Something has definitely gone awry when the best acting in a film comes from a little kid playing a supporting vampire. In this case, it’s Poppie Jae Hughes, having the time of her life hissing and snarling, caked in makeup and rocking some evil looking prosthetic fangs. Perhaps Hughes outclasses the adults so easily because her role doesn’t require much in the way of dialogue. The rest of the cast are mostly British actors hamming it up with absurd sounding “southern” American accents that range widely across the territory below the Mason-Dixon line. Compelled to deliver way more dialogue than they can feasibly handle given their meagre performing skills, it’s not pretty.
Otherwise this is a cheap as chips but not unamusing farrago that unfolds in a wee vampire community known as Bogieville, a trailer park where visitors either become lunch or never leave. The latter seems to be the fate of unlucky couple Ham (Arifin Putra) and Jody (Eloise Lovell Anderson) who stumble on Bogieville accidentally, and are chosen by the sole non-vampiric resident, caretaker Crawford (Hanathan Hansler), to look after the community after he dies someday. While the young lovers are subjected to vast wodges of verbal exposition and clunky flashbacks from Crawford, the film occasionally cuts away to the police and a doctor (Angela Dixon) who have cottoned on to the bloodsuckers’ presence in the vicinity and are out to hunt them down.
Director Sean Cronin also plays Bogieville’s undead leader; every line of his dialogue is rendered in a subsonic, incomprehensible growl, which sort of goes for his directing style too. At least the makeup and the gore effects are competently executed, making the ensemble look like blood smeared meat-puppets on a rampage.
• Bogieville is on digital platforms from 9 June.
