Girl trouble at home. Lads go to remote country village for male bonding, with the rumour of nubiles. Discover village taken over by female undead looking for revenge. Sound familiar? It’s not The Return of Lesbian Vampire Killers, but a new movie from Jake West, the UK’s master of low-budget splatstick. Just like nylon and the internal combustion engine, sometimes the same ideas just manifest at the same time in different places.
OK, there are superficial similarities with DOGHOUSE and LVK, and to be fair on Jake he has been doing these types of movies for a while, whereas Corden and Horne were obviously trying to cash in on their flavour of the month status with a bit of wish fulfilment, but it is still hard to avoid the parallels. The difference (in the story) is there are six blokes including Danny Dire (sorry, Dyer), Noel Clarke and Stephen Graham, and the women are more like zombies than vampires, and want to male flesh not female. The film is then made up of these six blokes trying to avoid being eaten by the women, and not in a way they were originally hoping for.
Among the undead is SFL regular Emily Booth, playing a rather disturbed hairdresser, hell bent on cutting the lads down to size. Amongst all the gore, of which there is plenty (although the sight of Noel Clarke in a dress and a blonde wig is probably the most disturbing image), is a subtext of gender politics. Although it is fairly obvious, I do get the feeling that the average punter going to see this film is not going to see it for the subtext, or so that he or she can have a debate about female empowerment in the face of misogyny after the film. Written by comic book artist and scribe Dan Schaffer, it has the humour and larger than life characters that inhabit comics, and B-movies, but it isn’t always as sharp as the on-screen weapons. It is definitely a better film than LVK, but I was hoping that with the decline in popularity of the lads mags, we were starting to grow up a bit. However, failed relationships are not a sign of growing up and although most men would agree with the film’s sentiment about women, it is more to do with loss of freedom than any real negative attitude towards the fairer sex (except maybe Danny Dyer’s character, who ends up suffering the most anyway).
Not being much of a fan of the horror genre, this certainly wasn’t scary and although the gore is supposed to be over the top in a humorous way, I still don’t get the point of it. It is great to see British genre films being made, it would just be nice to see one with a bit more of the depth that Brits have a reputation for.
DOGHOUSE is in cinemas now from Vertigo films.