Short Film: Fang

Fang is a 15-minute long short film directed by José Hidalgo and released in 2012. It is an extra on the DVD of the film Michael – (K)ein harter Vampirfilm and serves as a prequel to the film. The DVD was a gift from Matt who runs Vampire Film Reviews, who receives my gratitude for enabling me to see these films. If you wish to read Matt’s take on Fang it can be found here.

Michael (Jörn Guido) is a bit of a… well he would say player but I’d say a misogynist dick who seems to have managed to pick up two young ladies. We get some preamble with him on the phone, and likewise his friend and mutual misogynist lothario Billy Boy (Joachim Foerster), as they make excuses to other women about their behaviour. Having met Michael with the two girls, Billy is desperate to pick up a new conquest and sees a woman (Amanda Da Gloria) walking down the street.

Amanda Da Gloria as the woman

He comes on to her in the most slimy of ways, not taking her refusals for an answer, until eventually she seems to give in and invites him back to her apartment. She leaves him in the living room as she vanishes off for a moment and returns with glasses of wine, which he downs quickly as she sits alluringly on the sofa. Then he is on the sofa and she twists around straddling him…

attack

And at that point I would leave the descriptive walkthrough, but the saving grace of this comes in the twist. Billy Boy awakens on the sofa and calls out to her, but gets no response. He retrieves his underwear and goes looking for her, finding her in another room, sat atop another man, fangs out, attacking him. Billy Boy moves to intercept her but passes through her. Yes, he’s a ghost and when he moves back to the living room he finally sees his own corpse on the floor by the blood spattered sofa.

seeing his own corpse

It was this ending that made the short for me because, up to that point, I really had struggled with it. Not the low budget nature, not the amateur cinematography but the out and out misogyny. The two characters Michael and Billy Boy were simply horrible and, as for Michael, well the coda to the short is Michael meeting the same woman and trying the patter that got Billy Boy killed.

The imdb page is here.