Film is Pwn

One of the many great things about Tivo is the wonderful descriptions of programming it provides.  Take this Tivo-nopsis of the 2005 horror movie Dead Serious: “Religious fanatics try to take over a gay bar which is – they are about to discover – owned by vampires”. How could I not click the record button… 

The film opened in the gay bar in question, which one could tell was a gay bar because the only decor was a rainbow flag hanging on the wall.  A patron argues with the bartender who tells him to talk to the manager, whose office is up top of a winding dim staircase.  After registering his complaint the manager (who was creepy enough to be a vampire, but not well dressed enough to be a homosexual) he is attacked, fangs flashing, blood spurting.  And then cut to the title screen.. fangs descending from up top.  Pure cheese I though, but somehow I was mesmerized.  Next a scene in a park where a seemingly nice guy is trying to enjoy a hamburger but the sweet love of his life won’t let him.  It’s wrong to eat animals, he’s killing himself with cholesterol, hey! some guys are smoking!  Oh the humanity… you know, there are vampires, and I want her to die, but somehow I doubt she will… maybe, if I believe hard enough…

After leaving his lunch date with a promise of a fun filled evening at a vegetarian restaurant, our hero is off to the gay bar to ply his trade as an accountant, accidentally leave his cell phone (thus setting up a return visit with terrible consequences, and of course make the off hand comment concerning his wife “She wants to live for ever”.  This is in reference to her being a vegetarian, but one can see where this is going… but that’s not all.  It seems the vampires have some sort of lab upstairs where they will be performing some kind of insidious experiments.  Soon hired goons take over the bar wielding guns and crossbows, and even go so far as to throw our poor hero accountants wife to the floor by the hair.  And just as she was beginning to seem tolerable.  You see… the reverend and his christian action army are on the offensive.  They are putting an end to perversion.  But how will they keep anyone from finding out what they are doing while firing machine guns and all the screaming?  They taped a paper to the outside of the door that said Private Party – No Admittance.  They are crafty, these fanatics.  But just what evil experiments are they conducting?  Well, they involve alot of biting and bloodsucking which can turn a gay man straight.  No, really, I swear.  I don’t want to give the rest away, because honestly, it is fun in such a bad way.

The acting isn’t great, and the dialogue serves to move the plot forward and little else, but the film is entertaining in the same way a Dan Brown book is.  It moves from scene to scene quickly which is great since having grown up in the world of TV and the Internet I don’t have a long attention span, and while I just couldn’t stop watching I had a strange feeling that I would feel like I needed a shower when it was all done… but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it, it was alot of fun in the same way that a Keanu Reeves film would be if he was trying to be terrible instead of just being terrible, both perfectly and unwittingly.  What makes this such a great B movie is that it embraces it’s B-ness, and runs with it.  Definately worth a watch if it happens to be on late at night which is the perfect viewing time for B Horror.