With Halloween season just beginning, Netflix is stepping up their Netflix and Chills season of horror. This already boasts some awesome titles, with The Binding, The Paramedic, The Babysitter: Killer Queen and Alive having landed in September and many more to follow in October. One of the coolest, though, has got to be new original movie Vampires Vs The Bronx, a horror-comedy with a smart central metaphor.
As you might guess from the title, the film is set in New York’s Bronx where our heroes aren’t just battling immortal fanged creeps, but more insidious menace: gentrification. As the trailer shows, the rich, white and snobby Eurotrash vampires are buying up property and forcing the longtime residents out. So, the bad guys are not simply sucking the literal blood out of the people, but draining away the lifeblood of the neighbourhood itself.
The movie is directed by Saturday Night Live alumnus Oz Rodriguez, who co-wrote the screenplay with UglyDolls’ Blaise Hemingway. Jaden Michael plays hero Miguel, with Gregory Diaz IV and Gerald W. Jones filling out the main group. The pic also features Sarah Gadon, Method Man, Coco Jones and Chris Redd and, in an interesting twist, A-lister Zoe Saldana is buried right down at the bottom of the cast list in an unknown part (perhaps a vampire on the side of the heroes?).
Comparisons have already been drawn to similar ‘local kids vs. monsters’ stories like Attack the Block, The Lost Boys and Monster Squad. And, as a fan of all those movies, I’m looking forward to seeing whether this provides the same thrills. Even if the social commentary falls flat, let’s hope we get a nice dose of supernatural guts and gore as this gang shows some coffin-dwelling undead assholes that you don’t mess with the Bronx.
Vampires Vs The Bronx hits Netflix on October 2nd.