New Years Eve Bollywood Madness

As a treat, for New Years Eve, I’m bringing you not one but two Bollywood movies – not reviews as there are only Hindi versions out there and I don’t speak Hindi but both films are on YouTube, split into parts, and so I’ll post the first part of each… The first is Shaitani Dracula (2006) which was directed, written, and produced by Harinam Singh.

This one is absolutely mad, with a bizarre looking Dracula who occasionally wears cheap Halloween plastic fangs and I don’t think you need subtitles – just sit back and take in the weirdness. Disappointingly there are no real song and dance routines.

That is not the case with our second film. Forget Universal’s Son of Dracula and the Son of Dracula which was the Nilsson vehicle. Only the Saleem Suma directed Son of Dracula has the son of Dracula created as a papier mache puppet.

The first part of each is embedded below:

Shaitani Dracula:



Son of Dracula:

Murder, She Wrote – the Legacy of Borbey House – review (TV episode)

Directed by: Walter Grauman

First aired: 1993

Contains spoilers

Okay – another 'vampires get everywhere' entry into the annals of Taliesin Meets the Vampires and I’ll start by admitting that I don’t personally see the draw of Murder, She Wrote – a little too homey and nicey for my tastes (especially as it’s a murder mystery). Give me Columbo or Holmes any day. That said it is a damn sight better than Diagnosis Murder.

The show starts with a graveyard and a couple of teens wandering through it. Billy (Don Jeffcoat) clearly has romance in mind but Carla (Susan T Collins) is scared. They start hearing noises that Billy is, at first, dismissive of but eventually he seems nervous too. When they see a hand emerging from a grave they are well and truly freaked, she screams and they run. A man emerges from the grave, later we discover it is one Dr Sorenson (Roy Dotrice; Angel, Carmilla and Tales from the Darkside).

Jessica (Angela Lansbury) is in disarray, her plumbing and wiring have been condemned. She has a workman called Charlie (Richard Gilliand) round. He finds a note in his workbox – it is from Laurel his fiancé and it sounds as though she has been dead for 18 months (nothing spooky, just a box he hadn’t been in for a while) – actually, officially, she is missing. He gets a call from Larry Baker (David Birney) and the exchange is a little heated. He apologises to Jessica, but abandons her without electricity to go the Borley House, which Baker is having restored.

Molly Holt (Judith Jones) knocks at the Borley house door and it is answered by the servant Peter Jatich (Christopher Neame; Lust for a Vampire and Dracula AD 1972) – she says Mr Baker is expecting her. She has brought material catalogues for the man but he has dinner laid out – to have with her. She looks reluctant but agrees. When she gets home her father (Lawrence Pressman) shows his disapproval, she has broken a date with Dave (Gary Hershberger). She points out she has been making allowances for him for 18 months – it turns out he is Laurel’s brother and is still searching for his sister.

It turns out that Sorenson is researching a new book on Middle European supernatural phenomena in New England. He has discovered that the Borbey’s were rumoured to be vampires. Charlie has to drop Jessica as Baker wants a load-bearing wall removing and doubles his quote. Holt dislikes Baker as does Dave and Sorenson believes he is a vampire. Sorenson is, we see, in the house on the evening when Baker is killed – by stake through the heart. We also later discover that Jatich is an illegal immigrant and was an East German secret policeman. Who killed Baker?

Well I am not going to reveal that but I will reveal the lore we get. Vampires must be killed by ash stake (the stake is not ash). They dislike sunlight – we see Baker put sunglasses on before opening a door in daytime and he has not been seen outside the house in daylight, he also has no mirrors in the house. Garlic on a grave keeps the dead in situ and Baker has a mysterious bottle with red liquid in it and a wolf etched into it. The grave of William Borbey is actually empty (and yet the Cabot Cove police do not arrest Sorenson for desecratng a grave).

Is Baker a vampire? The show remains inconclusive, he is of course dead but staking will kill a human as readily as a vampire. His aversion to sunlight (and dislike of mirrors and the glare they cause) is put down to photophobia. Baker is the English translation of Borbey and Baker seemed to have no official records and paid for the house in cash. Nothing is ever said about the red liquid and what it might be – a red herring for the audience no doubt. At the end of the show the town librarian finds an old book with Borbey in it – he looks suspiciously like Baker.

