Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood (2003)

Since the birth of video, film has been used to document history. We have created works of art, and recorded the acts of legends to entertain generations to come.  Or, occasionally, you just grab a camera as an excuse to get your hot friends to take off their clothes and rub against each other for a while.

This is one of those movies….

Now I wasn’t expecting much for a film titled “Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood.”  Low-to-no-budget movies can’t really be faulted (much) for the quality of the recording, or the effects, or really even much of the acting. Most of this costs time and money to do right, let alone well.  So what you’ve got left is the storytelling.  If the guy has a vision, a bit of creativity, and manages to put it on film convincingly, we’ve got a winner.

This isn’t one of those movies…

Now, it does start promising. Two half-naked girls making out?  Awesome.  We’ve got tittage. Go tits! And some ass! Wooo tits again. Go… Jesus... they’re still at it? I’m going to go make a sandwich…

Yes, they managed to make even a scene with naked women petting each other simply boring.  (Apparently there wasn’t enough left in the budget to get their cast drunk enough to appear to be enjoying the make-out scenes.)  And the seven seconds of audio that is looped makes the already too-long shots seem even longer…

I don’t even have room to bitch about everything bad in this movie. This film shares most all of the common damning flaws in amateur film- the biggest of which being not enough content.  Your basic plot is pretty simple: Lesbian vampire mistress finds chick she wants to scissor, abducts her, tries to convert her, gets stopped by a halfwit vampire slayer, with gratuitous T&A thrown in to keep it almost interesting. You’ve got maybe a half-hour worth of material which was then stretched out to a feature-length time.  And it suffers for it.

This movie is an hour and twenty minutes long.  Ten minutes of that are credits. Another ten minutes or so is broken up with bits from the announcer, Mr. Creepo - a guy who’s dressed like a LARPer trying to pull off a “Son of Ghoul” type monologue.  It’s worth a chuckle. As for the movie, if you watch it like any other porn and fast-forward past all the annoying acting and filler and just stopping when you see skin you can save yourself some time. 

Filler. Lots of filler. Random city shots of people walking and random zooms in on traffic lights add nothing but run time. Entire scenes exist just to stretch time. An extended scene hopping around the city zooming in on one missing persons flier after another? And another? And another? All while a phone rings in the background?  Ok, we fuckin’ get it. She’s missing. Move the hell on.

Now I admit, I did like a few things in this film. There is some occasional witty slapstick dialog between a few of the “extra” characters. I don’t understand how an S&M scene with a gimp and a chubby chick whipping a caged punk girl fits in with the story, but you do what you have to do.  The makeup work on at least a few of male characters was also pretty cool. Somebody had some experience with stage makeup, and they turned out fine.  Unfortunately, they all seem to be cast in the script as “Background Vamptard.” All they really seem to do is groan and roll their eyes in the background while masturbating. (Or at least I think that is what they were doing…)  

And it is cool that someone talked their parents involved, and seeing them playing hide-and-seek in a graveyard was cute for a while, but no bonus points since you couldn’t talk Mom into taking off her shirt. 

But god damn it, slap whoever came up with the “I have the power to turn bottled water into Holy water!” scene. How about no? Note to any future filmmakers out there: when your vampire slayer’s pivotal final combat involves taking the cap off a liter of Aquafina and splashing it around the room a bit while everyone moans at you just stop filming. Put the camera down and walk away. Or go back to what works and have everyone take off their tops again.

This movie isn’t worth the effort to even fap to, and soft-core Goth is free on the Internet.  If you must get yourself a copy it is available on a couple of the Pendulum Pictures sets from Mill Creek Home Entertainment.  Check them out at http://www.millcreekent.com/  

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reviewed by Jeremy Gaggins

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer