What we bring to life in illusions

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2015)

Yes, this is Spinal Tap with vampires and will prove to be as iconic. Yes, it turns familiar vampire lore into day-to-day shenanigans between four vampire bachelors who share a flat, fun from start to finish. We're far from the lofty stage of Hammer, thank goodness.
But it could have as easily gone wrong as right; we could have easily felt the crass hand of someone trying to manufacture to specifications. Deliberately designed spoofs and oddities fall short every year. And they get it so right here in matters of placing us.
Our entry is that a documentary crew is supposedly filming what we see, following a few days in their life, but that's just a way for us to be placed in "real life", we never really bother with them, nor question the camera. Invisibly submerged.
The next gamble was the actors, they got this right too. Vampire lore provides no shortage of hijinks to milk and turn upside down. The real difficulty is fleshing characters who will experience them. Mel Brooks always goes too far the other way. We get here fearsome creatures of the night slash cunning teenagers delighting in mischief slash naive outsiders of the modern world, so we have a foot in three worlds. (in Borat we had one)
But the most vital aspect for me - and one I always note in comments - is in the background all around them, the kind of life evoked as playground. We don't have some silly plot significance that we're called to immerse ourselves in, in fact there's no plot here and just situations that come and go. A sense of unconstrained playing around with the fabrics and contexts of illusion, making it up as you go along, not bogged down by anything, now trying to score in a club, now encountering werewolves in a park.
Unfettered by narrative and significance, it leaves us free to see it for what it truly is; a few lovable buffoons playing around Wellington with a camera crew tagging along, and this is the actual film as it took shape. We get to see the reality of everyday normalcy around town as an open space to run around in. And no doubt for me this springs from a New Zealand world these people know.
So, submersion into world, characters caught in fiction about fiction, and larger view of the surge of life that gives rise to the fiction as free and easy wandering into it. This is good stuff right here folks. Having parsed this, your next stop is Trash Humpers, even more abstractly about wandering.
(There's a notion that good cinema will be somber and weigh on our souls with dilemmas of importance. I'd say no such silliness should be allowed into your life; leave that to the potatoheads in film festivals. Isn't cinema nothing more than being able to freely make use of appearances? In Taoism this is called taking each thing as its own measure. We might also venture this view. When life sorts itself out finally, when we've stopped making somber films about the persecution of people because we've stopped persecuting people, we'll be free to run around like New Zealanders making a film.)