Acting wise I felt we had a mixed bag. David Birney was perfectly cast as the enigmatic stranger and had a, dare I say it, almost Barnabas Collins feel to him lending credence to the ‘he might be a vampire’ vibe. Christopher Neame was good but barely in it, a clear under use of Johnny Alucard himself. I like Roy Dotrice but he was a pantomime in this – not his fault but the fault of the script writers and director I am sure.

You see, where this falls down is in the fact it isn’t a real mystery show. Jessica solves the mystery with a couple of clues that appear towards the end that were neither here nor there. There was a lot of building who might be a killer (before the murder) and some fiddling with vampirism and the rules thereof but in the main there was a soap opera level to the proceedings that clearly served to distract the audience from the lack of any real depth within the show.

Better than Diagnosis Murder though. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Hercules Against the Moon Men – review

Director: Giacomo Gentilomo

First released: 1964

Contains spoilers

Ahh… Italian sword and sandal movies. We have had them here before, in the form of Hercules in the Haunted World. Of course, the big difference between this and that was that Haunted World involved the talents of Mario Bava.

This, unfortunately, did not. When it comes to vampiric aspects we are primarily concerned with Selene (Delia D’Alberti), Queen of the Moon Men. She has definitive vampiric overtones, as we will later see, and whilst she is barely in the film as a character, the entire point of the plot is her resurrection.

The film explains, at the beginning, how a fiery rock fell from the sky and hit a mountain, carrying with it a monstrous life form that the people of the fair kingdom of Samar now have to offer sacrifices to, in order that they might survive. Current ruler of Samar is the originally named Queen Samara (Jany Clair) and her advisor Gladius (Nando Tamberlani) suggests that there is one man who can save them.

Samara is dismissive, expressing a belief that it is too risky to court rebellion against their oppressors, but we soon discover that she is a baddy. Her loyal soldier tells her that Gladius is due to meet Hercules (Sergio Ciani) anyway. We see Hercules travelling and he is attacked by thugs (who are actually Samara’s guard). He defeats them with his mighty arms (and a tree he uproots).

Samara is visited by a creature with a masked face – that I’ll describe as a moon priest. He is semi-transparent, so I guess it was a projection, and he tells her she has failed as Hercules is still alive. It becomes clear that she is to sacrifice her sister, the Princess Billis (Delia D’Alberti). Billis – who I swear I spent the film thinking was actually called Phyllis – is in love with her royal cousin Darix (Jean-Pierre Honoré) and they wish to marry.

Hercules is met by Agar (Anna Maria Polani), daughter of Gladius, who takes him to her father. Hercules, of course, agrees to help against the moon men. Gladius is showing him to the rebels, by secret passage, when Agar realises that Samara has spied on them. She goes to warn the men but it is too late, traps are triggered and her father is spiked, and as for Hercules…

Well, he kind of falls down a pit but who knows where it was as it took Agar forever and a day to find him. The pit fills with water and so, rather than floating upwards, Hercules breaks down the wall of the pit and then bends metal bars to escape. Unfortunately there is a monster there so he kills it too. Agar finds him and gets him away.

There is a backwards and forwards then with Hercules captured eventually. Once captured Samara has him executed in the most convoluted way – he is in a spiked piece of apparatus that he can push back on as slaves try to close it! As it is, the equipment breaks due to the power of his manly arms and, at that point, Samara decides she wants him. For his part, Hercules decides to fake love and then avoids drinking the love potion she gives him. Once she spills the location of the (by that time) kidnapped Billis he escapes and goes off to the rescue.

So, why Billis? It turns out that she is a dead ringer for Selene who is dead but preserved. Her blood, on a certain night when the planets are aligned and the moon can be brought crashing into earth, will restore Selene’s power, resurrecting her. So we do have a blood aspect to all this – indeed, the moon priest cuts Billis wrist and lets it drain down onto the Queen. There is also a pulsing rock seen in this scene, who knows what that was for (potentially pulling down the moon).

Bizarrely, as well as bringing the Moon Queen back to life, Billis’ blood also seems to cause flowers to grow around the Queen’s head. Luckily for Billis, Hercules rescues her (not really a spoiler, it was obvious he would) and the main reason for mentioning this is the interruption in the process causes the Queen to rapidly age and die – so we had life through blood and rapid aging on death. It is also said to Samara that she would be made like the moon people, in order that she is able to survive once the moon crashes into the earth; whether they meant she would be like the Queen or the minions is moot as the transformation doesn’t happen.

