(Dir. Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi, 2015)
Rated R In honor of Halloween I will be reviewing a spooooooky movie This is a mockumentary that tells the story of three vampires, Viago, Deacon, and Vladislav, living in modern day New Zealand. A camera crew follows the vampires as they go through their daily life. Like most mockumentaries there is not exactly a set plot for me to talk about so I'm going to focus on the characters. Each of the vampires are interesting and sympathetic enough that I didn't lose interest of watching what is essentially an hour and twenty-six minutes of hijinks. Viago, my favorite, is an 17th century aristocrat, as a middle child myself, I relate to him. The movie opens with him going around to each vampire and rousing them for a flatmate meeting. Deacon is the youngest of the bunch and was a Nazi experiment in which they turned people into vampires. This is brought up once and then quickly dropped. Vladislav is also known as Vlad the Poker. Fun guys. Despite some of them being hundreds to thousands of years old they still stay true to many of their human characteristics so it's fun to watch them goof around as vampires. Despite What We Do In the Shadows not having a traditional plot, it has a lot of good character story lines. Having multiple siblings, I liked how the family dynamic of the coven was highlighted when a new vampire was brought into the coven. Deacon, formerly the youngest, is no longer the youngest and hippest and is reeling over the loss of being the "baby" in the family. Anyone with a younger sibling can sympathize with this feeling. Vigo's love storyline was probably my favorite, his losing his love is melancholy, but hilarious. I mean, who else can say they missed out on the love of their life because their shipping container was mislabeled and it took them 18 months to get to them? Not many, cause most would be dead. My favorite part of the love storyline has got to be when it brings up the age difference. Iconic. I really like the way they filmed this. The filming seems like a student trying to create a documentary, but at the same time one can tell it's very stylized. The camera shakes sometimes, like the person carrying it is moving quickly, which makes it feel a lot more real. It doesn't do it so much that it's annoying though. The colors are also kept fairly drab and bleak, in order to give off supernatural vibes I guess. The costuming killed me, these vampires stick to the styles of their respective era's WHEN THERE ARE PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR THEM TO GET NEW CLOTHES. I don't know why I found this so funny. tl;dr Vampire shenanigans, if you like Flight of the Concords you'll like this. Also, perfect for Halloween viewing.
1 Comment
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Aubrey KirchhoffI'm just screaming into the void and somehow getting graded on it. Archives
April 2018
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