Rapid Review: Bloodsucking Bastards (2015)

“Wikipedia did not mention that.”
– Frank

SYNOPSIS: Evan is a dutiful and overworked employee stuck at a soul-killing corporation with his beautiful co-worker and girlfriend Amanda and his slacker best friend Tim . Evans world begins to crumble when Amanda dumps him and his boss Ted hands his coveted promotion to his nemesis Max. When his office mates start going through disturbing changes, Evan must find a way to stop the evil brewing amidst the cubicles, and rescue his workplace pals before his life and career go from dead-end… to just dead. – via IMDB

I can’t even remember where I read a review of this and decided to possibly check it out. But I did, and I cannot say that I was impressed. I mean, it is better than most movies, but it is a long way from really good, or even great. For one, starting the movie feels like you are watching a terribly boring sitcom. Nothing is happening, the characters suck, no genius, nothing. Then it moves along to the actual vampire bit, and things started getting more interesting there at least. The one good thing is that you can see the whole cast is having a total ball, which is great, and they were all very entertaining. Joey Kern’s stoning, Kelly Clarkson-loving, ever-eating Tim was a really good character, he was such a chop, and as much as Marshall Givens’s crazy, military, Redbull-guzzling Frank makes you smile, when you pair the two of them up, you get a stroke of genius. As for Fran Kranz… I could totally only see him as the stoner with a huge mug bong. Seriously. Pedro Pascal was very good as Evan’s arch nemesis, and you can see he is having a blast playing this crazy weird vampire with an MBA. Now all of this looks like it should make for a good movie, right? Well, it just didn’t. It looked ridiculously low budget, which isn’t something I usually have a problem with, but this really looked awful. Plus there was a lot of awkward, forced humour, which fell flat consistently and made me cringe. Let’s not even forget to mention the incredible amounts of stupid thrown into this. I am not a fan of stupid, brainless humour, and this movie packed a lot of that. Nothing really smart. Not because all comedy has to be smart, but I am not a fan of that by-the-numbers, don’t-use-your-braincells comedy. Every now and again Bloodsucking Bastards gets a laugh in, but not necessarily what you want, all the time. Plus two, the pacing was all over the show. Like I said, the movie takes quite a while to go anywhere and feels like a cheap sitcom, and then jumps into something more entertaining, but still falls grossly short of the mark, never really reaching the heights it set itself up for. Not the worst  movie you could be spending your time on, but not nearly as amusing as it would like to be.