Director – Tony Randel, Screenplay – Tony Schweikle, Producers – Tony Schweikle & Peter Wooley, Photography – David M. Rakoczy, Music – Corey Wallace, Visual Effects – Jenna Penoff, Jim Ray Rodriguez & Michael Spear, Production Design – Chip Radaelli. Production Company – Has III
Cast
Morjean Aria (Blaz), Leanne Agmon (Valena), Philip Willingham (Todor), Anne Leighton (Valentina), Paul Sorvino (The Count), Lauren Lakis (Maria), Charles L. Nolan (Professor Prater), Chris DeChristopher (Tug), Chuck Ardezzone (Vinnie), Carolyn Hennesy (Aradia), Jean St James (Alice), Rawle D. Lewis (Mr Trellis), Lee Knorr (Nancy), Tatanka Means (Lance)
Plot
Some years ago, Todor, the son of the vampire Count, met the witch Valentina and married. They have two children Blaz and Velana, who have hybrid vampire-witch powers. Blaz and Valena are tired of living in seclusion in the castle. Blaz develops a crush on Maria, a would-be horror filmmaker in Florida, after seeing an online video in which she is ridiculed by her film school professor. He persuades Valena to join him and they teleport to Florida. There Blaz gets close to Maria. With his inside knowledge, he is able to persuade her to make some changes to improve her film. Valena meanwhile gets a job at a cafe and debuts as a singer at the open mic night. Meanwhile, Professor Prater, a monster hunter who has been cursed by Valentina, comes after the children, determined to take them hostage to force Valentina to reverse the spell she cast on him.
Tony Randel is best known as director of Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). That was his first film and he subsequently went on to direct a string of B-budget horror films with the likes of Children of the Night (1991), Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992), Ticks (1993), Fist of the North Star (1995), Rattled (1996) and One Good Turn (1996). Randel started out working in the New World Pictures mailroom before graduating to an editor and eventually graduated to holding a senior position in the company.
On the other hand, it has been a long way down for Tony Randel since the 1990s. The Hybrids Family was one of only three films he has directed this side of the 2000s – the others being the horror film The Double Born (2008) and the cute puppy film A Doggone Adventure (2018). The rest of the time he appears to have paid the bills by working as an editor for B-budget hack Jim Wynorski.
Vampire-witch hybrid kids Valena (Leanne Agmon) and Blaz (Morjean Aria)
The Hybrids Family feels like the sort of thing that gets slung together as a Halloween special – something with a vaguely monster-related theme that nobody is taking seriously and made with tv movie level resources (although The Hybrids Family did get a dvd release). The Hybrids Family was made around the same time as Hotel Transylvania (2012) and sequels – it is in effect a live-action knockoff of Hotel Transylvania with a very similar plot that features a parody of a Transylvanian family where the children want to head off and do their own thing while the traditional monster parents struggle to integrate with the modern world.
One of the other comparisons you could make is to What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and the subsequent tv series What We Do in the Shadows (2019- ). Both incarnations are hilarious; on the other hand, The Hybrids Family is what you could get if these were made with just one twist of the dial in the wrong direction. That is to say, an excruciating mock monster family comedy with everyone over-acting in atrocious East European accents and taking none of the show seriously, along with assorted monstery stuff presented in a cutsie self-referential way. That and assorted teen melodramas – about Morjean Aria developing a crush on film director Lauren Lakis and essentially taking over her movie, or Leanne Agmon getting a job at a cafe and revealing singing talent. A 76 year old Paul Sorvino turns up as The Count, reigniting his romance with the witch. The results are cheap and painful.
