I decided to tap into movies floating around Showtime and Starz that I hadn’t seen yet, which led me to this trio.
V FOR VENGEANCE (2022)
This is the kind of humorous action vampire movie that would have found a home on SyFy back in the day, and it’s the perfect type of popcorn movie to watch with my horror-lite husband.
After a cute, sexy vampire girl shows her true colors by hitching rides with a couple of redneck bears to feed on, she reconnects with her estranged vampire sister. Despite bickering, they decide they must take down the clan of bad vamps that killed their parents and rescue their missing sister.
Along the way, they become allies with a few vampire hunters, including a sexy one they can’t resist.
There are some playful twists and turns leading up to the sisters infiltrating the lair of the vampire clan to destroy its leader.
The cast is pretty and charming, the humor is cute and funny, and the fight scenes are a load of fun. This is a low budget indie I could easily watch over and over.
HUMAN RESOURCES (2022)
Why, why, why did the creators of this film opt to make it 110 minutes long? Just look at reviews on IMDb and you’ll see most of them saying they couldn’t get through half the movie.
Well, I stuck it out, and this movie did start to bore me to tears…until the last 25 minutes, when it at last delivers on the horror and throws in an unexpected, tonal shift that is fun but definitely jarring.
A dude desperate for work takes a job at a very creepy hardware store with dark and isolate aisles, militant managers that watch workers like hawks, and zones that are off limits. There’s even a zombie-like, regular customer. Eek!
Our main guy notices almost immediately that things are off, learns the previous employee disappeared mysteriously, and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to him and what’s behind a locked door in back.
Unfortunately, that plot simply can’t sustain itself for nearly an hour and a half. The main dude always looks terrified and is constantly almost getting caught snooping around, yet nothing ever comes of any of the building suspense moments. The repetition just causes the film to start dying a slow death.
And then comes that final act. It’s like this movie did that Tantric cum control trick and finally let it all explode at once. We find out what’s behind that door, there’s suddenly inhuman madness, and the main guy finds his balls and breaks out his fighting moves to a rockin’ track (the out of place tonal shift moment).
I would love to recommend this movie for the finale, but you just have to understand that it will try your patience before you get there.
THE LONELIEST BOY IN THE WORLD (2022)
The director of L.A. Slasher offers up a zombie message movie that brings to mind the film Fido…with less zombie action. Don’t let the cartoonish, surreal sets and campy tone fool you…this film labeled a zomcom fantasy on imdb isn’t funny. It’s actually sad.
The lead is Max Hardwood, who played the lead in the queer film Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. And while this film is a metaphor for family, friends, and loneliness, his performance as a young man who was in a psychiatric institution, who was abandoned by his father, and whose mother recently died in a freak accident, leaving him alone to live in her pink-lit house, can just as easily be read as a metaphor for the isolation some young queer people feel when they have no social and familial support.
Max is told by his social workers that in order to live alone, he needs to make friends to prove he’s a normal member of society. Problem is that everyone bullies him.
Soooooo…he digs up the body of a young man who recently died and brings him home to be his friend. There’s definitely a queer edge to this short-lived relationship (so to speak), because Max decides to go back to the cemetery and dig up a whole family worth of corpses. He even brings home a dog he runs over while leaving the cemetery. As a result, I felt like Max doesn’t get enough time to bond with any of them individually.
Every one of them comes back as a zombie and they all live a happy life together. We can assume they’re not really alive and that Max just needs companionship, because there’s no explanation for the zombie transformations—Max just wakes up and there they are. However, that begs the question, why doesn’t he imagine them coming back to life as whole people and not rotting corpses?
There’s not much of a story arc to keep any momentum going beyond Max living with corpses and occasionally making sure they’re not discovered by outsiders. The whole film feels like a colorfully tragic peek at a really lonely kid who can’t come to terms with reality. Even a sequence on Halloween didn’t draw me into this world. And the ending, while seeming to suggest that Max finds a positive escape from the psychological prison he’s created, is just as sad and depressing to me as the whole movie.
There is, at least, a good soundtrack, including “We Close Our Eyes” by Go West, Max Hardwood covering the Go West hit “King of Wishful Thinking”, an instrumental of “Can’t Smile Without You” used as a theme song, Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing” during a montage of Max making his family comfy, and “Ghostbusters” for the Halloween sequence.
