Fim review: Boys playing for low stakes in horror spoof

Published on Friday 20 March 2009 08:28

EVERY couple of years, the comedy establishment seemingly anoints two bright young things as guardians of the nation's fickle sense of humour.

First it was Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, then came Matt Lucas and David Walliams, and more recently Peep Show duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

Now, James Corden and Mathew Horne, stars of the brilliant award-winning sitcom Gavin & Stacey, accept the mantle with this horror spoof that wedges a tongue in cheek and a stake in its heart.

Unfortunately, it's an exceedingly poor choice for the leads to showcase their undeniable talents.

The tone throughout is juvenile, ogling the frequently topless female cast and littering the script with puerile humour and copious expletives.

It would come as no surprise if screenwriters Paul Hupfield and Stewart Williams were two 15-year-old boys who bunked off school one day and scrawled the plot in the margins of an overdue assignment.

Lesbian Vampire Killers may be many things - clumsy, dull, almost completely starved of laughs - but sophisticated certainly isn't one of them.

Shortly after his unfaithful girlfriend Judy dumps him for the seventh time, eternal slacker Jimmy Maclaren (Horne) begrudgingly agrees to go hiking with his girl-crazed best friend, Fletch (Corden).

The duo huffs and puffs all the way to the village of Cragwich, blissfully unaware that the locals have been cursed for centuries by Carmilla, the Lesbian Vampire Queen (Silvia Colloca).

Every time a local girl turns 18, she is transformed into a Sapphic fanged fiend.

Jimmy and Fletch join forces with a campervan full of sexy, foreign student girls - Lotte (MyAnna Buring), Heidi (Tiffany Mulheron), Trudi (Ashley Mulheron) and Anke (Louise Dylan) - to despatch Camilla and her undead minions.

A disgruntled local vicar (Paul McGann), who possesses an ancient sword with the power to send Camilla to hell, joins the good fight as one by one, the girls succumb to a hungry army of lascivious lesbian vampires.

Will Jimmy and Fletch be able to resist a nibble?

Phil Claydon's film is styled like a comic strip, replete with captions, and the flimsy plot supports lashings of bodily fluids courtesy of Neal Champion's special effects and Neil Gorton's prosthetics.

The two leads strive hard to inject life into the limp script but their tomfoolery is irritating rather than endearing and there are long sections of the film where every punchline falls horribly flat.

Corden snaffles the odd giggle as the zany mate with an eye on any lady with a pulse, who thinks he's in with a chance of bedding one of the students, only to see them develop a taste for each other. Literally.