Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires
By John Oak Dalton • Aug 26th, 2004 • Category: ComedyLowbrow horror/comedy has imperious vampire queen deciding to take over a backwoods town to raise a new legion of undead, unaware its citizens are too dimwitted to pose a threat to anyone but themselves. In spite of it all, a vampire bloodbath ensues at the annual Tripe Festival, with a few equally hapless country folk holding off the assault.
Joe Sherlock’s team-up with fellow director Michael Hegg spawned Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires, a raucous romp through many stereotypes and genre conventions. Viewers who find Green Acres and Petticoat Junction to be scathing socio-political satires of P.G. Wodehouse magnitude will find plenty to like here. Others should be warned that lots of baked beans are enjoyed, in all the ways baked beans can be enjoyed, and that strip poker is played with an alarmingly obese woman dubbed “One-Eyed Lurlene.”
A big cast (showing off a lot of funny performances) seems to be enjoying themselves; of note are Felicia Pandolfi as the exasperated undead royalty, Warren EBB as her long-suffering minion, Rob Merickel as the eye-bugging Little Junior, Bill Bradford as his acid-tongued sidekick, and Carrie Davis as the matriarch of a (perhaps too) closely-related brood.
Where I found fault with Sherlock’s feature is in its production values; a lot of the shooting and editing was just average, with lots of master shots and long takes, and a patched-together finale revealing a few glaring shortcuts that appear to have been forced onto the project.
Although some of the production is as rough-hewn as the protagonists’ down-home cabins, there are still lots of laughs and fun to be had, in Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires.
Two and a half stars.
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John Oak Dalton is a Community Television Station Manager by day, and a DIY acolyte by night. In the 80s he made Super-8 movies and his own basement mix tapes. In the 90s he hosted a cable-access show and made his own zines and minicomics. In the 21st Century he began working with grassroots video and microcinema and writing b-movies, and has more than a dozen projects on the shelf, on screen, in development, or in production.
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