The Beginnings of a Cinematic Odyssey

Just going to blaze through some of the first amateur explosions of the senses we passed through on our way to true science.  We started like many of you, enjoying mainstream bullshit and rarely dipping into the B-movie realm except to make fun of it.  Our interest in submitting ourselves to obscure B-movies was given a helping hand by Red Letter Media’s Best of the Worst series where we realized an entire world of entertainment was lurking in the shadows and begged to be brought into the light and gawked at for its deformities.
We started this mission with a few beers and an interest in seeing fake blood and real tits.  We don’t own things, so we searched Netflix for ‘lesbian vampires’ and came up with:

We Are The Night – 2010
We_are_the_night_poster

We were surprised that we couldn’t laugh at this movie as much as we intended, it was the vague newer b-movie that we were looking for, but it was actually ok, relatively speaking.
There’s a trio of vampiresses feeding in Berlin nightclubs. There’s the eccentric young raver, there’s the raven-haired sleek ex-movie starlet from the roaring twenties, and there’s the dominant blonde matriarch of of the group (cough, Germany).
The matriarch is on an endless hunt for the reincarnation of the vampiress that bit her, in her search she turns a new recruit, a pickpocket whose ties to a human male (copboyfriend) will ultimately bring down the entire coven.
When the movie gets into action or special effects it gets a little too low-rent Matrixy and is not interesting, but it handles the caricatured aspects of its four vampiresses very well.

charlotteBy far the best character is Charlotte (played by Jennifer Ulrich) the melancholy 20’s starlet vampire, who was taken from her young daughter to become a vampire.

The one scene that stuck with me after the first viewing is when Charlotte is singing a lullaby to a dying old woman; her estranged daughter who wakes and recognizes her as her mother.
Captain America: Winter Soldier did a similar scene in 2014, but, in my opinion, this one just has a little more heart and kick to it, despite the silliness of it all.

I guess after that last plunge into the depths went so well, we thought we’d dip into some more trodden …rivers or… whatever analogy: We took the river more trodden by, sure

Carrie – 1976
R26VkvttZ_w.movieposter

You know this one, it’s supposedly a classic, there’s a girl and a prom and the cow blood goes on her and she can kill her mom with her brain or something, there’s an evil Jesus living under her stairs, John Travolta is young.
The movie opens with a group shower scene that ends in puberty… and then nothing else happens for a long time.  This was on Netflix because the remake had just come out.  That’s all I have to say about this.  Some people probably like it for good reasons, I don’t.  And but also me neither.  The mom was pretty creepy though.

Obviously our “lesbian vampire” Netflix search yielded more than one result (and oh, what fruits would later fall from just such a tree!), so we went back to our birthing grounds for a second helping.

The Countess – 2009
countess

Directed, Starring, Written by and Musiced by Julie Delpy.
Also starring William -I am a soft-spoken block of wood- Hurt.

When it comes to vampire lore, Elizabeth Bathory is the female equivalent of Vlad the Impaler.  Basically some people have argued that Dracula himself takes almost nothing but his name from Vlad Drakul, and everything else from Bathory.  Her story of deranged unquestioned oligarchy raping and torturing young girls and literally bathing in children’s blood has limitless potential.  This movie realizes none of it and opts for a story of a woman whose failed liaison makes her feel not-pretty, so she starts murdering people.  Any Snow White adaptation has done more with this evil queen character.
If you want to write a hyper-realistic version of Elizabeth Bathory removing all the stigma and paranormal elements of her legacy, fine, that’s acceptable, but if you’re going to write a no-nonsense biographical story about a woman who was balls-deep in lesbian sadism before lesbian or sadism were recognizable English words, her psychological state as a serial killer should stem from something a little more grandiose than a harlequinesque fling with a younger man.

WilliamHurtactual block of woodactual block of woodWilliam Hurt (left) actual Block of Wood (right)

If you want a better vampire story ending with someone being buried alive in a wall watch Angel Season 1 Episode 5: Rm w/a Vu.  Yes do that.

Battledogs – 2013
Battledogs-2013

I -Jeremiah- LOVE werewolves.  I love low budget movies.  I love campy action.  This movie can suck a bag of dead cocks.
Look.  There’s trash and there’s trash.  Some trash you make a dress out of and dance around greeting pedestrians like a Satanic mall santa.  Some trash, you just throw in the trash.  Fuck this movie.
When you start watching weird movies you can get to some pretty awesome places, but you can never predict when you’re gonna land one big fat stinker.  It is important that we mention these failures so as to guide you.  If Lewis & Clark never kidnapped Sacagawea we still wouldn’t know where Tennessee is, you know what I’m sayin?  If there be monsters here, put it on the map.

‘But hey, fucker!’ you might ask, ‘I thought you liked bad movies?’

I respect poor filmmaking when it is a labor of love, I respect doing your best to make a thing you love even if your best sucks.  Unless that thing you love is money.
I even love parody and mimicry of bad filmmaking if it’s done well.  (see Garth Marenghi’s Dark Placelike actually see it.  Just stop whatever you’re doing in life and see it.)
And I don’t want to sound like a naive starlet here, but I’m ok with doing sharknados (SFX-Porn’s version of nudity) if it’s in service of the plot.

The type of productions made by The Asylum and SyFy (like Battledogs and Sharknado) try and fail to attain the ‘so bad it’s good’ quality coveted in our ironic times, both their means and ends are cynical and base, they wear funny hats and do any self-degrading thing they can think of to get you to laugh at how garishly absurd they can be—they are the Jim Carrey of film.

No matter how “bad” a movie (or any form of art) is, it’s like a message in a bottle, it may be the suicidal ramblings of a toddler, or a love letter from someone who doesn’t speak your language to someone who is not you.  But in some strange way it’s there, it’s for you, and you’re consuming it and letting it become part of you.
The Asylum and SyFy brand of intentional tripe sends you a thousand bottles washed up on the beach and they all say “Hey! You found my bottle! You have syphilis now!”