Doghouse

You wait ages for a horror movie in which beery, unreconstructed blokes are set upon by sexy man-eating women, and then two come along. However, the contrast between Horne and Corden’s bloodless, laugh-free ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ and Jake West’s gory, funny ‘splatstick’ comedy could not be more stark. The magic ingredient here is Dan Schaffer’s sly script, which constantly undercuts the film’s inherently sexist premise.

In ‘LVK’, a bloke took his recently dumped ex-mate to a remote country village, where they were set upon by blood-sucking lesbians; in ‘Doghouse’, a bunch of blokes take their recently divorced pal to a remote village, where they are set upon by flesh-eating ‘Zombirds’. The crucial difference is, while ‘LVK’ celebrated its protagonists’ leery lad-mag misogyny, ‘Doghouse’ points up the Neanderthal blokes’ deep Freudian fear of being castrated by women. ‘This is the day you rediscover your inner bloke,’ says Neil (a typecast Danny Dyer) to his despondent pal Vince (Stephen Graham). But in order to become a born-again bloke, Vince and his mates must face a horde of ‘pissed-off man-hating feminist cannibals’.

West sails dangerously close to indulging the sexism he aims to mock: many of the Zombirds are dressed like strippers or porn fantasy figures. But then Schaffer throws in an ironic line like: ‘Now is not the time to stop objectifying women,’ and the dick swings the other way. And you’d have to be barking mad not to cheer when the lairy lads risk life and limb to save their gay pal Graham from the Zombirds’ nest.