What We Do in the Shadows

Year 12, Day 305 - 10/31/20 - Movie #3,688

BEFORE: OK, here it is, the last movie of October.  24 films (12 originals and 12 sequels) and while it might have been a short month, it's still some solid linking work.  Rhys Darby carries over from "Jumanji: The Next Level".  Also just 12 films left to come in 2020, and I've got the great benefit of having THREE slightly different paths to the end, all of them will result in another "perfect year" (in this year that's been anything but perfect) so I can choose my favorite, that's a great feeling.  

Here are my viewing platform stats for October, and I'll total everything up in December, most likely cable still comes out on top.  

OCTOBER -

8 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Cabin in the Woods, The Dark Tower, Zombieland: Double Tap, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Addams Family (2019), Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, The House with a Clock in its Walls, What We Do in the Shadows
6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, Doctor Sleep, Replicas, The Dead Don't Die, It: Chapter Two, Jumanji: The Next Level
2 watched on Netflix: Horns, Swiss Army Man
1 watched on iTunes: The Woman in Black
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Suspiria
5 watched on Hulu: Twilight, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
1 watched on Disney+: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
24 TOTAL

I also took my first stab at making a rough plan for January, and an attempt to clarify February a bit, because locking down February's start will tell me where January needs to end.  I've got a solid plan for the first two weeks of January, but right around January 15 comes a problem known as "too many choices" - there are about 13 different places I could be on January 16-18.  I build these little "decision trees" with a lot of arrows showing all the different directions I could go in, and at that point it just grows ridiculously large.  Which is good in a way, because it shows through probability how vast my choices are, but then how do I narrow them down?  I tried going backwards from February 1, also, but that decision tree got too large too, and so far I haven't found the film chain that unites both sets of choices, at best there's a four or five day gap in between.  More scrap paper is required at this point...

THE PLOT: Vlago, Deacon and Vladislav are vampires who are finding that modern life has them struggling with the mundane - like paying rent, keeping up with the chore wheel, trying to get into nightclubs and overcoming roommate conflicts. 

AFTER: As you can imagine, with just 12 film slots left this year, I have to make my choices carefully.  Sure, I've got a couple more films with Jemaine Clement in them, but that's not going to get me to some Christmas movies.  So, I'm going the other way tomorrow, which gets me to "Jojo Rabbit" this week, and I've really been looking forward to that one.  Everything else is essentially being re-scheduled for 2021 or beyond, and it's also been the year of the Constant Re-schedule, hasn't it?  Between COVID-19 and the cold weather, most of Halloween is cancelled - no parade, no parties, no sexy costumes, no kids trick-or-treating.  I didn't even buy candy because there's half a bag of last year's candy left on my shelf, just in case a few hardy souls come by tonight begging.  But if our doorbell doesn't ring tonight at all, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. OK, so I bought one package of Reese's pumpkins, but those are all for me.  

"Hellboy" is put off until next year, as are eight films about mummies, 10 films about time travel, "Salem's Lot", "The Babadook", "Devil", "Pet Sematary", last year's "The Invisible Man", "The Witch", "The Witches" (1990 and 2020 versions), "Gretel & Hansel", all remaining films about serial killers, and quite a few others.  There just wasn't time this October to get to everything.  Other notable re-schedules include "New Mutants", "The Lion King" (2019), "Dumbo", "The Trip to Greece", "The King of Staten Island", "The Call of the Wild", 4 films with Shia Labeouf, "Warrior" and three other films with Tom Hardy, 3 films with Johnny Depp, "Bohemian Rhapsody" and countless others.  (If I keep listing, I'll be here all day...)  I'm running out of time, across the board.  Then there's "Bill and Ted Face the Music", "Tenet", "Wonder Woman 1984", "Black Widow", "No Time to Die" and everything else Hollywood has chosen to not release until movie theaters re-open in the two biggest markets, NYC and L.A. Even though great progress was made this year on some long-standing fronts, I still feel like I'm never going to be able to schedule it all.  Maybe I need to wait a bit to see when the vaccine gets released, when Hollywood gets back on track, then firm up my January plans.  

