Let the Wrong One In – review

Director: Conor McMahon

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

Horror comedies are an odd thing, they might work but often do not and that can just be around sense of humour differences. My trepidation around this film was lowered because of director Conor McMahon’s previous horror comedy, Stitches, which I particularly enjoyed. McMahon was also the director of the (not comedic) vampire film From the Dark, which proved itself a fine inclusion in the vampire canon.

Let me tell you right now that I was not disappointed, this was a cracking little flick and it managed to endear itself to me right from the beginning.

the hens

The opening shot is a castle, lit up in the night. The film title, the soundtrack, the font when we are told it is Transylvania and the horse-drawn hearse that passes all screamed Hammer and managed to make me a tad nostalgic. Then it comes crashing into reality as a group of Irish hens come barrelling through the scene, one of the hens holding an inflatable phallus. Sheila (Mary Murray, Penny Dreadful) is getting hitched and the Dublin girls are in full flow.

fangs

They are being chased by a bouncer (Manuel Pombo) for failing to pay for their drinks and they split up. He corners Sheila, who makes a rather forward (last night of freedom) suggestion that causes him to back off. Another guy comes out of the shadows, reaching for her and then he bites her (the bite incredibly visceral). We cut to Dublin and see Matt (Karl Rice) on the way home with a tray of chips in garlic mayonnaise. On his walk home we get some playful moments with our expectations; a shadowy figure in an underpass soon becomes a drunk passer-by, and we get a shadow moment as he gets home that is innocent but reminiscent of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.

Deco in the morning

Cut to the morning and Matt is having to cook breakfast for his Ma (Hilda Fay), meanwhile his brother, Deco (Eoin Duffy), wakes up outdoors, looking worse for wear with bite marks on his neck. As things proceed, we discover that Deco had a drug problem and has been kicked out of the house by Ma but, as he walks down the road towards his brother’s home, he tries to avoid sunlight as it begins to make him fry and the soundtrack plays the classic Violent Femmes' track Blister in the Sun. We are less than five minutes into the film and I’m already sold (and wondering why I can’t recall anyone using the Femmes' track in connection to a vampire movie before). The film just hits the right notes all the way through – for instance, when Deco and Matt discuss his condition there is no prevarication, Matt sees his reaction to sunlight, bite marks and dislike of the garlic mayonnaise on Matt's leftover chips and says vampire.

Henry - vampire killer

The basic story is Sheila was going to get married to taxi-driving train enthusiast Henry (Anthony Head, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but on being turned into a vampire she turned the hens and they are back in Dublin preying on the population (we get a flashback to her attack on Deco), whilst Henry uses his taxi driver network to track them down. The vampires are setting up a new nightclub and intend to build an army to take over Dublin. Matt wants to help Deco but there is no turning back, and eventually the events of the day force them to the opening of the nightclub.

staked

The majority of the gags are based on and around the brothers and range from body humour to family observation. The former is seen, for instance, when Deco strains to turn into a bat and farts, but the body humour gags are not overused and so work. Vampires can, it turns out, turn into bats in this, they must be staked through the heart or burned/put in direct sunlight to kill (there is a partial beheading that does not work). We see a staked vampire dragged into the sunlight and start to smoke, quickly reduced to a skeleton. The vampires have no reflection and to turn someone the vampire must bite and not drain the victim; this happens with a rabbit and sets up a gag for a bat-winged rabbit later (the inclusion thereof understated). Vampires love AB -ve blood.

Deco and Matt

It is primarily Karl Rice and Eoin Duffy carrying the film but they are ably supported by the rest of the cast, especially Anthony Head. It was after the film that I realised that the female characters were pretty uniformly drawn as negative (if not actually villains), with Ma, for instance, drawn as less than a role model. That said the men aren’t drawn much better, with only Matt getting any sort of pass, and there is an element that Sheila’s bloody rampage is partly Henry’s fault (for thinking more about trains than her). However, this was after-film musing and the humour worked, for me, through the film and the characters were a big part of that. There is no shying from blood, and there is a lot on screen at times. I’m glad we have this one in the genre. 8 out of 10, remembering that the subjective nature of comedy means this one genuinely tickled me, your reaction may differ.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

The Tale of the Vampire Rabbit – review

Poet: Michael Quinlyn-Nixon

Illustrations: Michael Quinlyn-Nixon

First Published:2020

The Blurb: A totally fictional and completely unhistorical account of the origins of Newcastle’s mysterious grotesque, known as the Vampire Rabbit. Written as an original poem and fully illustrated by the author, Michael Quinlyn-Nixon, the story of the quirky Vampire Rabbit is brought ‘alive’ in the year of 1899, with the story concluding in the present day. Set in Victorian Tyne and Wear, the story illustrates the Vampire Rabbit’s unquenchable bloodlust and the consequences of its villainous actions.

