Description

U.K. comedy duo James Corden and Mat Horne (BBC TV’s GAVIN & STACEY) take the proverbial piss out of Britain’s esteemed horror heritage with this equally funny and raunchy blast that’s been bowling over audiences and angering critics across its homeland! Jimmy (Horne) and Fletch (Corden) drive to a far-off village for a hiking vacation and discover that said village has a wealth of cultural peculiarities, not to mention one hell of a vampire problem. More specifically, a lesbian vampire problem! If you think our heroes’ biology excludes them from potential victim status, think again. All it excludes them from is the option of a tender, more pleasurable death! Besides, they’ve taken refuge in a gothic cottage along with a busload of cute lesbians and the pressure factor is rather high for them to be chivalrous. Worse, tonight seems to be the night that an evil prophecy involving vampire queen Carmilla (Silvia Colloca) is about to fulfilled, putting nothing less than the fate of the world in the hands of our fish-very-out-of-water London boys. Can they—ahem!—rise to the occasion?

With a title taken straight from the “how to sell a film based purely on the strength of its name” handbook, LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS (or LVK, as some eternally polite sales agents have been calling it) could have just been a cynical one-note cash-bagger. It’s not, though it does deliver exactly what its moniker promises; this is a wickedly crass vampire send-up that rockets with witticisms and bloody carnal excess —meaning excesses both bloody AND carnal! Bodily fluids of all colours and consistencies splatter across the screen. Vulgar sight gags abound. Dialogue flies fast and furious. The laughs are wedged halfway between contemporary straight-faced BritCom humour and old school BENNY HILL. At once proudly unsophisticated and aesthetically slick, LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS gets mileage from the tradition of pitting ordinary schlubs against ageless evil, with Horne & Corden bringing an incredulous energy to the proceedings that reinvent the familiar into a goofy fun time—with bursting bra sizes and deliciously sharp teeth.

—Mitch Davis