When I served on the Horror Shorts Jury at last year’s Fantastic I had a mission: try and reward serious horror shorts. The horror world has been deluged with self-aware, tongue in cheek comedy for too many years. Sometimes it works – Shaun of the Dead – but most of the time it just feels like the filmmakers are ashamed of the genre, or think that what they’re making is stupid.
What’s worse is when someone tries to make an exploitation type movie and just makes it campy and ‘funny.’ The great exploitation films – and the ones that are now campy and funny when we watch them – mostly took themselves seriously. A wink at the audience is okay, but so many films today are winking so much you wonder if they have tourette’s, or some other spasm-making illness.
The latest of these: Lesbian Vampire Killers. The trailer, embedded below, has the comic subtlety of a Jay Leno sketch. Wouldn’t this be funnier if played straight? Wouldn’t it be more fun if played deadpan? Instead the filmmakers must remind us at all times that THEY TOTALLY GET IT.
Maybe this film is good. Who knows. What I do know is that any horror film that’s pushing the comedy twice as hard as the horror is getting a skeptical eye from me.
I first saw this trailer on Shock Til You Drop.