Anette Crosbie

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) The surest way to make a film reviewer mad is not necessarily to show them a bad movie – it’s to ask them to talk about a film that had many reasons to be good (or fun, or at least entertaining) yet couldn’t manage much more than a handful of good moments. There’s something promising in the situation set up early in Eat Locals – a gathering of powerful vampires in an isolated country house, surrounded by a team of vampire hunters. The point of the meeting is to carve up England’s population for vampire use (they use quotas), and some of the vampire hunters have mercenary motives. This should be a solid foundation for a film, but actor-turned director Jason Flemyng doesn’t have much to work with – the script fails to take advantage of what it has at its disposal, and turns out something surprisingly boring. Even though it’s not taking itself seriously, Eat Locals is considerably less funny than it could have been, and the production’s limited budget clearly stops it from relying on action sequences or special-effects set-pieces that could have mitigated the dullness of the script. Sure, it’s rather fun to see Anette Crosbie as an elderly vampire mowing down attackers with a machine gun… but when that’s the highlight of the film, that more or less confirms my point. Eat Locals is nowhere near as witty as its title – it may appeal to vampire fans having seen nearly everything else, but there are much better horror comedies out there that deserve attention before this one.