Blimpo
(Gary Peebles) is a beloved clown from Baltimore who dies in a freak circus
fire in Bulgaria. When his body is
shipped home, it mistakenly gets dropped off at an office building where it
must be kept overnight. Blimpo soon
awakens from his coffin as a vampire and begins biting his victims and turning
them into bloodthirsty bloodsuckers.
Naturally, the only ones who can stop the vampire plague from spreading
are the ragtag group of security guards that work in the building.
The first thing you notice (or I noticed) about this low budget, locally shot horror movie is the presence of James Remar who plays the nerdy, sexually harassing office manager. It’s really weird seeing him playing such an oddball character. I’m more used to seeing him being the badass. He must’ve taken this role (and the co-producer credit) in an effort to try something new. The only other “names” in the cast are Scream Queen Tiffany Shepis and Rain Pryor (Richard’s daughter), both of whom don’t stick around very long.
The
Night Watchmen offers an agreeable mix of over the top gore and crude humor. The humor, it must be said, is hit-and-miss
and the gore gets awfully repetitive as most of the kills revolve around people
getting their throats torn out. (There
is a clever scene where a broken plunger is used as a makeshift stake though.) Even though the film is about vampires, it’s structured
more like a zombie movie. That’s not
really a criticism. Just a fact.
One
thing I can say for it is that director Mitchell Altieri (one half of the
“Butcher Brothers”) gets the show on the road rather swiftly. It’s just that the film spins its wheels a bit
too much in the second and third acts to be totally successful. By then, the movie feels a lot longer than the
79 minute-running-time suggests. Still,
as a former Marylander, I appreciated the jabs made at Baltimore’s expense, so
it was hard to completely hate it.
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