As sub-genres go, the vampire movie parody has had a remarkably low strike rate, perhaps because the films in the firing line have an inbuilt sense of camp that either resists irony or absorbs it. But over the mirthless corpses of Lesbian Vampire Killers, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Vampires Suck, a genuinely funny attempt has risen: What We Do in the Shadows (Metrodome, 15), a cheap, chipper exercise in bloodsucker banter from New Zealand that also finds improbable life in the creatively dormant mockumentary format.
Such are the sharply silly comic skills of Flight of the Conchords goofball Jemaine Clement, who co-wrote and directed the film with Taika Waititi; the pair also play half of the film’s mismatched quartet of vampires, sharing digs in defiantly un-moody suburban Wellington. One’s geeky, one’s macho, one’s an 8,000-year-old demon who communicates only in primal shrieks. It’s more a premise for a sitcom than a movie, but Waititi and Clement find remarkable mileage in the core joke of undead domesticity. Then again, it’s actually a rival pack of morally upstanding werewolves – “Werewolves, not swearwolves!” – who almost walk off with the film.
Would that Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (Fox, PG) could find similar comic life in raising the dead, but the third outing in this family franchise is very tired indeed, with Ben Stiller looking even more tetchy and distracted than usual as a nightwatchman turned museum conjuror, and the novelty of historical resurrection hardly revitalised by a hop across the Atlantic to London’s hitherto inanimate exhibits. Thank goodness for Rebel Wilson’s offbeat, seemingly off-script turn as a wonky security guard; if not for her, there might be more relic-related chuckles in the cheerfully stupid Egyptology-horror throwaway The Pyramid (Fox, 15), in which every tomb’s secret is of a gory, booby-trapped variety. (Also out this week, and unseen: the straight-to-DVD titles Curse of the Sphinx and Frankenstein vs the Mummy. Are you picking up a theme?)
Jude Law, meanwhile, is on the hunt for buried treasure in Black Sea (Universal, 15), a robustly crafted, committedly performed submarine thriller that, for all its old-fashioned merits, still demonstrates the problem with the submarine thriller as a form: its physical restrictions are more conducive to murk than mayhem. Dennis Kelly’s script attempts to combine gung-ho yarn-spinning – Lost Nazi gold! Shifty-eyed Russians! Captains courageous! – with character-driven chamber drama, but wants for energy and intensity respectively. Law’s a good, firm lead, but this isn’t the tightest ship director Kevin Macdonald has run.
Of this week’s mixed bag of arthouse selections, Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Maidan (Dogwoof, E) is the most austere offering, but far the most unshakably vivid. Capturing the wave of Euromaidan demonstrations in Kiev’s Independence Square last year, largely using sustained master shots that invite progressively closer scrutiny, it’s inspired, minimalist film-making and an invaluable historical resource in the making. Neither can be said of Oscar-nominated Norwegian seafaring biopic Kon-Tiki (Soda, 15), about explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Pacific odyssey by raft, but it’s colourful, classical entertainment.
There’s muscular formal conviction on display in a pair of European gay releases: handsomely charcoal-hued Hungarian love story Land of Storms (TLA, 18) is the sturdier and more deeply felt of the two, but the unclassifiable German oddity The Samurai (Peccadillo, 15), which blends horror, erotica, Asian action influences and Bavarian literary drama to compellingly reckless effect, has more cult potential. (I might have rethought the tagline: “The deadliest thing to emerge from Germany since 1945” perhaps isn’t the best way to sell new queer cinema.)
On the British front, two minor DVD releases – goopily mournful character study Still Life (Artificial Eye, 12) and spiritualism-inflected cockney gangster saga Snow in Paradise (Curzon, 18) – have less to offer than Harry Macqueen’s debut feature Hinterland, a whispery miniature now available on iTunes. A spare exercise in melancholy, following two drifting childhood friends as they navigate their ambiguous relationship and the coast of Cornwall in tandem, it has sure, strong reserves of feeling to compensate for its slightly shaggy shaping. Macqueen’s patient observation and brisk, airy visual style suggest some affinity with the work of Andrew Haigh and Joanna Hogg. This is an imperfectly auspicious arrival.
