Rating: B
Dir: Mark Tuit
Star: William MacDonald, Bryce McLaughlin, Courtney Kramer
a.k.a. Shelf Life
This Canadian horror film provides an interesting twist on a familiar mythos, avoiding the usual tendency in low-budget movies to equate “vampires” with “nekkid chicks”. Instead, this goes for something that mixes Cronenbergian body-horror with Lovecraftian paranoia: what if you knew the horrible truth, and no-one believed you? This centres on young couple Ben + Julie (McLaughlin + Kramer); after they hit Martin (MacDonald) with their car, he won’t let them take him to hospital, so they bring him back to their house. There, they discover he is apparently a drug-addict, an alcoholic, possesses a really big knife, and rants about being a vampire hunter who has to kill those infected by a parasite. Is he a paranoid-schizophrenic escapee from a psych ward? Or maybe – just maybe – is he telling the truth?
While the low-budget is often painfully obvious (flaky audio, and some bad CGI they should have skipped entirely), and too much of the dialogue does appear to come from Philosophy for Dummies, it does have more intelligence that you’d expect, and MacDonald is excellent. Credibility is absolutely key for a role like this, and Martin [a nod to Romero’s vampire of the same name] behaves exactly as you imagine someone like that would, convincing the viewer to go along with him, as he does Ben and Julie. It’s this that lifts the film above average, and provides a nightmarish glimpse into a world that maybe – just maybe – genuinely exists.