Bad Meaning Good case study #12: 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez'

Tuesday, January 19 2010

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

Bad Meaning Good case study #12:
'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' (dir. John Bacchus)

Summary:
'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' is an utterly joyless and astonishingly bad, direct-to-DVD feature released in 2006. It deals with two separate and centuries-old, supernatural gangs: the "Bloodz", a mobilized, high-society outfit of vampires and the "Wolvez", a bottom-feeding, fringe-society-dwelling outfit of werewolves. Taking more than a few pages out of 'The Wire' handbook, the movie seems to be trying to make some kind of statement about societal decay or class warfare or something like that... It's all incredibly unclear because there really is not one redeemable characteristic in this mess and at the end of the day, between the actors, production folks, and viewers alike (or really, ANYONE who even THINKS about 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' in any capacity at all), everybody is worse off for the experience.

The "action" is sparse and the pacing beyond labored. Most scenes were filmed in what appear to be empty, or at least minimally decorated apartments and retail spaces which paint a color spectrum of dull flesh tones, bland off-whites and light grays as a backdrop for the film's feverishly boring dialog and vaguely expository sequences. The film has all the visual flair of a Holiday Inn conference room.

Evidently, the battle between the two New York gangs has been waged over centuries of bloodshed and in an attempt to catalyze the growing, organizational strength of the Bloodz' various business enterprises, Bloodz leader Asiman opts to launch a ceasefire in a sort of bargain bin variation on the way Stringer Bell played diplomatic chess in 'The Wire'. What follows is a whole lot of back-stabbing from both sides of the ball game and a soap opera season's worth of trite melodrama, none of which offers anything warranting comment or revision. The script is full of a seemingly endless barrage of generic street-isms (I think the expression "Time is money." is uttered, without a hint of irony, no fewer than 6 or 7 times in the film) and the whole experience is so completely uninspired and lame that its admittedly slim 84 minute run-time more often than not felt torturous and downright sadistic.

Perhaps the film's worst offense though (in a very long list of them) is that no one involved seemed to be having any Goddamn fun. I mean, for fuck's sake people, you're making an extremely low-budget, straight-to-DVD movie about vampire and werewolf street gangs... Could we all just lighten up a little bit and not take this thing so seriously? Additionally, and as far as I'm concerned, it should be no mystery to anyone that if you as a director are unable to make even the most low-rent, girl-on-girl vampire action in ANY WAY hot or even remotely fun to watch, then that should be a sign that your film is a consummate, infernal failure from cinematic hell.

How 'Bad Meaning Good' was it?:
Ugh. Not at all. Skip it people, I beg you. This one is not worth your time.

Oddly enough, there is one brief moment in the film that treads delicately close to the tipping point of becoming a fantastic comedic premise. It was a moment that required just the slightest amount of cool-headed, directorial and script-writing whimsy in order to blossom into something legitimately funny... And then with all the gentle and poised restraint required to incinerate an ant farm with a nuclear warhead, the idea was promptly dispatched, falling eons short of its potential evolution.

Said idea involved Loup Garou, the head of the Wolvez, employing an etiquette coach to help him overcome his brash, unrefined werewolf ways in order to create the facade of relative sophistication required to step up to bat against the vampires on a business level. What happens though is that the etiquette coach commits the werewolf-insensitive social faux pas of showing up to the werewolf lair with REAL silverware with which he intends to teach Loup Garou the basics of dining civility (an admittedly funny idea in its own right). Well, needless to say, the werewolves in the building do not take kindly to such a mistake and it proves to be a nearly instantaneously fatal one, suffocating the possibility of a potentially hilarious montage sequence of werewolf dining and courtesy coaching and leaving the film's much needed comic relief dead in the water.

Now... Forgive me if I'm allowing my undoubtedly coarse and juvenile sense of humor get the better of me here but I honestly thought this idea had comedic legs to stand on and I still do. For comparison's sake, and just to demonstrate my point, imagine it for a second in the hands of the 'Mr. Show' folks (which is of course an incredibly lopsided comedic comparison) and then think about what they could have done with such an idea. Even if you were to take your imagined 'Mr. Show' version of that bit and imagine it further as a half-as-funny version of itself, you'd still probably have something both relatively amusing and infinitely funnier than what actually happens in 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez'... And that's what kind of film we're dealing with here folks; a film that gets it all wrong so comprehensively that the best compliment I can pay it is to offer one example of potential humor that failed catastrophically.

I'd like to give it a 0.0/10 because ultimately there was nothing I liked about it (and by the way, next time you see me you should thank me for not providing details about the part where a werewolf takes a shit on a newspaper) but I have this vague, internal feeling that somewhere out there exists some greater, more life-sucking time-waster than 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' and for that reason alone I'll give it an extremely generous 0.4.

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
0.4/10

The best I could do (or perhaps worst) in youtube footage of the film:

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies

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