[four-star-rating]Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer[/four-star-rating]
If you’re fed up with vampires – and I don’t blame you – here’s a bite of comedy that’ll get your heart to beating again. Created by the team behind Flight of the Conchords, this is a wryly funny 85 minutes. Shadows asks all those stupid questions we have about vampires – like how do they get slaves? And it always answers the queries in humorous ways.
Shadows is a mock-umentary in the style of MTV’s Real World, borrowing much from Christopher Guest’s oeuvre. Yet, being slightly reductive is fine when you’re this entertaining.
In modern-day New Zealand, a household of bloodsuckers invites a film crew in to get to know them. After making sure the crew is bedecked in crucifixes, the four succubae show the small, intimate details of their after-lives. Waititi (an actor who is actually Maori and Jewish) portrays a German fop longing for a lost love. Brugh thinks he’s the young, sexy one. Romanian Clement is suffering a sort of vampiric impotence. And Petyr (Fransham) in the basement is Nosferatu come to life… Or half-life… Or, whatever, you get the point.
The first scene is a house meeting where these bachelor vampires discuss that dishes haven’t been done in five years. Why do vampires have dishes? Because they host dinner parties for their victims. I don’t know why these undead are worried about dirty flatware and glasses when the rest of the house looks like it’s slowly rotting. Vampires, in general, feel it’s beneath them to clean, apparently.
The comedy here is that their personal problems are not much different from ours. They’re neurotic, vain, and selfish. They can come across as nerdy and needy. Underneath, they’re terribly loyal to each other. The only differences are that they kill people, they’re allergic to silver, and sunlight will set them afire.
A series of happenstances, which I refuse to spoil, occur. This forces the 183-to-8000-year-old guys to learn more about the modern technology – dating sites, online porn, and Skype.
[rating-key]
Besides acting in the film, Clement and Waitiki also wrote and directed Shadows. After their years of experience with Conchords, Boy, The Eagle and the Shark, and other projects, they know what they’re doing. They’re gifted at editing for the laughs. Sure, if one thinks about it, the cinema verité style doesn’t always make sense – how the camera crew is always ready for the important shot, even when vampires are chasing each other through the house or running victims down in the woods. That technicality matters less when the jokes land so well.
At the risk of going too punny – ah, what the hell – the result here is bloody hilarious! What We Do in the Shadows doesn’t suck.
You must be logged in to post a comment.