Now the rapid aging is a rather good effect, surprising given the other effects – especially the moon men which were big rock things. The acting was, well it is difficult to say (though it seemed cheesy) smothered as it was by the blooming awful dubbing. The version I saw was completely washed out colour wise and all in all it wasn’t a great film. There is a bit when Hercules is going to rescue Billis when all I could think was “get on with it”, bored as I was by the endless wandering through wind-machine buffeted fake fog. 1 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Koishite Akuma – review

Directors: various

First aired: 2009

Contains spoilers

Koishite Akuma was a ten episode J-Drama – in other words a drama from Japan – that ran over the summer of 2009. Whilst it is known as the Loving Demon it has a tagline of Vampire Boy.

The vampire lore within it develops over the ten episodes as the vampire boy, Kuromiya Ruka (Nakayama Yuma), learns more about himself. However he is not the first vampire we meet.

That honour falls to Kaito (Kondo Masahiko) whom we see on a rooftop, before a large moon, holding a woman in his arms. He calls her foolish and states that the entire human race is simply prey to vampire kind and there are not enough human’s to feed the vampires’ collective hunger. Bizarrely that is the last we hear about any apparent food shortage. We later discover that Kaito is 400 years old.

Tagaki Kaori (Sakuraba Nanami) is the school representative for her class. On her way in she sees a strange boy but by the time she tells her teacher, Natsukawa Makoto (Kato Rosa), he has vanished – we do notice, however, that Ruka finds bright light problematic. Later Makoto is told by the assistant chairman, Fujii Masayuki (Takahashi Hitomi), that she is to get an exchange student from Romania.

We note that vampires have telekinetic powers when Ruka makes a bike crash and later, when sitting on a bridge in the rain, he is seen by Makoto who thinks him suicidal. She runs up to him but is shocked at his resemblance to her first love, Ayumu, who died ten years before (when they were fifteen). So, who is Ruka and where has he come from?

Not from Romania, though that is his cover story. Kaito has placed him with a Japanese family who run a Chinese restaurant – convincing them, through his mind controlling powers, that he is related to them distantly. Ruka has not yet developed his fangs and is on an initiation outing. He must find his destined woman, at which point his fangs will emerge and he must take her lifeblood to become a full vampire. He is at the school to find a victim – at one point he thinks it might be Kaori.

It is both to his shock and disgust that his fangs emerge with Makoto and he does not want to feed from her; he finds humans repulsive but her more so. He then learns that he must overcome this prejudice and bite her as, if he does not by the first full moon following his fangs appearance, he will turn to dust and it will be as though he never was. Of course things are not as easy as they might seem. The longer he is amongst humans the more feelings he develops, he also starts to regain his memories. He is not a pure born vampire (there is no such thing) he was Ayumu and he still loves Makoto.

It is here, within the drama aspects, that this struggled. We have the fact that he makes friends with Handa Horoto (Nakajima Kento), who loves Kaori but she falls for Ruka. We have the deep seated attraction between Ruka and Makoto and all the forbidden love aspects to that as she is his teacher and they now have a ten year age gap between them. We have the fact that Fujii Masayuki is in love with Makoto and wants to marry her. The programme drips with romantic melodrama.

Add to that the fact that it stretches those romances out and out and out, over ten episodes. The baseline romances could have been explored quicker and there wasn’t enough supernatural peril to keep me as interested as I should be. Until… suddenly there was an episode when another vampire. Kobayakawa Miho (Shimizu Mao) came into the series, took over the school and made Makoto the object of his hunger (unusually, given he took the school over because mid-teen girls were his normal favourite snack). This episode (8) suddenly forgot all about the melodrama and aimed for the jugular – but by the end we went back to the romance storyline and everyone had forgotten what occurred.

As for vampire lore – this was rather good in places and patchy in others. Beyond the unusual, feed within a month of fangs emerging or vanish, we find that vampires can be reflected but not photographed... yet somehow vampires can be filmed and that footage sneaked to people. Sunlight causes discomfort and too much exposure might be fatal. Crosses will ward off vampires and a distinction is made between Western style vampires (like these) and Chinese vampires.

