With Chuck (Joseph Riker) set to marry Michelle (Trina Analee), best man Sammy (Gregg Aaron Greenberg) decides to throw the ultimate bachelor party at a supposedly classy - though we see no evidence of this - bungalow in the Hamptons. Overgrown frat boys Paulie (Sean Parker) and Fish (Gelu Dan Rusu) are invited along, although the one condition of renting the house is that its caretaker, their buttoned-down, sexually ambiguous yuppie friend Gordon (Joe Testa) must come along too. By Sammy’s request, three (and I’m sorry, there is no nice way to put this) less-than-attractive strippers arrive to perform some toe-curlingly un-erotic pole-dances before bedding down with the horny halfwits. But the strippers turn out to be vampires and wreak bloody havoc with the party-boys and things get worse when Michelle heads down to the bungalow.
In days gone by indie horror meant something like Carnival of Souls (1962). Yet in the last twenty years, the majority of homemade horror efforts have been self-consciously campy and witless splatter-comedies straining for the kind of “isn’t this awful” notoriety movies like The Horror of Party Beach (1964) achieved by accident. Time and again independent filmmakers forget the golden rule: a cult movie cannot be manufactured to order. Warning signs start blaring early on when that boil on the backside of trash filmmaking, Lloyd Kaufman pops up for a cameo as Fish’s one-night-stand (!) to utter a typically classy one-liner: “My ass hasn’t felt like that since my hot tub sucked out three feet of my rectum.” If that’s the kind of finely honed wit that tickles your funny bone, you’ll be happy enough with what unfolds. Those of you with half a brain cell will recognise Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned for the joyless, vomit-inducing farrago that it is.
Writer/director/behind-the-scenes dogsbody Brian Thompson evidently believes in this project, but his dedication is the only admirable thing about this crude, moronic exercise in frat boy humour. Thompson goes in for cartoon sound effects and thought bubbles to underline the jokiness of the enterprise and crash zooms that play like feeble riffs on Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright movies. Grungy camcorder photography makes everything even more nauseous, dyeing faces inexplicable hues of yellow and green while surreal computer effects mimic the wilder excesses of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). The rubbery gore effects are unpleasant but a lot less scary than the merciless parade of hairy, middle-aged arses and freaky collagen implants.
Thompson throws in a late in the day twist unmasking the vampire activity as part of a high school revenge pact and flirts with pathos as one character almost sacrifices himself so the bride-and-groom to be can have a happy ending. But an air of misogyny hangs about the movie, from some woeful homophobic wisecracks to the moment Sammy faces a vampire stripper with bloated man-eating breasts with the line: “Sorry bitch, always been an ass man.” Performances are risible, dialogue is self-amusedly offensive, production values seem calculated to encourage viewers to gouge their own eyes out - there is literally nothing to recommend here. I cannot stress this enough: avoid this vile piece of garbage at all costs.
