NYC Horror ’17: The Night Watchmen

Baltimore is so accustomed to violent crime and crummy city services, it takes quite a lot to shock the beleaguered city. However, vampire clowns should do the trick. Apparently, the only thing standing between the city and a wild pack of red-haired, face-painted blood-suckers is an incompetent crew of security guards. Despite everyone’s low expectations, the thin rented-blue line might just hold up to the undead onslaught in Mitchell Altieri’s wildly funny and shamelessly gory vampire comedy, The Night Watchmen (trailer here), which screens during the 2017 New York City Horror Film Festival.

This will be a heck of a first night for the new guy. Everyone calls him Rajeev, because he is stuck with his predecessor’s old uniform and name-tag. His new colleagues think they will have plenty of time to haze him, because most nights they just sit around eating donuts, watching adult videos, and spying on the employees of their primary tenant (a weekly newspaper), especially the cute one. Unfortunately, this will be no ordinary night. It starts when they mistakenly receive a coffin that was supposed to be delivered to the city morgue. Inside lies the remains of Blimpo the Clown, who died under mysterious circumstances while touring Romania—and you know who else came from the Transylvanian region. Needless to say, Blimpo will not stay laying down for long.

Good old Blimpo chews through most of the building, killing or turning most of the paper’s employees. Plus, he also has more clown vampire reinforcements on the way. “Rajeev” and the crew, led by Ken, the supposed former Marine, find themselves in an undead siege. On the positive side, his big crush is still alive, no thanks to their dubious protection.

Night Watchmen is one of the funniest horror comedies since Ava’s Possessions and Witching & Bitching, but it is still fabulously gory. We are talking about some arterial blood sprays that resemble the Bellagio Casino’s water show. To give you a sense of the film’s tone, our intrepid watchmen soon learn vampires pass some really nasty gas after getting staked through the heart.

Yes, Altieri and the battery of co-screenwriters (Jamie Nash, with co-stars Ken Arnold and Dan DeLuca) go there, frequently. Yet, probably the foulest gags involve James Remar playing Randall, the spectacularly sleazy newspaper boss. Good taste prevents us from describing his antics, but it is safe to say you have never seen the veteran character actor so slimy and skeevy.

You have to respect how defiantly tasteless Night Watchmen gets. Yet, the crazy thing is, it still works relatively well as a straight-up vampire horror movie. Cast-members Arnold, DeLuca, Kevin Jiggets, and Kara Luiz deserve all kinds of credit for their flexibility—and a willingness to work drenched in fake blood. It is hard to believe this is the same Altieri that helmed the rather dull hickspolitation flick Holy Ghost People, but here he is, delivering us farting vampires. We want more like this one please. Very highly recommended, The Night Watchmen screens this Friday (10/27) at the Cinepolis Chelsea, as part of this year’s NYC Horror Film Festival.

NYC Horror ’17: 3

Even though I work in book publishing, I don’t know the proper etiquette for greeting fellow patients of a common shrink. That is how our unnamed man and woman initially came together, but their memories of the exact time-line differ significantly. Nonetheless, “He” is determined to give her the justice and closure she needs, by extracting a confession from her rapist. Getting the truth out of the man he calls “It” will be harder than he anticipated, but he will not fail due to a lack of effort in Lou Simon’s 3 (trailer here), which opens the 2017 New York City Horror Film Festival.

He was military trained as a medic, so is able to snatch It relatively easily and keep him alive after their interrogation sessions. Predictably, It protests his innocence, but She never wavers in her certainty. That is good enough for Him, even though He is a little unnerved by her insistence he was also a guest at that fateful party. He knows with absolute certainty they had not yet met, but he tries to dismiss it as a trick of the memory induced by extreme stress. Something about their conflicting memories nags at the back of his head, but a few amputations should help distract him.

All you who are faint of heart, why don’t you just exit this way now? 3 should not be dismissed as torture porn, but there is still very definitely torture. Yet, the stuff that will really unsettle the audience is all psychological in nature. Rather deceptively, Simon makes viewers think she has tipped her hand almost from the beginning, but she is really setting up later revelations to come.

Aniela McGuinness is terrific as She in a quiet, weirdly flaky, ominously manipulative kind of way. Don’t make a lot of assumptions about her. Likewise, Todd Bruno always conveys how badly damaged He is, even when he is committing problematic acts of brutality. Their chemistry together is both eerie and poignant, if such a combination is ever possible.

3 represents a big, big step up from Simon’s previous release, the disappointingly conventional and easily skippable All Girls Weekend. Although it is not as explicitly feminist, 3 dramatically addresses topics of sexuality and identity in ways that dovetail with the current national discussion. Recommended for hardy horror and payback thriller fans, 3 screens this Thursday (10/26) at the Cinepolis Chelsea, kicking off this year’s NYC Horror Film Festival.