Given their ability to get into apartments one suspects they either fly or jump very high – but this is not shown. They do, however, have super strength – be it lifting cabinets or hitting thugs so that they fly across building sites. There is some indication that garlic is a deterrent (yet, to make his adoptive family happy, Ruka eats a garlic filled snack with no obvious damage done) but they have no sense of taste when it comes to human food. Moonlight reflected on a crucifix, into a vampires eye, causes said eye to bleed. As I say patchy in places as it was inconsistent but some aspects – like the moonlight reflected from the cross was very interesting.

As for the acting, the principles seemed very natural. Ruka was somewhat pouty at times (as the role required) but then we got counterbalancing lines, from Kaito, such as “a wolf dying of starvation in front of a sheep is just pathetic.” Perhaps some other vampire brands need to remember that line! However, as pouty as Ruka was, Nakayama Yuma was very natural in the role and we bought his relationship with Makoto. As for Kato Rosa I was taken not only by her performance but by her rather infectious smile.

All in all this was okay. It could have done with cutting about half its length out though – for my taste at least. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Interesting Shorts: Viy

Viy, by Nikolai Gogol, was published in 1835 and on first glance is a story of witchcraft. However we must remember that the traditional vampire the strigoï vii was a living vampiric witch who became a strigoï mort – or undead vampire – on death.

The story has been adapted several times. At the time of writing this article, a Russian adaptation to mark 200 years since Gogol’s birth and a more Vernian adventure adaptation are due for release (I understand the earlier has been released in Russian cinemas). Recently there was a version named Vedma. Two of the adaptations are two of my favourite all time films. The first of these is Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, from 1960, is only very loosely based on Viy and is definitely vampiric in nature, this was poorly remade (and lost the vampirism aspects) by Bava’s son and named Demons 5.

The 1967 film Viy is also one of my favourite films and the film actually follows the Gogol story rather closely. The seminarian Khoma, and two of his fellows, are travelling home from Kiev when they become lost and then come across a homestead. They ask for shelter and the reluctant old woman separates them. She comes in the night and hag-rides Khoma, which is itself a form of psychic vampirism. Khoma, eventually, is able to regain control of his body by saying the prayers and exorcisms he remembers. He gets the upper hand and then beats the woman, but she turns into a young girl.

He returns to Kiev, but a Cossack has summoned him. His daughter was beaten and died but she asked, before she died, that Khoma come and say the three nights of prayers over her body. Reluctant he may be, but the seminarian has no real choice and the girl – of course – is the witch. One area that the tale does diverge from the film is in one of the tales the locals tell Khoma about the girl’s evil ways. In one tale we hear that she attacked a baby. “She grabbed the baby, bit its throat, and began drinking its blood.” Following this she bit the mother all over and killed her too. This is much more evident as vampirism than is often shown in the adaptations – though the book itself never actually mentions the V word.

Of course each night, whilst he says the prayers, the girl comes back to life and tries to get to him. It is interesting that like Clara Crofton in the later Varney the Vampire and Lucy Westenra in Dracula the girl looks absolutely beautiful in death and repose. “…there was in her features nothing dull, lustreless, dead. The face was alive, and it seemed to the philosopher that she was looking at him through closed eyes.” Even more interestingly the paragraph goes on “It even seemed to him that a tear rolled from under her right eyelash, and when it stopped on her cheek, he made out clearly that it was a drop of blood.” Surely this is one of the earliest examples of the undead crying a blood tear.

On the third night the girl; summons up a host of monsters and then Viy. Viy is the chief of the gnomes, Gogol claims in a footnote, also claiming this to be a traditional legend he has not altered. However Richard Pevear’s preface in “The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol” clearly states that the creature Viy, “has no source in folklore, he is Gogol’s creature and appears literally out of nowhere.” Viy kills Khoma, but what happens to the girl we never discover… we do know that many of the monsters she summoned were trapped in the doors and windows of the church and therefore the priest, who attended after the events, refused to perform the traditional rites of the dead and the church itself was abandoned.

Viy is a perfect example of what I would deem an interesting short and has led to two of the best movies the genre has to offer.

Nightlife – review

Director: Timothy Sanderson

Release date: 2008

Contains spoilers

I saw this at the Bram Stoker International Film Festival and, in my report back I said “I thoroughly enjoyed it. It had a great cast and fantastic dialogue and the audience all seemed to find that it hit the funny bone.”