Suitable for older children (with parental guidance), the book can be equally enjoyed by adults who enjoy dark poems with a drop of humour.

The review: This is quite a difficult one to review, in terms of the fact that it is essentially a short poem but expanded over a 30-page book with illustrations. My thanks to Everlost for bringing it to my attention and to Michael Quinlyn-Nixon for providing a copy for review.

the actual grotesque

The poem tells the story of a vampire rabbit and whilst such a thing is not unique – I am sure all reading this have heard of Bunnicula, of course – this is based on a grotesque adorning Cathedral Buildings in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne that is a fanged rabbit and over 100-years old. Unlike Bunnicula, this rabbit likes a drop of the red stuff too and when I say drop, well it might be a bit more than a drop. The tale introduces us to this cotton-tailed fiend as it starts its career in late 19th Century Newcastle, how it came to be a grotesque and cautions us in the here and now.

The poem itself is designed as a humorous piece, composed of stanzas built through a simple rhyming couplet format but the joy of the volume is actually within the illustrations that adorn the pages – though I actually rather liked some ‘bonus’ stanzas, not part of the poem proper they were almost like little murder ballads at the end of the volume. Perhaps more aimed towards a younger market this could well be that Christmas stocking filler for the older vampire fan. And this is how I’m scoring the volume, based around it being a unique little gift that pleases through its art. 7.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Short film: Bunnicula: the Vampire Rabbit

Director: Charles A. Nichols

First aired: 1982

The animation of Bunnicula was part of the ABC Weekend Specials and was based on the children book series that began with Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery, written by Deborah and James Howe. The cartoon diverged radically from the book both in story and in the fact that it gave Bunnicula overtly vampiric powers, which the rabbit did not possess in the book.

For this article I watched the video rip that was on YouTube and the video quality was not the best, so apologies for the screenshots in advance. However it was good enough to view.

our narrator, Harold

The story is narrated by Harold (Jack Carter) the family dog who lives with The Munroes: mom (Janet Waldo), dad (Alan Young) and two kids, as well as the well-read cat Chester (Howard Morris) . Mr Munroe is a scientist at the World Co Food Processing Plant. The plant has been suffering from accidents and as the cartoon begins there is another, with a metal container nearly crushing Munroe and his boss (Alan Dinehart); the rope it was held by has been chewed through. Spooked out locals blame ghosts, one swears he spotted a wolf in the factory. The boss closes the factory down – which is the town’s main source of employment.

Bunny in a box

The family go to pick Mr Munroe up from his final day at the factory. Whilst there, the boys find a shoebox containing a rabbit (sleeping on a bed of earth) and a note – which is unreadable, due to it being in Romanian, except for the name Bunnicula (in the book the rabbit is named by the family as they found it in a cinema when they went to watch a Dracula film). One of the boys comments on Bunnicula sounding like Dracula. Harold, being part Russian Wolfhound (!), can read the note. It says “take good care of my baby”.

drained veg

Anyway, as things progress we see a pattern of vegetables turning white, having been drained of juice. Chester becomes convinced that the rabbit is a vampire. He is sleeping on earth, that sleep is through the day (Harold reminds him that they both sleep most of the day too) and the vegetables have a single puncture like a rabbit’s buckteeth (Harold points out they both have fangs and we should note that, despite the dialogue, the bunny is actually drawn with fangs when in vamp mode and not buckteeth).

using telekinesis

Eventually the neighbours decide that their drained vegetables are down to a vampire rabbit and head to the Munroe’s house as a mob. The dog and cat run with the rabbit to save it (in the books the cat repeatedly tries to kill the rabbit), unfortunately ending up at the plant. The source of the accident reveals itself to actually be wolves breaking in through a pipeline in the forest and looking for food. Bunnicula (out of sight of the cat and dog) reveals it has the ability to sprout batwings, have glowing red eyes and use telekinesis as it saves the cat and dog. That mystery solved, the Munroes then realise that the kids had not been feeding the rabbit and the drained vegetables were due to hunger, Bunnicula sucking the juice as it is a baby, which is accepted as a reasonable explanation and deposits us at the end of our journey.

The animation was passable, the story was just plain silly (and it feels strange to complain about that when the premise was a vampire rabbit) and, if we take the premise as read, the exposition around it was lazy and ultimately, as I say, silly. That said, it did have a degree of charm.

The imdb page is here.