful work of art; it also cleverly fulfills the frog plague requirement of the film’s premise.

The masquerade scene in Dr. Phibes is brief, but beautiful. It not only echoes Corman’s Masque in the setting, but also in the gorgeous saturation of color and in the other guest’s nonchalance at the frog-mask victim’s pleas for help. Just as Prospero laughs cruelly at his party guests’ demise, Phibes casually looks on from behind a crystal chandelier as his frog mask contraption exterminates his prey. The two films are tonally different works from two opposing phases of Vincent Price’s career, but in the brief moment at the masque in Phibes, The Masque of the Red Death and The Abominable Dr. Phibes are spiritually linked.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death, visit our Swampchat on the film, the round-up of its dueling 1989 knockoffs, and last week’s photos of The Red Death at Mardi Gras. Coverage of our next Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, begins early next week.

-Brandon Ledet

Upside Down (2013)

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fourstar

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It’s probably safe to say that by the end of its whopping seven minutes of opening narration you’ll be prepared to tell if you’re game for where Upside Down wants to take you. In heavy, overreaching breaths the protagonist coos about pink bees, forbidden love, flying pancakes, and “the three basic laws of double gravity” in a stunningly over-explanation of the film’s ludicrous premise. It’s as if Romeo & Juliet were retold through the half-mad kaleidoscope of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. The line “Once love was stronger than gravity” best sums up the tone, distinctly warning the audience that this is a fairy tale and a love story, not a crowd-pleaser for discerning sci-fi types.

As is common with fairy tales (and sci-fi for that matter), the film sets up a very simple haves-vs-have-nots dichotomy. Two worlds are connected by opposing gravitational pulls, so that inhabitants of one are always looking upside down at the inhabitants of the other. The world on top is rich. The world on bottom is poor. It’s about as simple of an allegory as you’ll get outside the front & back of the train in Snowpiercer. The fun is in the film’s more fantastic elements, like the aforementioned pink bees that pollinate flowers from both worlds and improbably make an interplanetary romance possible. Besides a few grim details in the wealth disparity and interplanetary oil trade, Upside Down is mostly light fare. If you have the ability (or desire) to turn off your brain and enjoy a sappy against-all-odds love story that involves distant planets and magical pink nectar, it’s a truly fun film.

Even though the movie requires a complete absence of cynicism, it does boast visually thoughtful rewards as well. The spaces where the two worlds meet (particularly in offices & ballrooms that stretch on like two mirrors facing each other) are just straight up nifty. There’s an effortless cool to watching Kirsten Dunst sip a martini out of an upside down glass or watching her love interest hop around on floating platforms like a video game character. After the film’s opening Richard Kelly-style rant, it slows way down to tell a simple love story that will sound awfully familiar to most, but it’s a cliché that’s substantially boosted by its outlandish setting. The romantic fairy tale Upside Down tells is trite, but it’s also timelessly cute and backed up by a puzzling visual landscape that’s deliciously stubborn to even the most basic logic.

Upside Down is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Possession (1981)

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Let’s just get this out of the way: Possession is a masterpiece. It’s a cold, incomprehensible film that confidently unleashes cinematic techniques like deadly weapons. Filmed in Berlin in 1980, Possession occupies harsh, uncaring architectural spaces, but populates them with passionate characters that remain in constant, violently fluid motion. The camera moves with them, rarely allowing the audience to settle as it chases its tormented subjects down sparse rooms and hallways like a slasher movie serial killer. In one shot the central couple undulates back & forth in front of a blank white wall, constantly swirling around each other during a bitter argument, but seemingly going nowhere as if trapped in a void. The film feels like a visual manifestation of madness, inertia, and heartbreak all rolled into one dizzying package. It captures the cold horror of divorce & separation and transforms it into an unknowable evil. It’s one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in quite some time, but finds its horror in ambiguity instead of a tangible, comprehensible threat.

That’s not to say there aren’t the typical on-screen genre-signifiers of horror in the film. There is gore. Characters bleed at the impact of sharp instruments and are confronted by humanoid demons, but these aspects serve more as exclamation points than the main attraction. With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, “Maybe all couples go through this” it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.

For a taste of the film’s fascinatingly bizarre sense of movement, the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague” samples key scenes and repurposes them as demonic, Kate Bush-style interpretive dance. It could possibly spoil some striking images, but the film’s plot is mostly spoiler-proof in its intentional obfuscation. The Berlin setting, the sound design in the final scene and the protagonist’s confession that he’s “at war against women” all allude to the possibility of a war allegory subtext, but it’s not explicit or concrete. If anything, characters are at war with themselves and the uncaring nature of the world they occupy. When Sam Neill’s protagonist confesses “For me, God is a disease” it’s easy to empathize. Whoever created the cruel, heartless world of Possession and brought life into it must have at least been as callous as a disease. With its brutal momentum & inevitable bloodshed it’s a terrifying hellscape, especially if it’s something that “all couples go through.”