I was lucky enough to be sent a screener disc and it was nice to sit down with a film and know that the resultant review was going to be positive. The reason for this, beyond the script and cast, was the fact that the filmmakers knew their limitations. The film is a mockumentary and thus the level of cameras used is perfect, any flaws in lighting – a problem with the documentary filmmaking process. Said documentary is being made by Ian (Michael Mergan), Mike (Ryan Sullivan) and Kate (Maria Collins). Their subject, vampires and the hunters who hunt them.

The film actually starts with Henry (Alex Tosspon), who is mixing up a thick paint. He shaves his head, strips and puts in protective contact lenses. Then he smears himself liberally with the paint. It is Henry’s daywalking experiment (13th attempt). He walks into the sunlight and rejoices, he can see the sun, but then he starts to burn. He makes it back to the garage – somewhat crispier than he was before. Henry was a surfer before being turned and desperately misses the sun. At the end of the film we hear him talk of Seattle and the high suicide rate due to, he believes, the many rainy days and lack of sun. “Being a vampire,” he says insightfully, “Is like living in Seattle all the time.”

There are several other vampires all sharing a house and one of the astounding things about the film is that, whilst we don’t hear too much about most of their backgrounds, we learn enough about their characters to bond with many of them. Avi (Avi Hartman) is a paramedic and Larry (James Brownlee) – or Laurencio de la Ciscaren – claims to have been an assassin but now is a doorman at a hotel. He is a traditionalist vampire, sleeping in a coffin whilst all the others sleep in beds. Thomas (Adam Langley) is a frat boy and the youngest of the vampires, whilst Darren (Brandon Hayes) owns the house and several businesses.

Also living in the house is Harpo (Korey Simone), who is clearly mad – theories range from the idea that he was staked in the head and never recovered, to the idea that he fell into the ocean and walked to show, but chose the wrong direction and ended up in America- he has almost savant moments, for example with a violin. He has a tendency to eat small furry animals from time to time and in an almost throw away moment, blick and you’d miss it, we do see him sucking on a used tampon.

The hunters, on the other hand, are geeks. Led by Ricky (Jason Small), who works in a comic book store, they also include Andrew (Paul Evans) who is a pizza delivery boy and Billy (Frank Weysos) who is ostensibly the muscle. There is also Ethan (J.R. Zambrano), the inventor of the group. Some of his ideas work, such as metal neck collars, but others such as tanning cream as a weapon – if it tans it should kill a vampire – fail miserably. Incidentally it is only sunlight that kills in this, Henry uses a tanning booth. Finally there is Seth, who espouses the idea that Jesus was a vampire – a concept we have come across before.

The hunters believe they saw a med student called Sara (Jessica Dill) fight off a vampire. In fact what they saw was a lovers tiff between Sara and Avi, who were in a relationship at the time. Because of this the hunters all have developed a crush on her – there is a scene when Andrew tries to introduce a character called Sara into their thrice weekly Dungeons and Dragons sessions – it has to be said that they are crushes that are almost akin to stalking. It is because of their obsession with Sara, and the fact that Avi still has feelings for her, that the vampires and hunters actually cross paths.

Further lore includes the idea that vampires can’t get stoned in conventional ways and so they keep a guy called Kyle (Christian Huey) around. A pot head of the highest order, they buy him his drugs and he lets them drink his blood. Avi tells us that Dracula and Lestat are just fictional but when asked about Vlad the Impaler he calls him Vlady and says that he runs a shish kebab stall downtown.

A stake through the heart will kill a vampire, but it has to be in the heart. Staking to the left will miss as the heart is in the centre of the body. To turn someone a vampire’s blood must get into their mouth – it is as simple as that. The vampires are pretty much immortal – Larry is 500 – but do not seem to have any more strength than a mortal man.

Vampires can be captured on film but cast no reflection in mirrors. Religion does not seem to be an issue. Larry puts a drop of holy water in his drink to spice it up, but that is shown to be a delusion on his part. Avi gets rather upset when a cross is pushed in his face but that is because he is a Jew (and wears a Star of David) and finds the act offensive. Thomas, for his part, is a rather messy eater but he is less practiced than his brethren.

The acting all works. Everyone feels natural but special mention to Jason Small, who was very good as Ricky, and Avi Hartman, who was a revelation as Avi. I did notice Brandon Hayes accent slipping in places but that was a very small thing. The film has a wonderful undercurrent of absurdity that works really well but what really does make it is the writing – the target audience will get a lot out of the dialogue, that’s for sure.

