Super Hot (2021) poster

Super Hot (2021)

Rating:


USA. 2021.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Taylor King, Producers – Dani Jean & Sean King. Production Company – New Zealand Son Films.

Cast

Kandace Kale (Jackie Polidori), Elijah Cooke (Sam), Lissa Carandang-Sweeney (Melissa Stoker), Nobuaki Shimamoto (Warren Van Helsing), Sam Watkins (Brad), Coleson Berlin (Kevin Campbell), Sierra Corcoran (Carmen), Alexa Tkatch (Layla), Cait Medearis (Zoe), Caroline James Kennedy (Kayla), Celeste Marcone (Helen), Nick Gilland (Luca), David Fields (Eddie)


Plot

Jackie Polidori has an unrequited crush on her neighbour Carmen. Upon learning that Carmen is moving out, Jackie’s friends urge her to go over and say something but when she does Carmen’s boyfriend Brad is there. Carmen explains that she is moving into a house with four other girls who are models. Later Jackie and her friend Sam find the house where Carmen is moving in and realise that she has split up with Brad. Jackie returns to the pizza delivery job she had just quit and begs to do a delivery to the house as a way of ‘coincidentally’ talking to Carmen again. As she invited in by the other girls, Jackie’s friend Sam discovers a body in the trash can outside and realises that the other girls are vampires. He contrives to extract Jackie. As they debate about what to do, they encounter the Japanese vampire hunter Warren Van Helsing. Warren gathers them as part of a plan to invade the house to stop the vampire girls before they conduct a sacrifice of Carmen at midnight.


Super Hot was a film from father Sean King and son Taylor. Between them they operate New Zealand Son Films (despte which both were born and grew up in the USA). Together they have made a bunch of films, primarily comedies, which have all been released to Amazon Prime. Sean has directed Highways (1992), Coffee with Anna (2017), My Alien Girlfriend (2019), It’s Not You, It’s Me (2021), The Wedding Trip (2021) and Moving Valentine (2022). Both Sean and Taylor had co-directed the horror film Devil’s Island (2021). Super Hot marks Taylor’s solo directorial debut and he subsequently went on to make the horror film Morbid (2022).

There have been assorted vampire comedies ever since The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). These include the likes of Love at First Bite (1979), Once Bitten (1985), Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009), What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and a host of others – see Vampire Films for a more detailed overview. We have even gotten to the point of there now being a body of comedies about Vampire Hunters – see the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Hawk and Rex: Vampire Slayers (2020) and Day Shift (2022).

Super Hot is a not uninteresting film. But what almost entirely kills it is an excessive degree of Genre Homage. It is not just characters named after key figures from vampire fiction – Stoker, Polidori, a descendent of Van Helsing – something that has become a tediously overused cliché in vampire films since the 2000s. There is also the excessive amount of fannish in-joking and referencing that is allowed to completely overtake the film. Characters have debates while driving about casting The Avengers with 1990s actors; Kandace Kale sits down in the sorority house and delivers a monologue about having one friend who loves Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) and one who hates it.

Vampire hunters Elijah Cooke, Kandace Kale and Sam Watkins in Super Hot (2021)
Vampire hunters – Sam (Elijah Cooke), Jackie Polidori (Kandace Kale) and Brad (Sam Watkins)

Elsewhere, the group visit a comic store and the clerk makes a big thing about giving them a pop quiz to determine their fannish knowledge before letting them see a Gundam toy. Kandace wears an Army of Darkness (1992) t-shirt and Elijah Cooke a Nostromo crew t-shirt. The walls of Kandace’s room are covered with Star Wars posters, she even has a BB-8 fluffy toy on her bed. Do any of these do anything that advances the plot? No – you could edit them all from the film and not alter what happens one bit.

You could easily cut out most of the first half of the film and what would remain in the second half would be an amiable vampire comedy about the efforts of an inept group to try and save someone from the big sacrifice at midnight. These scenes have some appealing moments puncturing vampire movie clichés – Dracula is resurrected and then announces the sorority girls will be his vampire brides, which they respond with a “No, sounds too much like slavery.” At another point, Dracula asks the sorority girls “Eternal life – why do you want such a curse?” which gets the response, “We’re models.”

The low-budget does show through – the vampire killings take place off-screen and there is a very wimpy explosion of a whole bandolier of grenades. Nevertheless, it is a likeable film in its second half at least where it develops some good comedic energy. It also announces its own sequel.


Trailer here


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