-Brandon Ledet

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

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witch

fourstar

Although it was made a few years before the term “documentary” was coined, Häxan was far from the first non-fiction film ever made. It may, however, be the first documentary to ever be billed as a horror film. Based on the painstaking research of Danish writer/director Benjamin Christensen, Häxan is a hot-button doc that pretends to be about the “real” history of witchcraft, but is in truth a condemnation of how modern society deals with mental health. Although it begins & ends with lectures on antiquated notions of geography and health care, most of the film consists of live reenactments of medieval depictions of witchcraft that often blend the film’s documentary genre with classic silent horror. The reenactments are not only the sugar that helps the medicine go down. They’re also technical marvels that made Häxan the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made and a cinematic outlaw in countries that found its depictions of witches & devils to be blasphemous.

In its reenactments, Häxan looks like what you’d get if Fritz Lang’s Metropolis were set in Hell. Devils wag their tongues and suggestively churn butter while witches make potions out of thieves’ fingers, cat feces, and doves’ hearts. Women are lured out of their marriage beds by demons for late night naked dance parties and rub salves on each other’s backs that give them the ability to fly around on brooms. In these scenes, Häxan is the most metal 20s movie I’ve ever encountered. There’s so much wild imagery in the costuming and practical effects that I swear I’ve seen directly echoed before in VHS-era creature features like Nightbreed, Demons and C.H.U.D. The movie’s late night witches’ councils could also pretty much be considered source material for Kate Bush’s incredible “Sat in Your Lap” music video. Although Häxan boasts a serious message it deeply cares about, there’s no denying that it has a lot of fun in scaring the shit out of people with the medieval “The Devil takes many shapes” concept. Recreating live-action versions of witchcraft from art history is the film’s bread & butter, even if Ben Christensen had a loftier purpose in mind.

As devilishly fun & influential as the reenactment scenes are, Häxan (like a lot of hot button documentaries) is ultimately a huge downer. When the film returns to the real world to draw the thread between how women with mental illness have been treated in the past (as witches) and how they’re treated in the present (as lepers & pariahs) the naked dance parties are a far off memory and a flood of more sobering thoughts comes crashing through. The narration explicitly states “The Devil does not belong to the past” and asks “Isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” as depictions of the horrors of modern mental institutions and shady health care practices play out on the screen. Christensen then smartly returns to the opening depictions of the crystal spheres & bowl-shaped landscapes people once believed to be the science of the Universe’s structure, calling into question the validity of modern scientific consensus. Even nearly a hundred years since Häxan’s release, the sentiment is still potent. There are still huge flaws in our treatment of mental health & we still need flashy, sinful entertainment to draw our attention to them. Along with its hellish practical effects & creature design, the film’s central message has a surprisingly long shelf life.

Häxan is currently streaming on Hulu Plus.

-Brandon Ledet

Zombeavers (2015)

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three star

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Zombeavers is a deeply stupid movie. Just a remarkably dumb piece of work. Its irreverent “potty humor”, skin-deep characters, theatrical sex, and leering lipstick lesbianism all feel like the musings of a particularly gross twelve year old boy. Its endless fascination with the double entendre of the word “beaver” is about as corny as its central conceit. A lot of the dialogue is merely a long string of insults (so much so that you could probably apply our See No Evil Drinking Game here and leave fairly sloshed). The zombie-beaver hand-puppets look like garbage. It’s just an undeniably bad movie. I enjoyed it anyway.

Zombeavers is not just a dumb movie; it’s a faithful sendup of dumb 80s horror. Sorority sisters on retreat in a remote cabin find flimsy excuses to strip nude and have loud sex with their airhead boyfriends. They’re punished for their transgressions by an army of murderous, undead beavers that have been transformed by toxic waste polluting the river. As if toxic waste & horny campers being murdered isn’t enough of an 80s throwback, it also boasts a John Carpenter nod in its opening credits & title card to drive the point home. Thankfully, its most faithful 80s sendup is in the practical effects of the beavers & the gore. The beaver puppets don’t look particularly professional, but they have a handmade charm to them that’s missing from a lot of modern horror cheapies, especially in The Asylum mockbusters like Sharknado & Mega Piranha. If the movie had opted for CGI over practical effects, it would’ve been a total slog, but it instead manages to succeed in the choice to chase a homemade, DIY, VHS aesthetic. I might not have laughed at most of its verbal stabs at humor, but the beaver attacks had me howling.