All in all an excellent addition to the genre, making the most out of what it had and creating a little gem. Indeed, I have to say that it stood the test of a second viewing, being as enjoyable the second time around. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Merry Yule

To all the readers of TMtV.

Two Front Teeth – review

First released: 2006

Contains spoilers

Sometimes a film manages to rise above its limitations and there are many ways in which this can happen. Certainly for a low budget film, which Two Front Teeth definitely is, it is concept and story that can carry it above said limitations.

When it comes to concept there is none more unique than two front teeth. Indeed it is the only vampiric Christmas film, where Santa, or Clausferatu (Josh Buchbinder), is a vampire, that I can think of off the top of my head. Indeed tying the vampiric traditions into the Christmas mythology is a rarity, though my own The Meaning of Christmas is another example, as is The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas.

That’s not to say that the budget constraints do not show in this, the lighting, for instance, is terrible, the sets limited and it looks cheap but sometimes you can touch a special something…

Noelle Snow (Megan Pearson) loves Christmas, to a fetishist level, so it is just a shame that her husband Gabe (Johnny Francis Wolf) is Christmas phobic, to the point of having panic attacks when he sees Santa models. Noelle, consequently, is cheating on him with a mall Santa named Kevin (Eric Messner). They are about to get down and dirty when she hears something, firstly on the roof and then downstairs. She sends Kevin to investigate. Kevin is attacked by an elf. Later the same elf captures Noelle.

Let us, for a moment, talk elves. These are not your atypical Santa’s little helpers. Described as zombie elves they have sharp pointed teeth, foul mouths, heads that continue to mouth off when removed from the body and a perchance for fetish type wear. The primary one is called Frost (Lisa Oberg), though there is a whole army of the pernicious little buggers. Actually the makeup work for them wasn’t too shabby either.

As for Gabe, he works for a tabloid dedicated to holiday weirdness called the X-Mass Files. We see many of the front pages and he has been investigating a crashed plane, he has a source who has given him info about the crash. He has written a note to Noelle – which also contains divorce papers as he knows she is fooling around. His editor, Ed (Michael Brecher), tries to get details re the source and then gives him a gun for Christmas. Why a gun? All he will say is that he went to Gabe’s house and lost an ear… Now I know what you're thinking, lost an ear… plot improbability at the very least, but we have left reality at the head of the film.

Gabe gets home and finds Kevin’s head on a train set and Noelle tied up. He frees her and tries to get Kevin’s car keys (Ed has driven off in Gabe’s car). An elf has the car keys. They manage to get the key, though Gabe is bitten. A group of carollers get in the way as they make their escape and later we see that the elf slaughters them for their trouble. Gabe heads away but when they try to phone the cops they aren’t believed. They are hijacked by Ed who says that *they* want to know who the source is, but he is thrown from the car for his troubles. Gabe heads to his source, a gunslinger wannabe called Pete (Joseph L Johnson). Pete knows what is going on… Santa is evil, a vampire.

Clausferatu is a creature who comes out at night, who dresses in red and has no fear of fire – hence coming down chimneys – and injects greed into the Christmas festivities (all very similar to Gabe’s story, ‘Yes Virginia, there is a vampiric Santa’). The flight was brought down by a ‘bird strike’ involving a reindeer escaping from Clausferatu – we get a bizarre little animation at this point. It died and Pete has its head mounted, but the elves are trying to get the red nose for their master. When it flashes it causes them pain.

The elves are using Gabe and Noelle to find Pete. They have placed a tracking device in the shape of a gingerbread man in Noelle’s foot. Gabe has to remove it. They decide to hide out in a place that Christmas has not touched for many years – Gabe’s old family home. It is here that we discover why Noelle has a Christmas fetish and why Gabe has a Christmas phobia.

We can also throw into the mix the Silent Knights – a group of nuns who have taken a vow of silence but are also Vatican assassins. It is they who took Ed’s ear and they seek to get the nose as this will be the decisive battle for Christmas and, yes, it is all very, very bizarre.

Over all this should be dross, badly lit and very cheap, but… the dialogue is well done, the constant Christmas gags work well and Noelle and Gabe work as a mismatched couple who actually do love each other – they’ve just got lost in their own little worlds. The story is so bizarre it can only be worth a watch and, if you can stand the low budget, this actually had something going for it.

It is far from perfect, it has no logic base to work from and yet it is fun, a guilty pleasure would probably be the best descriptor. If you can handle the excesses of low budget aspects then this is worth a watch. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.