Brides of Sodom – review

Director: Creep Creepersin

Release date: 2013

Contains spoilers

It was the director’s name that gave me pause to thought. It sounded a little too much like another (really bad) director’s name. Later I would discover that Creep Creepersin is head honcho of the horror-punk/goth combo Creepersin.

However, a vampire film is a vampire film and, you know what, it’s nice when you are pleasantly surprised. Not that this is perfect. Indeed it is far from perfect in many respects. But it is one that had real heart and jumps up high onto the guilty pleasure list. It also stars a couple of familiar faces from gay interest vampire series the Lair.

witches

After some remarkably effective shots during the opening credits we get a couple of witches waving their arms above a cauldron, talking about the end of *his* clan by making someone fall in love with a human. We then get a quick run through of the world in which we have landed, We see a broken city and hear about the great war. A war to end all wars. In short a nuclear war and, in the sun blotted depths of nuclear winter, the rising of the vampires to take control.

post nuclear devastation

Out on the streets and humans look around warily, armed with machettes. Flashes of movements is responded to with no fight back, just arms severed and blood spilling (it is viscerally gory in places, which is nice) Clearly the humans are no match for the vampires. Later we discover that this is artificial. The humans are in, what could be best described as, free range cages, the vampires’ hunting class little more than collection agents. We see a group of humans chained and led away. This was one of the problems. The entire human aspect seems important, especially when we discover there are only three left in that area and they decide to fight back, but it really isn’t in the grand scheme. Perhaps the film had a little too much ambition in places.

feed

The hunter, Eros (David Taylor), presents the catch to vampire Lord Dyonisus (Dylan Vox, The Lair, Vampire Boys & Scab) – incorrect spelling of Dionysus as per IMDb – who has vampire Persephone (Rachel Zeskind) dance before he lets the court chow down on the humans. During the dance one human, Samuel (Domiziano Arcangeli), slips his bonds but does not run away. We later hear, in a scene with the remaining humans, that he had longed to be taken by the vampires and turned.

Eros and a satroi

Apparently Eros is fascinated by him and, having checked him over, Dyonisus decides that he can be kept alive for Eros on the condition that Eros does not make him any kind of undead – in the film we see gay-scene fetish models with hoods over their heads who are called satrois and are, apparently, undead sex slaves. Samuel is sent to the dungeon and Eros has a date with Persephone. Given the fact that David Taylor is named on the DVD box as a gay porn star and there are several actors from the Lair, this was a somewhat surprising direction for the film as I assumed it would be purely gay interest. Later we discover that Persephone is Eros’ sister.

Beverly Lynne as the dungeon mistress

Whilst Eros is busy, Dyonisus visits Samuel and looks him over, letting us know that he has kept him alive as he perceives the human to be the first sign of weakness that Eros has ever shown. It is worth mentioning a cameo here by Beverly Lynne (also the Lair, Twilight Vamps, Kiss Me if you Dare, Tomb of the Werewolf and Haunting Desires) as a dungeon mistress. Anyway, Eros comes to Samuel for some sex, during which the mysterious Dominic (Peter Stickles, also the Lair) whispers in Persphone’s ear, letting her know what her brother is up to. The Dominic character is never explained but is a manipulator of the pieces on a larger board.

bloody face

After Dyonisus rapes Samuel, Eros decides that he and the human should run away – and also turns Samuel. Of course this betrayal does not please Dyonisus. We won’t go any further and we haven’t even got into the other, witch related, plot. But you know, for a piece on a budget this did really well. The acting might have been a little overtly melodramatic, soap like even, but it fit the mood of the film and managed to resist falling into too much campness. The story was in turns simple and overly complex in that it tried to stretch a little too far. If that sentence seems contradictory I can’t help it, the film did seem like that. The pacing was a little off in places but the relationship of Eros and Samuel was filmed in a way that seemed genuinely romantic.

Dylan Vox as Dyonisus

I wasn’t sure why Dyonisus' face was permanently in a Buffy-vampire-face mode, but there you go. I did wonder as to how the humans seemed to have tattoos when they were living free range, as it were, in a broken city block. This was probably not pre-war ink as Samuel doesn’t know what a bar is and so some time must have passed since the war. The timescales, thus, also seemed a little strained (would a nuclear winter last so very long?) Location wise the film knew its limitations and worked within them – which was positive.

I liked it. Most will probably disagree with me, but I did. A guilty pleasure that was easily better than the sum of its parts. 5.5 out of 10. The imdb page is here.