Yes, the humor is hokey and the “beaver” quips are especially relentless. One character even pleads “Can we please stop with the beaver jokes?” in the film’s most genuine moment. However, I’m going to choose to believe it’s cheesy on purpose. It’s not like corny jokes & shoddy puppets didn’t work for folks like Peter Jackson just a few decades ago. It’s a winning formula. Besides, there are a couple moments of absurd brilliance in the script as well, like in the line “We can’t turn on each other right now. That’s exactly what the beavers would want.” I also chose not to turn on the film, the same way the horny, beaver-persecuted sorority sisters chose not to turn on each other. Zombeavers’ hokey banter was bullshit, but the practical effects & 80s horror throwbacks really worked for me. It worked for me so much that when a post-credits stinger promised (or threatened, depending on your perspective) a second instillation in the form of Zombees, I was totally on board. I’ll even throw out a few suggestions for a Part Three: Zombeetles, Zombengals, Zombeagles. Keep ‘em coming, ya violent goofballs. And don’t lose the puppetry.

-Brandon Ledet

Get Excited! Indywood is Looking to Expand their Programming through a Kickstarter Campaign

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I’ve heard tale of an ancient time when New Orleans was blessed with independent movie theaters, from legitimate single-screen cinemas to the overheated living rooms of shotgun houses where enterprising weirdos would sell you cheap beer & strange art films. By the time I was old enough to care, this cinematic paradise was gone. Up until a few years ago, the only independent theater holding on for dear life was The Prytania, a cultural institution that’s blessed our city with a hundred years of service. Most of our city’s independent cinemas had fallen to the crushing presence of AMC theaters in the suburbs and the convenience of home video.

Thankfully, things have changed. Just in the last few years, New Orleans’ independent movie scene has been veritably raised from the dead. In addition to the Prytania, we now have Chalmette Movies, Zeitgeist, Shotgun Cinema, The Theatres at Canal Place, outdoor Moonlight Movies screenings, the upcoming cinema on Broad Street and Indywood at the edge of the French Quarter. The city is buzzing with filmmaking & film watching activity. It’s a great time to be a cinephile in New Orleans.

One of the more exciting and more recent movie theaters in the city, Indywood, is looking to expand its scope & ambition through a crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign. A much cozier & laidback downtown option than the too-rich-for-my-blood Theatres at Canal Place, Indywood is an intimate single-screen cinema on Elysian Fields, a few blocks from the river. It occupies a strange, comfortable middle ground between watching a film in a traditional theater and popping in a DVD in a friend’s living room. Much like the experience of seeing a film at Zeitgeist or the outdoor Moonlight Movies screenings, there’s a communal aesthetic to Indywood that can’t be achieved at a larger, corporate-owned venue.

Asking the very community it serves for a very reasonable donation to fund an expanse in programming, Indywood is looking to be more than just an intimate place to watch movies. According to the Kickstarter page, they’re looking to serve food & wine, play Saturday morning cartoons, and host stand-up comedy & discussions of classic works. They’re also looking to expand the ranges of films they screen to include spotlights on local films, African American films, silent films with live musical accompaniment and (most exciting to me) “80’s VHS gems”. The campaign’s “rewards” are also pretty cool, including a nifty t-shirt, private screenings, and the right to buy a seat in the theater that you’ll have the right to claim “no matter who’s sitting there for a whole year. Even if it’s Beyoncé.”

If you have the time or a few bucks to spare, help support the revival of New Orleans’ independent cinema scene by donating to the Indywood Kickstarter page or at least spreading it on social media. It has about two weeks left to reach its reasonable goal, but just over half of its funding secured. We at Swampflix would love to see their project completed.

2/26/15 UPDATE: The campain was a success!

-Brandon Ledet

The Masque of the Red Death (1964) on Mardi Gras Day

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In our Movie of the Month conversation about the deeply strange, beautiful and undeniably ahead-of-its-time The Masque of the Red Death, I pointed out how much the movie reminds me of Carnival season in New Orleans. I wrote, “With Fat Tuesday looming around the corner, it was impossible not to see aspects of Carnival in the masquerade ball hosted by Prince Prospero (Vincent Price). The cheap costumes & mockery of opulence is very much reminiscent of Mardi Gras parades. There’s even a scene where Prospero literally throws beads from a balcony shouting ‘Gifts! Gifts!’ and scoffs at the greed of the people below. As the threat of The Red Death plague becomes increasingly severe, the masquerade takes on a ‘party while the ship is sinking’ vibe New Orleans knows all too well. Horror films are usually tied to Halloween, but The Masque of the Red Death is distinctly akin to Mardi Gras in my mind.” In an effort to put my money where my mouth is, I took the Movie of the Month out into the streets on Mardi Gras, masquerading as The Red Death himself. Here’s a few pictures of the costume below to help solidify the memory.

