The Night Watchmen

"The Night Watchmen," named Best Horror Feature at the 2017 International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, is the movie equivalent of tasty junk food – the cinematic counterpart to fried Twinkie or an Oreo churro. (The latter available at the theater concession stand.) It's a ridiculous tale of vampire clowns terrorizing a Baltimore newspaper office. And, apparently, legendary Baltimore filmmaker John Waters had nothing to do with it.

The co-creators, Ken Arnold and Dan DeLuca, play two of the security guards. Arnold's Ken is the nominal leader, while DeLuca's Luca is the mysterious, scary one. The team of watchmen is rounded out by Kevin Jiggetts, playing Ken's sidekick Jiggetts, a pot-loving African-American Jew, and Max Gray Wilbur as a washed-up rock musician in his first night on the job.

Following their mysterious deaths while performing in Romania, Baltimore icon Blimpo the Clown and his troupe are shipped home for medical testing. After a delivery mix-up leaves Blimpo's coffin at the newspaper building instead of the medical facility down the block, pervy newspaper owner Randall (James Remar, the only cast member that a viewer is likely to recognize) forces is it open, releasing Vampire Blimpo.

The four inept night watchmen and hot-chick newspaper editor Karen (Kara Luiz) must band together like sad-sack Guardians of the Galaxy to fight off the vampire clowns and the newly undead newspaper employees they have created.

During the Q&A after a screening at the Phoenix Film Festival, Arnold said he and DeLuca dreamed up the project to amuse themselves between jobs and that their overriding priority was to make people laugh. That they don't take themselves or their movie too seriously is obvious from the look of the film, the cheesy dialogue and the silly subplots.

Along the way, however, The Night Watchmen lampoons the conventions of the horror, vampire and zombie genres. The movie gushes bodily fluids, but in a manner that is silly, not scary, goofy, not gory. At one point, after encountering some really disgusting vampire clowns, Karen grumbles that she watched every season of HBO's "True Blood" and it was nothing like this.

It's worth noting that, for fans of horror, vampire and zombie movies, The Night Watchmen is full of Easter Eggs that pay homage to previous films in those genres. Besides amusing themselves, the writers clearly are offering middlebrow comedy for a highbrow audience. They hit their mark.

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Stu Robinson does writing, editing, media relations and social media through his business, Phoenix-based Lightbulb Communications.

This movie combines zombie and vampire elements with a spooky clown. Sounds like a popcorn flick? Yeah it kinda is, it leaves the impression as if it could be a pilot for a new series. This movie doesn't take itself seriously and you can feel that all the way because with dialogues as cheesy as these, and vampires reacting in funny comic styled ways you can't expect more. It's entertaining to a certain degree and I'm glad it wasn't any longer, 80 minutes were just about right. The beginning seemed a bit more promising than the movie finally was but, who could have expected something different. The cameraman did a good job and the music was fitting, colorgrading was nicer than expected. Good movie to watch with some friends and laugh here or there.

The comedy-horror sub-genre is quite a hard one to execute successfully, usually the comedy lessens the horror or vice-versa and the film winds up being neither one thing nor the other. The Night Watchmen is another in this line of movies but it is definitely one which succeeds better than most. Set in an office building in Baltimore, a coffin containing the body of a famous clown who died while on tour in Romania is wrongly left on the premises. Before long, the corpse is revealed as a powerful vampire and soon many people fall victim to both him and his minions. Its left to the inept security guards to save the day.

There's no question that this one works much better as a comedy than as a horror. Which kind of explains why it begins very strongly but fades a bit in the second half. The reason being that, as is often the way in these types of movies, the action ramps up in the latter half with more emphasis on the horror elements. But it was the character interactions that impressed me most, with a lot of good comic acting from the cast and a lot of funny dialogue. Much of the humour is genuinely laugh-out-loud, even if they did overplay the fart joke somewhat! The cast work very well together and understand the comic material very well, there are no name actors here except for James Remar of Warriors (1979) fame, who plays a slightly sleazy office worker. From the horror side of the fence this one has zombie-like vampires and an evil clown, so it's a bit of a selection box. It does ultimately boil down to a group of people trapped in a building fighting back against hordes of monsters which isn't the most interesting or original set-up, however, I would say that this one is still well worth catching on account of its comic interplay and sense of mischief.

I did not have high hopes for this but it turned out to be a lot of fun don't get me wrong this is cheap pulp but the producers did a good job with their limited funds. the acting was not too bad and over all there was a fun vibe about the movie but please do not expect anything special ok to watch with a few beers and no expectations.

Nice little vampire horror comedy - a clown vampire got a really big appetite and a bunch of night watchmen are trying to stop him on his killing spree. Not outstanding but still got some nice effects and funny moments, with some lengths in the end.