Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned – review

Director: Brian Thomson

Release date: 2008

Contains spoilers

With a title like Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned, I guess really you know what you are going to get – low rent horror, filmed on a budget. And that is what you get here, really it is. A short film (some 75 minutes on PAL), with a transfer to DVD that proved to be the first time I have ever, on my PC, had to stretch the aspect ratio to watch and even stretched it left big black bands to the left and right.

Chuck (Joseph Riker) is getting married to Michelle (Trina Analee). He is going golfing for his bachelor party and she is convinced he will stray (she puts condoms in his golf bag). His best man, Sammy (Gregg Aaron Greenburg), picks him up and tells him that there is a change of plans – the party will now be in the Hamptons, at a bungalow owned by the family of a high school ‘friend’ named Gordon (Joe Testa). Sammy has him involved only because of the house and Gordon has to make his own way there. They do, however, pick up friends Paulie (Sean Parker) and The Fish (Delu Dan Rusu) – who happens to be late due to sleeping with a woman, who turns out to be Lloyd Kaufman in drag.

They get lost on route – go to a bar and Sammy shows the barman the address and they immediately get thrown out. However, somehow they find the bungalow. Gordon is there and enters the alarm code 666. There is plenty of Mickey taking out of Chuck as the others have decided that Gordon fancies him. Anyway, evening comes and the entertainment arrives in the form of Emerald (Monique Dupree, Skeleton Key 2: 667 neighbour of the Beast), Vermillion (Kaitlyn Gutkes) and Snowy (Zoe Hunter, A Feast of Flesh). Gordon is not happy and states that if they let the girls in, then the blood is on their hands… he retires to bed.

The girls give Chuck drugged drinks from some strange bottles, which puts him out of it. Snowy takes him off. Sammy suggests that the other two girls service Paulie and The Fish. They are all in rooms and they get to eating Paulie and The Fish… literally. Snowy has a good old ride on Chuck to start with and then vamps out and looks as though she has bitten him slightly. However Michelle had rung Chuck earlier (so Sammy dropped Chuck's phone in the pool) and now rings Sammy. She is on her way there.

Now let us talk plot hole. The guys had trouble finding the place. Michelle simply knows they are in the Hamptons. How the hell she knew where to go and then actually got there was a leap of faith that… Hold on, Thomson answers this in the credits with the disclaimer “Repeat after me: Gaps in continuity constitute the unconscious poetry of the cinema.” Of course that is so much BS, but at least he knew he was offering us a Swiss Cheese of a film.

Sammy gets the girls out of there and tries to get Chuck up and at ‘em, as it were. Chuck, however, seems ill. Sammy even sends Gordon to get some aspirin from a pharmacy. Suddenly the girls are back, claiming that their car has broken down. Sammy lets them in and is going to hide them when he finds the remains of his friends. They attack. Now the effects are odd, they almost seem demonic – though they are meant to be vampires. We get subtitles at one point as Sammy goes for a staking and misses (with an inaccurate view of anatomy as the heart is central). Their skin seems, at times, rotten.

Anyway Michelle arrives and Chuck turns. She then realises he had sex with one of the girls and thus we get a simile of vampirism as a std. Sammy wants to turn Chuck back and decides that killing the head vampire is the way forward. He also decides that this must be Snowy – there is no logic to his decision other than the fact that she was with Chuck. He gets her by decapitation with garden shears but Chuck is still vampirised.

Let’s spoil this now as it leads to a more unusual aspect of this. The head vampire is Gordon (sunlight, crosses and garlic do not effect these vampires, hence he was around during the day). He turned after Sammy got Chuck to play a trick on him, when they were still in high school, and it was the hatred he felt because of it that made him turn. The three girls were cheerleaders at the school – that Chuck and Sammy didn’t recognise for some reason… oh yeah, that’s because of the unconscious poetry of the cinema!

Other than the bit about hatred turning someone into a vampire, which was fairly unique, this really didn’t do anything new or particularly worthwhile. It had some humour and some worked, but most didn’t. The acting was generally low grade though there was something very personable about Gregg Aaron Greenburg. There is cgi in there that is truly awful. Not a great film but it is a great title. 1.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.