In the meantime, I'm going to work with what I have available to me.  This 2014 film out of New Zealand was bound to happen, I suppose, with someone taking the mockumentary format made popular by "This is Spinal Tap" and "The Office" and applying it to vampires.  I guess it also hearkens back to "The Real World", which basically started the reality TV genre, and asks, "What happens when four vampires live together in a house, stop being polite and start getting real?"  Which of course doesn't make any sense, because why would said vampires allow a documentary crew to follow them around, while they're trying to avoid detection?  Why wouldn't they just pretend to go along with the project, and then drink the blood of the camera crew and field producers?  Ah, right, the lure of reality TV and becoming famous, and all those sweet, sweet endorsement deals.  Vampire influencers cashing in on Instagram would probably follow.  

For the purposes of this film, it turns out that New Zealand has a very lively monster nightlife scene - there are clubs, of course, and in addition to the vampires there's a roving group of werewolves that our subjects encounter a few times.  (There's that "Twilight" rivalry again, between the vamps and the wolves...)  And the big social event of the year is the Unholy Masquerade, which happens not on Halloween but on June 6 at 6 pm (think about it).  Vampires, zombies and witches all come together for a big masked ball, and absolutely no humans are allowed, it's a chance for all the undead to relax and unwind and interact, putting their differences aside.  In New Zealand it seems things are very well organized, each group has its own society with boards and elected leaders, and rules and such.  It seems like a very civilized way of doing things, of course it only works until some idiots bring a human to the party as their "plus one".  

Much like "The Dead Don't Die" and "Only Lovers Left Alive", this film is interesting because someone sat down for a bit and really thought about the classic horror film stereotypes, and what they might mean in the modern world.  Being a vampire surely has its down-side, right?  If a vampire should happen to make human friends, then he's either got to watch them grow old and die, or turn them into a vampire at some point, or just plain drain the blood of a friend.  Tough choices, all.  A vampire also needs a human "familiar", like Renfield from the "Dracula" novel, to get certain household tasks done during the day, get his coffin shipped from place to place, and clean up the blood from the bathroom floor.  How complicated is that relationship, like does hypnosis only get them so far, at some point it seems they need to promise to make their familiars immortal, just to keep them interested in doing the job.  It's like a promised promotion that never seems to come.  

Speaking of things that never happen, there's a chore wheel in the vampire flat that most people choose to ignore - Deacon hasn't washed the dishes in at least five years.  And whose job is it to get the blood stains out of the couch?  There's something of a generation gap here, because Deacon's only 183 years old, so he's clearly the "young rebel" of the group.  Viago is 379 years old, he's a former German count who ended up in New Zealand in the 1910's searching for the former love of his life (who's now in a senior home), and Vladislav is 862, he's been around since the early Transylvanian days, it seems, haunted by memories of his old nemesis "The Beast".  Petyr, meanwhile, is over 8,000 years old, and he's more of the "Nosferatu" type of vampire, doesn't say much but just lives down in the basement behind a stone slab and does whatever he wants.  They bring him a chicken every few days and that keeps him from getting out and killing the locals.  

There are probably good reasons why most vampires live alone - put a few of them together and they're bound to argue about who to eat, when to eat, who to turn into a vampire when they need a new roomate, and who to banish from the house for not following the rules.  There are just a few special-effects heavy battles here, but mostly this feels like a low-rent indie production, either by design or just by the nature of making an indie film and trying to do a lot with very little resources.  Thankfully, they succeeded in getting a lot done, and even though (as "Spinal Tap" pointed out) there's a very fine line between clever and stupid, I'm going to give this one the benefit of the doubt.  

I know there's an FX series that spun off from this film, and even though I'm only halfway through "Luke Cage" on Netflix, I might have to check that series out on Hulu, before the third season starts.  It's only 20 20-minute episodes, I could probably knock that out in under a week, before I start watching "Iron Fist".  If that series is half as funny as this film, I'll probably enjoy it. 

Happy Halloween, everyone!  We've got a rare full moon tonight (2nd of the month, so it's a "blue moon" too) so that means both the werewolves AND the vampires will be out tonight, unless it's too cold, or unless they're afraid of the plague.  Stay safe, buy your own candy, and wear a mask - you know what, wear two masks just to be on the safe side.

Also starring Taika Waititi (last heard in "Avengers: Endgame"), Jemaine Clement (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stu Rutherford, Jackie Van Beek, Ethel Robinson, Elena Stejko, Jason Hoyte, Karen O'Leary, Mike Minogue.

RATING: 7 out of 10 hard-to-find virgins