• Directed by J.R. Bookwalter
• Written by Matthew Jason Walsh
• Starring
  • Matthew Jason Walsh
  • Cherie Petry
  • Shannon Doyle
  • Tom Stephan
  • Jo Norcia

While all micro-budget productions have a particular lack in common (that of money, naturally), most of them also lack plenty of other attributes: Skill behind the camera, wit or insight in their scripts, acting ability, or just plain ambition. Too many indie shot-on-video flicks, especially those in the horror genre, seem to betray that their only goal all along was to deliberately make a sow’s ear. Kingdom of the Vampire, J.R. Bookwalter’s first “camcorder movie,” isn’t going to make anyone’s Top Ten list by any criteria, but it’s still head-and-shoulders above so many of its micro-budget brethren, simply by virtue of the attempt to accomplish something of greater depth than a bottom-of-the-barrel slasher flick. From time to time, it even succeeds in that attempt. Not too bad for a budget around $3,000.

What’s worse than Oreo mouth? Vampire Oreo mouth.

The “kingdom” of the title is more irony than anything else. Our protagonist is Jeff (scriptwriter and score composer Matthew Jason Walsh, who’s had considerable work in the ensuing years writing low-budget features), a sallow-faced introvert who works the closing shift at a small-town convenience store. He’s out of high school, and his life has pretty much stopped: No friends, no hobbies, no job skills, no romance, no prospects. All he has is his elderly mother (Cherie Petry), who sits at home napping and watching TV until Jeff comes home. Oh, and occasionally she buys and eats some Girl Scout cookies. Right after she eats the Girl Scout.

Because Mom is a vampire. So was Dad, who disappeared when Jeff was little. And so, naturally, is Jeff, though he’s resistant to it; so cripplingly shy is he that he can’t even conceive of hunting and killing humans for blood. Instead, he simply cleans up his mother’s occasional bloody messes, and very occasionally takes a quick lick from one of his mother’s recent kills before guilt pulls him back. He sleeps all day; he works at night. This is not the romantic ennui of an Anne Rice-style bloodsucker; this life simply sucks.

Dude, give it up and get some leaf bags.

And they aren’t going to get better. Mom regularly regales him with tales of the ancient vampire kingdom, which was a power to be reckoned with up through the Middle Ages; alas, as far as they know, the two of them are the last of their kind, hiding out in midwestern suburbia, sneaking kills when they can (or when Mom can, anyway). And Mom’s such a domineering, demanding old hag that Jeff’s spirit is a broken little thing; she beats him and demeans him, she demands his presence whenever he’s not working, and she consistently grinds into him a sense of his own worthlessness. This movie ranks right up there with Psycho on the scale of bad mother/son relationships.

The one bright spot in his life, which he doesn’t even dare recognize, is Nina (Shannon Doyle), a young truck-stop waitress who knows Jeff peripherally and wants to know him better. It takes so much work for her to draw him even marginally out of his shell that one starts to wonder if Jeff is Nina’s intended paramour or her charity social case; on the other hand, when she contrasts him to the ass-grabbing customers she deals with all day, her attraction to someone quiet and reserved like Jeff makes a little more sense.

“You didn’t wash behind your ears!!!”

Of course, any conflict between mother and ladyfriend is BOUND to go wrong… though it takes a long time to get there. The entire middle section of the movie deals instead with the Halloween enticement of a mother and child into the vampire home, and the aftermath. I guess it’s just the rotten luck that the mother and child were the sister-in-law and nephew of Sheriff Blake (Tom Stephan), the homespun but intelligent lawman who remembers a certain other vampire which that town had put down twenty years back…

“Well, let’s just put the lie to THAT vampire myth, shall we?”

It’s a small movie, and in some ways it stays far too understated; the “romance” between Jeff and Nina never gets past a couple of walks home and a chaste kiss or two, and the final conflict between mother and lover owes more to happenstance than archetype. I appreciate that Jeff is beaten, broken and passive, which gives us scenes like him trying desperately to bring himself to stake his mother, but losing nerve with the point against her heart. But he’s such an inactive character that most of the movie is a string of things that happen either to him or around him; very little that he actually does has any effect on the flow of the story. (And I question whether a vampire who hates the life apart that he’s forced to lead would wear Night of the Living Dead T-shirts or paper his room in posters for Evil Dead 2 and Creepshow and I Spit on Your Grave.)

On the other hand, much of the movie’s success comes from attention to detail. Little things like the all-day time lapse that runs under the opening credits. Or the blank medicine cabinet in the bathroom where a mirror should be. Or Mom beating Jeff with a crucifix (THAT’S gotta sting.) The music’s good, though it suffers from over-scoring (as so many indie flicks do); the performances hovers between underacting and overacting, with the occasional scene right on the mark.

“Either way, Jeff, it’s icky!”

I guess the crowning achievement is that it’s a sincere movie, not a lavish fanboy pastiche or winking camp. J.R. Bookwalter’s always been one to take his filmmaking seriously, and that kind of attention shows.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0