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I hope everyone had a great, safe Mardi Gras and maybe even costumed as their own pet obsessions, movie-related or not. It’s certainly been a fun Carnival season on my end and I was glad to take a little bit of Swampflix with me into the Quarter on Fat Tuesday. I might even do it again next year!

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death, visit our Swampchat on the film and last week’s round-up of its dueling 1989 knockoffs.

-Brandon Ledet

ABBA: The Movie (1977)

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three star

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In our recent conversation about the Village People movie Can’t Stop the Music, I asked Britnee if it’s possible to make a legitimately-great disco musical or if the two genres were fundamentally irreconcilable. Britnee answered with a resounding “Yes!” but I remained somewhat unconvinced. The repetition inherent to disco makes a musical film’s plot feel like its idling in a way that a more narrative-intense music genre wouldn’t. Can’t Stop the Music’s musical numbers were strange Village People music video-type interjections that barely interacted with the film’s completely unnecessary plot involving Steve Guttenberg’s DJ career and some out-of-place heterosexual shenanigans. The movie’s disco & plot mixed just about as cohesively as oil & water.

ABBA: The Musical brilliantly sidesteps the problem by not even attempting to mix its plot with its disco. The movie does tell a half-assed story of about country music DJ assigned to interview the Swedish pop group on their Australian tour, but it’s entirely inconsequential. Early conversations between the DJ and his station manager are periodically interrupted with crowds chanting “We want ABBA!”, voicing exactly what the audience is thinking. The movie delivers the goods early on, full live performances of the band’s hit songs running almost continuously from about ten minutes in. ABBA: The Musical is essentially a concert film in disguise, the Australian DJ’s story arc serving mostly as filler. Between the live performances, he conducts street interviews with fans, reads about the group member’s individual personalities in magazines, and struggles to make his way backstage at their concerts. Where Can’t Stop the Music made the band it was marketing second to its superficial plot, ABBA: The Movie is smart to do the exact opposite, always putting the band first & the fiction second.

Honestly, Can’t Stop the Music is a much more interesting film (especially in its choice to obscure both its subject’s homosexuality and the disco scene’s rampant drug use), but ABBA: The Movie isn’t without its own strange subtext. There are some questionable inclusions in the film’s attempt to push its product. If they were trying to make the group seem hip to kids, it may not have been the best idea to include street interviews where parents praise the music as “nice & clean”. In direct contradiction, there’s a lot made of singer Agnetha Faltskog’s award-winning ass, which is talked about & filmed so much it’s easy to think of her as the Nikki Minaj of her time. My favorite oddball choice is the endless parade of ABBA merchandise (hats, socks, buttons, beer mugs, picture books, etc.) on display while the group sings the anti-capitalist anthem “Money Money Money.” Then there’s an early press conference in which ABBA complains about the grueling ordeal of touring in a movie that glorifies their life on the road. For the most part, though, the film really does live up to the parental-friendly “nice & clean” image the band intentionally cultivated, making little attempt to mine anything under the surface.

There’s not much going on here besides the idea that ABBA is awesome and people who paid to watch their movie mostly just want to watch them play their music. It’s a honest concept I can get behind. Although the film may lack the more bizarre connotations of Can’t Stop the Music, it’s very easy to get swept up in its straightforward “ABBA is awesome!” sentiment when the group is performing killer pop tunes like “Waterloo”, “S.O.S.”, “Mamma Mia” and, of course, “Dancing Queen”. It’s downright fascinating how thick the 70s cheese is here, considering it was released the same year punk starting poking its head out from dive bars and terrified parents across the world. It’s a flawed, corny film, but it’s one that delivers the product it promises. Of course the Australian country music DJ asides are mostly inconsequential, but they don’t overpower the band the same way the plot did in Can’t Stop the Music and they also help to break up the more laborious task a full-on concert movie from the group would’ve presented. All I really wanted from an ABBA movie was some great ABBA musical performances, which it delivered in abundance.

-Brandon Ledet

Near Dark (1987)

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neardark

fourstar

In 2009 the war drama The Hurt Locker won six Oscars, including Best Picture, becoming the lowest-grossing movie to ever sweep the Academy Awards. What’s more astonishing is that in the Academy Awards’ 82nd year, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow became the very first & only woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director. Five years later it’s still a feat that somehow has not been repeated. Unfathomably, no woman has even so much as been nominated for Best Director since Bigelow’s win. Bigelow herself struggled for nearly three decades to earn the accolade. With the exception of a couple box office successes like Point Break and (more recently) Zero Dark Thirty, her career is a frustrating succession of near-hits & complete flops. Her Hurt Locker Oscar was the pot of gold at the end of a very troubled rainbow.

