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In 2004, the film ‘Sex Lives of the Potato Men’ caused an outcry: a celebration of puerile schoolboy humour, it became a rallying cry for those concerned with the plummeting standards of British film comedy. It seems unbelievable that those standards could sink any lower, but next to ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ – ‘Gavin and Stacey’ stars James Corden and Mat Horne’s movie debut – ‘Potato Men’ was a work of rapier-like wit and Switftian subtlety.
The plot is simple: dumped by his devious on-off girlfriend Judy, hapless schlub Jimmy (Horne) drags his mate Fletch (Corden) on a trip to darkest Norfolk. It’s not long before they run into trouble with the locals: an ancient clan of girl-hungry nightwalkers.
On one level, ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ is just pitiful playground humour that assumes that face-pulling, swearing and the occasional flash of boob will compensate for a complete absence of actual jokes. But on another, far more worrying level, it’s the cruel and furtive revenge fantasy of two scorned adolescent nerds against the entire female gender. The women in the film are, almost without exception, manipulative, sexually voracious, man-hating monsters, and it’s hard not to feel queasy as they are dispatched in a number of unimaginative , brutal ways.
Clearly aware of its own artistic shortcomings, ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ is aimed squarely at the ‘so bad it’s good’ camp. But with its drab sitcom aesthetic, a script that might have been jotted on the back of a beer mat and a plot that feels overstretched at 86 minutes, this is so bad, it’s just bad.