It might be utterly foolish to call a film called Lesbian Vampire Killers a disappointment, especially considering that it aims low and scores a few funny goals, but it is still a lost opportunity. It has a title no film could really live up to without pushing the boundaries of censorship and mainstream taste to the limit, and not, more importantly, without a bolder grasp of the subgenre it tackles satirically. Directed by Phil Claydon, from a screenplay by Stewart Williams and Paul Hupfield, LVK tries to do for ‘70s Hammer and Euro-horror what Edgar Wright, Nick Frost, and Simon Pegg did for zombie flicks and cop thrillers, but with an edge borrowed more from TV comedy that plays the portentousness of genre clichés against low-brow contemporary mores of lad culture and the popular zeitgeist’s T&A obsession.
Two Londoner losers, Jimmy (Matthew Horne), recently dumped for the seventh time by his horny, wayward girlfriend Judy (Lucy Gaskell), and his portly mate Fletch (James Corden), just fired from his job as a party clown for clocking a bratty kid, decide to escape their troubles, and lack of bread, by heading off for a hiking holiday. Having tossed a dart at a map to decide their destination, they finish up in the remote village of Cragwich in rural Devonshire. That town has been cursed for centuries by vampire queen Carmilla (Silvia Colloca), causing every girl in the village to become one of her army of undead gal-loving ghouls on her eighteenth birthday, keeping the men in the village alive only to help them snare new prey. When they enter the compulsory creepy tavern filled by weird-looking blokes, Jimmy murmurs that he feels like he’s stumbled into a “medieval gay bar”.
Jimmy, gentle and bewildered, and Fletch, foul-mouthed and desperate to get laid, hook onto a holidaying foursome of jiggly Swedish students (in a VW microbus, no less). Whilst Fletch tries to make one of the others who dance to crap techno and smoke copious amounts of pot, Jimmy is taken with their most sensible member, Lotte (foxy MyAnna Buring), who proves to combine traits of three of the genre’s favourite female figures: the virgin waiting for the perfect man, the nerdy student of folklore who knows all about the legend of Carmilla, and the kick-ass action heroine.
Pretty soon of course her three fellows have been snatched away and chowed on by the vamps, and the two twits and their plucky gal pal have to fight off the rest, with the aid of the village’s vigorous Vicar (Paul McGann, amusingly channelling Peter Cushing’s iron moralism), who’s desperate to stop the vamps before his own daughter Rebecca (Emer Kenny) comes of age at midnight. Carmilla’s former lover and leader of the horde, Eva (Vera Filatova) realises that Jimmy is the descendent of Carmilla’s slayer, a heroic knight of yore, and his blood mixed with Lotte’s virginal blood can resurrect Carmilla. But Carmilla, and the entire curse, can be laid to rest by the knight’s sword, with a handle that’s rather too phallic for the boys’ comfort.
Claydon, for his part, employs the imagery of classic gothic-horror with a certain intelligence and vivacity, depicting Cragwich’s woods as gnarled, fog-riddled abodes, and the vampires as wraith-like spooks, so that LVK is, by default, the best visual approximation of the gothic style since Sleepy Hollow. The lesbian vampire subgenre, depending on how it’s played, can be either the most prurient and reactionary, or the most scurrilous and sensual, of breeds, and the filmmakers tackle it with a jokey comprehension of the symbolism it invokes, particularly in that phallic weapon, made by the underworld demon “Dieldo”, as the annihilator of the lesbian bitch-queen. Filatova’s Eva has exactly the right attitude of sepulchral sauciness. LVK explicitly counterpoints the heroes’ sexual frustration and emasculation, and latent gay panic, against the sensualised liberation of the Sapphic trollops, building to some decent comic punch-lines, like the death of one recently-turned vampire – they all liquefy upon expiring – leaving Fletch clutching her silicon implants. The problem’s with the script, which fluffs a lot of gag potential, and lurches to a conclusion, played very nearly straight, with utterly perfunctory story development. Even in loopy comedy, you can’t just toss the ideas at the screen.
Writers Williams and Hupfield originally conceived the tale as a B-movie, and it’s a pity they didn’t roll with that, because the core ideas, especially the notion of a town in which all the women are heir to a vivid sexual transformation that inverses the power structure, has a certain cheeky, unrealised potential, particularly in the subplot of Rebecca. But the half-hearted story development finally leaves the viewer nowhere: it’s not funny or original enough to justify its own absurdity, and too lazy to work as either horror film or send-up. It certainly never develops into a truly sophisticated crossbreed, like obvious precursors An American Werewolf in London and The Fearless Vampire Killers. When it comes to its central conceit, in acknowledging so baldly the ripely onanistic appeal of the genre, it’s weirdly shy of actual sexuality, as if looking squarely as its lesbian vamps doing lesbian vamp things might take the spotlight away from its dopey heroes and the laddish humour style, and, by implication, is finally afraid of the erotic peril at the heart of the type of tale it intends to mock and exploit.
