VOD from the Dead - Hawk And Rev: Vampire Slayers (2021)
When I think of great horror-comedies, the usual suspects come to mind. Evil Dead 2, Braindead (aka Dead Alive), and more recently Tucker & Dale vs Evil. The tight-rope thin line filmmakers must walk in order to successfully pull off a horror-comedy is quite thin, and it is even harder to make it both scary and funny. The blending of horror and comedy is a natural one as both are there to elicit extreme emotions from the audience, they just happen to be on complete opposite sides of the spectrum of emotion. The challenge always becomes how do you blend the horror with the comedy without dulling the impact of the other? From this reviewer's experience, it comes down to having one that is carrying the other. In the case of Braindead (aka Dead Alive) the plentiful and cartoonish gore serves not to mimic reality, but rather parody it with its over-the-top absurdity. The beauty of this approach is that it serves both audiences; horror-heads get their gore fix, and those who love to chuckle at the absurd have plenty to engage with. This brings us to 2021’s HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS, a horror-comedy that pits some relative nobodies against a supernatural bloodsucker. The question remains; do Hawk and Rev deliver the gore and the gags or fall short of both?
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
HAWK & REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS tells the story of Philip "HAWK" Hawkins. Hawk doesn't just dream about killing vampires, he eats, sleeps, drinks, and freakin' breaths it! After getting kicked out of the army for staking a fellow soldier with a blunt two by four, Hawk almost dies of boredom working as a night security guard in his hometown of Santa Muerte, California. Just when it looks like all Hawk's options in life have expired, filthy blood-sucking vampires appear and of course -- nobody believes him! With his back up against the wall, his sweaty Karate Kid headband on, and hordes of murderous vampires closing in, Hawk enlists the help of the one person who kind of believes him: Revson "REV" McCabe, a dimwitted, vegan-pacifist groundskeeper. Together they join forces to save the whole entire freakin' world! Well, at least their hometown anyway.
Rev and Hawk enjoy a coffee in downtown Santa Muerte
HOW IS IT?
In the opening of this review, I posit that for a great horror comedy all you really need is to get one thing right that compliments the other thing. It’s hard to review HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS without making mention of a very similar film, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. In the latter, we get two polar opposite characters to thrust into an absurd situation and the enjoyment is derived entirely off of the two titular characters and how they deal with the horrors that befall them. The anchor is the two leads, and rightfully so. It seemed to me that HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS was attempting to do the same thing, but ultimately falls short in delivering either memorable leads, humor, or horror. We are introduced to Hawk, a man so lazy he would prefer to be homeless, and Rev a man so boring he seems to only be friends with people like Hawk. While both characters are clearly trying to get you to laugh at them, neither is particularly funny. Their interactions are relatively pedestrian, and it’s hard to find them endearing when they both come off as generally useless even in the fictional world they operate in. When it comes to any buddy film (action, horror, or otherwise) the chemistry between the pair is crucial. In the case of Hawk and Rev, there is a deficit of chemistry between them, and it begs the question of why these two would ever hang around each other aside from being co-workers. Hawk is meant to be this loose, free-spirited, wise-cracking type and yet he is boring and clumsy in all the wrong ways. Rev is just as clumsy and boring and between the two of them, neither is interesting enough to make you care about them at all.
When it comes to humor in horror, I tend to be pretty forgiving. Even the silliest of things will make me smirk, so I went into HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS hoping that at least there would be a handful of jokes to chuckle at. Sadly, this was not the case. HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS is almost exclusively unfunny, with most of the jokes falling flat and the delivery is less than enthusiastic. One particular scene stands out as a prime example of both an unfunny joke delivered with the gusto of a plague doctor. Hawk is trying to motivate Rev with a series of one-liners yanked directly from famous films, to which Rev responds with a blank stare of confusion. To the viewer, it’s quite obvious this exercise is lost on Rev, but Hawk keeps slinging one-liners out there hoping one will stick and all of them ultimately falling flat on Rev and the viewer. This goes on for much longer (90+ seconds) than it should, and gets progressively less funny as it goes on. This is not to say there is a lack of effort in attempting to make the viewer laugh, it’s just the jokes are all very cliché and tired.
So that brings us to the horror element, which fares somewhat better than the leads and the humor, just not by much. For a movie about vampires and vampire slayers, there is a pretty significant lack of the former. When the vampire action does happen it is quite entertaining and hands-down the best part of the movie, it just makes up so little of the runtime that it doesn’t redeem the rest of the film. I think the issue at hand here is that the film focuses too much time on the titular leads and not enough time on the vampires to balance things out. I hate to bring up Tucker and Dale again, but it’s the easiest comparison. In that film, the characters were experiencing horror in real-time and reacting in kind. The key here is that there was horror happening and watching the characters experience it is part of the fun. In the case of HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS very little of the horror actually happens upon the characters until the end, and most of it up to that point is tended to off-screen. Not seeing these characters experience the horror impacts our ability to see how these characters respond, and their response is exactly what the audience is paying to see. Part of me wonders if this would have functioned better as a short, or a web-series where we could get a chance to understand these characters better, and most importantly see them actually fight vampires.
Some of the “vampires” that inhabit Santa Muerte
LAST RITES
HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS attempts to bring levity and humor to horror, but stumbles with providing characters that are interesting and misses the opportunity to put them in front of danger on screen rather than off. While the practical and vampire effects are good, it’s not enough to deliver that giggles or the gore that even the most mediocre of horror comedies provides.
THE GORY DETAILS
Directed By
Written By
Starring
RYAN BARTON-GRIMLEY (PHILIP HAWK HAWKINS)
ARI SCHNEIDER (REVSON MCCABE / FORNEUS)
JANA SAVAGE (THEO)
RICHARD GAYLER (JASPER)
JEFF LORCH (DEPUTY JACK SCROGGINS)
CASEY GRAF (ARNOLD)
KEVIN OCAMPO (TERRY)
Where can you watch it?
Out now on all iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, VUDU, Xbox, Fandango Now, YouTube, and Hoopla. DVD & Blu-Ray coming 3/30/21 learn more at https://www.hawkandrev.com
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