If any of Bigelow’s less-successful pictures were destined to hit it big, it was 1987’s vampire-Western Near Dark. Striking the 80s vampire craze instigated by Fright Night & Lost Boys while the iron was hot, Near Dark made a commercial gamble by simultaneously reviving the much-less-hip Western genre, but it was still packed with so much 80s cool that it should have been a huge hit. Not only did Bigelow craft a film with stark imagery that could rival, if not top, anything you’d find in Fright Night or Lost Boys, she also employed synth wizards Tangerine Dream to provide the film with an era-epitomizing soundtrack. Tangerine Dream’s nightmarish score for Near Dark floats moodily in the background, building slowly like a thick fog until its heavy drums interject to match the escalating violence of the movie’s action. There’s so much 80s-specific brutality, sexuality, and pop music aesthetic to the film that it’s difficult to imagine why it flopped in the box office (before later gaining its rightful cult classic status).

Audiences’ reluctance to embrace the film may have to do with the slow, brooding pacing of its first act. Near Dark opens with a teenage cowboy hitting on a female stranger, luring her into his pick-up, and refusing to driver her home as she ominously worries about sunrise. It’s a great reversal of the typical dangers of a woman accepting a ride from a strange man, as the man’s life is eventually threatened by a bloodthirsty vampire coven as a result. It’s an chilling initiation into the world Bigelow establishes here, but it’s one with a slow build. The film doesn’t truly become energized until it follows the ritualistic nightly feedings of the coven as they hunt for meals in small town bars & back alleys. The open Western nighttime sky gives the film an otherworldly look, which is starkly contrasted with scenes like a rather lengthy & violent barroom altercation that’s aggressively relentless in its cramped containment. The vampires in Near Dark are confined to hotel rooms & the backs of trucks during daylight, but at night they’re free to prowl like a pride of lions. In some ways they’re portrayed to be as unfairly persecuted as the monsters of Nightbreed, but with the major difference that they actually murder people regularly & viciously.

Near Dark is not a perfect film. It frankly gets by more on style & mood than it does on content, but it’s so stylistically strong that it can pull off a lack of depth with ease. Just the basic concept of a Kathryn Bigelow vampire-Western with a Tangerine Dream soundtrack is enough to inspire enthusiasm on its own. Performances from the always-disturbing Lance Erikson, Bill Paxton as a perfect 80’s alpha-male/blowhard/murderous monster, and the kid who played the creepy little brother from Teen Witch go a long way as well. The movie’s gore, especially in its burning flesh & gunshot wounds, is surprisingly up to par with its art house visual tendencies and there’s enough police shootouts and vocal posturing to make even the most casual Tarantino fan gush. The film even remains loyal enough to the Western format to conclude with a lone cowboy riding into town on horseback for a final showdown. Bigelow may have not had her first commercial success until Point Break or won her career-defining accolades until The Hurt Locker, but she had already established herself as a formidable creative mind with the cult classic Near Dark, box office numbers be damned.

-Brandon Ledet

UPDATE: The What We Do in the Shadows Kickstarter was a Success!

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Last week I wrote that the upcoming Jemaine Clement/Taika Watiti vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows was looking to fund an American theatrical release through a Kickstarter campaign. The film had already secured digital & home media distribution, but was struggling to reach American cinemas outside a couple screenings in New York & Los Angeles. At the time I wrote about the campaign to fund a wider theatrical release, it was barely more than halfway funded with only a week left to go. I am happy to report that the project has since reached its goal and will be able to hit a lot more local cinemas as a result (hopefully with New Orleans on its itinerary).

Last week, I described What We Do in the Shadows thusly: “It promises to take the same ennui employed by Only Lovers Left Alive into the satiric comedy territory of Vamps. Posed as a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary, the film follows modern day vampires as they navigate mundane activities like nightlife, dealing with roommates, and searching for a bite to eat. They clash with the likes of witches, zombies, werewolves, and plain-old humans in a loosely-plotted slice of (undead) life comedy. From the looks of the trailer, it could be quite funny as well as a fresh take on a genre I once thought hopelessly stale.” Judging by early reports it indeed is a very funny film and I hope that we will get to see & review it ourselves soon enough. Maybe even in the theater, thanks to the Kickstarter!

-Brandon Ledet