Well, this should be fun. An Attack The Block style bit of genre cinema doubling as social commentary, with a group of kids from the Bronx defending their neighbourhood against invading vampires. As much as short attention spans lead people to think that political touches in horror movies is some kind of new phenomena (or worse, retroactively trying to re-write the intent behind the classics of old), this looks a great fit on paper and works even better in execution… but I’d be lying if I said it was an absolute success.
If I had to guess at the chink in the production’s armour, it’s co-writer Blaise Hemingway, who delivered a woeful one-two punch last year with contributions to both UglyDolls and Playmobil The Movie, and whose trope-laden tactics stick around for this feature. The meta-horror nudges, with many references to Blade and the main villains working for Murnau Properties, are occasionally fun but it’s largely par for the course for these kinds of films. The ones where kids are the only ones who can stop monsters from killing everyone, because none of the adults believe them; I swear, some of these scenes are just a mild remix of The Lost Boys.
It also doesn’t help that the main allegory, with vampires as a personification of urban gentrification, is about as subtle as the vampire lawyers from Charmed. And because of that bluntness, a lot of the plot beats concerning them and their larger plan are unfortunately easy to guess ahead of time if you’re aware of the media it’s referencing/cribbing from. It’s one of the more unfortunate outcomes as far as media that’s openly inspired by other media, as knowing enough to get the references also means knowing most, if not all, of the plot to come.
But even with how plain some of the presentation is, and how lacklustre a lot of the humour is (it’s not painful, just not that impactful), I don’t want any of that to take away from the film’s entertainment value, which grows steadily over the film’s under-90-minute run time. Part of that is again down to the referential aspect, as the filmmakers appear savvy enough of their influences to know what made them work in the first place and remix them sufficiently here, but there’s also the allegory itself to consider.
I maintain that it’s not all that sophisticated, but credit to Hemingway and co-writer/director Oz Rodriguez for knowing their shit when it comes to the inner workings of gentrification. Everything from street crime, to law enforcement, to the literal infiltration of the courts, to a promised better life in the suburbs if they let the machine take over, even the place that white liberals play in keeping the wheels turning, gets highlighted. It all fits, and when combined with the individual characters, namely Gerald Jones III’s Bobby and his own experiences with the gang element, it highlights overlap between the mundane and the fantastic that, unlike quite a few movies I’ve covered so far this year, says more than just the obvious.
There’s also something to be said about that Latin twist I mentioned earlier, as it makes for a certain change in routine from something like The Last Black Man In San Francisco. It’s something that’s unfortunately easy to overlook but black communities aren’t the only ones at risk from these kinds of machinations, and considering the Latinx aspect of the Bronx has been getting a lot of attention in the last few years (Cardi B, anyone?), it works to further show how minorities are targeted by this process. It also adds to some of the imagery, like how Sammy Sosa’s baseball bat gets used against a vampire who looks an awful lot like Miley Cyrus with Iggy Azalea’s hairstyle; a showing of the genuine against the appropriator in action.
It may fall short on the genre fun it wants to build its political foundation on, and I’ll admit that I was sighing a fair bit at just how played out some scenes get with playing exactly to the formula, but as a spin on that formula, it shows enough creativity, knowledge, and solid casting (Method Man as Father Jackson was a small role that added a lot to the entertainment value) to make its point.
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