Director: Jemaine Clement
First aired: 2018
Contains spoilers
With the TV series of
What we do in the Shadows airing, the first season on Wellington Paranormal was made available for free stream on the internet. The original film
What we Do in the Shadows was based in New Zealand (rather that the TV shows Staten Island location) and featured a couple of cops part way through, Officers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O'Leary), and this is a spin-off centred on the two.
Played with deadpan, this is done as though there is a film crew on ride along (ala shows like Cops) and was thus a tad reminiscent of shows such as
Death Valley - though in this the paranormal menace was a hidden one and it is certainly less Police Squad in delivery.
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| Minogue and O'Leary |
The essence is that the precinct’s Sergeant Maaka (Maaka Pohatu) is aware of paranormal activity in the Wellington area and has the two coppers investigate. Through this they come across aliens, ghosts, demons, werewolves, zombies and, in this episode, vampires. The episode begins with the investigation of a ghost that turns out to be a plastic bag (though Maaka suspects it to be a Yōkai). The two cops are then sent to investigate the theft of blood bags from the hospital. O’Leary's suspicions are mundane but Minogue thinks vampires. In the car park they find a dropped blood bag (though Minogue manages to burst it by trying to put it in a smaller evidence bag).
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| ritual |
They go into the hospital and interview the worker in the blood bank, Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) – who was one of the
What we do in the Shadows characters. He, of course, denies the theft and (after a couple of failed attempts) manages to glamour the two cops into believing his innocence. Maaka is convinced they have been glamoured and sends them to interview him again. They get side tracked a few times, the first when they investigate a report of chanting and find a naked man (Tom Clarke) tied and hooded figures chanting, led by Nick – he glamours the officers again and they leave them to it.
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| the creepy clowns cometh |
The next distraction is a bunch of sinister clowns (for no reason but surreal creepiness) and then a call to sightings of ghosts in the cemetery (which turns out to be goths – Minogue can’t read his own writing). However, in the cemetery they see Nick again, with the bags of blood, dealing with a Nosferatu looking vampire (Fergus Aitken) – he has also given out leaflets to the Goths for Nick’s Vampire Party. Will he glamour the officers again? I won’t answer that but will say that there are some nice lore moments such as Nick floating and also a vampire transformed into a bat carrying a blood bag.
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| cemetery vampire |
The series is amusing and relies heavily on the deadpan performances of Minogue and O’Leary. There is a nice moment where Nick brings a racial aspect into his police interactions. The episodes are short and so don’t overstay their welcome but it isn’t the most hysterical comedy I’ve ever watched – not to decry it, it works very well but its parent vehicle was much funnier.
6 out of 10.
The episode's imdb page is
here.
On Region 4 DVD @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
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