Bloody Mallory (2002)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) The world of low-budget cinema can be a slapdash and uneven affair, but Bloody Mallory is an honest surprise: a film made back when live-action anime aesthetics and genre-blending fun were still new, it has the earnest glee of a hyperactive kid having just discovered blasphemy, manga heroines, transgressive literature and digital special effects. So it is that writer-director Julien Magnat seemingly has a lot of fun introducing us to an action heroine (the titular Mallory) and her merry crew of supernatural-hunting specialists—among them a drag queen, a mute girl that expresses herself by taking possession of others, and a more stereotypical man in black. When the pope is kidnapped, Mallory is joined by a kung-fu-fighting priest to discover and investigate a long-lost village controlled by a vampire. Bloody Mallory is a lot of fun, especially if you’re nostalgic for such fare as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 1990s Hong Kong action movies. It’s not a good movie by any sense—everything feels slap-dash (starting with the special effects), as if cast and crew were racing to finish the film before the budget ran out and the checks started to bounce. But quite a few viewers will love the result: it’s playing without any shyness with big genre tropes and ideas, defying viewers to cheer along as it goes for the power chords of the modern fantastic. The roughness of the production is almost another layer of fantasy on top of everything else. Plus, it’s French—so there’s another bonus right there. I wasn’t expecting much from Bloody Mallory, but it’s safe to say that it went far beyond my expectations.