New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Please enjoy your inflatable furniture.

For everyone else, the premise behind What We Do in the Shadows is simple – three vampires rent a house together in New Zealand, where they fight about who has to do the dishes and how many victims per week it is permissible to slaughter in the living room. Viago (Waititi) is a 17th Century dandy who fusses over his frilly clothes, fine wines and antique furniture. Vladislav (Clement) is an 800-year-old sado-masochist who doesn’t want much from life; only to have sex with many beautiful women, and then kill them. Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) is the rebellious youth of the group at the tender age of 183, and Petyr (Ben Fransham) is an 8000-year-old arch-fiend whose hobbies include being a bat, chilling out in his sarcophagus, and killing puny humans.

A documentary crew follows the vampires around (think of them as a glorified plot device) as they fight over chores, try to get into nightclubs (the Anne Rice look is so 90s), and of course - lure victims back to the house for a delicious late night snack. The problem is that each of them is stuck in the past, unable to shed old habits for the new routines that could make them culturally relevant - and who wouldn’t be after a few centuries? It’s only with an infusion of new blood (yes, a pun) that the gang can find their way forward. And when it finally happens it brings new roommates, new dangers, new victims and new laughs. Just when you think there aren’t more bad vampire jokes the movie can somehow make perfectly hilarious anyway, apparently there ARE.

But do you have to be the first to try something for it to be worth trying? It’s not that they’re new gags; it’s the wry, inventive treatment and timing that works. Vampires don’t have reflections, so what do you do when you’re going out for the night and you want to make sure you look good? Vampires can’t touch silver, so how much would it suck if all that remained of the one true love in all your immortal years was a silver locket? Vampires can’t enter a building without being specifically invited, so guess how hard it is to get into a nightclub? It’s the precise execution and unfettered, faintly intellectual glee this movie takes in deconstructing its many targets that truly makes it funny.

Shadows really goes over less as a feature film and more as a series of insane vampire sketches made by people who are really into vampires. They’re all joined by the thinnest of plot threads – a kind of super bloody ‘80s teen dramedy about acceptance and the fickle pleasure of love. It’s not perfect, of course (speaking of things that are 800-years-old, there’s a Matrix joke in the movie), but it IS just straight up insanely, stupidly, incredibly funny. And not just any funny - it’s the kind of funny that actually reminds you that most of the time we laugh, it’s at things that are merely amusing. When you see something that’s so hilarious you wouldn’t mind if it killed you, the curve gets redrawn, and the world is new again.

Continued:       1       2       3       4