A NERDY VAMPIRE IS READY TO LOSE HIS "VIRGINITY"
★★★★★ (A Must-See)
Director: Mark Pirro
1983
A Polish Vampire is Burbank is the most wonderful film made with $2,500. I’m going to keep coming back to that dollar amount because this movie is better than many of the big-budget horror flicks I’ve seen. The story is engaging, the cast feels like a bunch of friends having fun, the cheap set pieces are impressive, and the jokes are almost perfectly timed. Mark Pirro may not have the funds, but he’s a brilliant screenwriter, and if you’re not too offended by the non-PC culture of the 80s—and don’t have an aversion to poor ADR—you’ll love hanging out with Dupah, a vampire whose father decides he’s through coddling him. It’s time for Dupah to make his first kill and leave the nest, but this isn’t easy for a guy who wears bat jammies, sleeps with a stuffed monster doll, and has a poster of Farrah Fawcett taped on the inside of his coffin.
Many young adults will likely understand Duplah’s plight.
"In my day, I had no college debt and castles cost $10,000."
“Papa” and Dupah’s sexy sister have been filling sippy cups of blood for him every night, and they’re finally tired of it. They give him an ultimatum: Either he bags his first body or he’ll be thrown out and wind up like his older, geeky brother Sphincter, whose demise is a mystery to the family. Like Dupah, Sphincter wasn’t ready to go all the way, and when he tried, he came across the path of the wrong person. This flashback is one of the best scenes in A Polish Vampire in Burbank—just one surprise in a movie filled with them—and the older brother’s storyline gives off An American Werewolf in London vibes. The boys both equate sinking their teeth into someone with losing their virginity, and these juvenile sexual innuendos abound in a script that’s filled with puns and sight gags. If Monty Python got into the horror business with only $2,500, this is the movie they would have birthed.
Complications arise for Dupah when he falls in love with his first potential victim, a foxy blonde named Dolores (Lori Sutton) who gets turned on by vampire movies. I wish her ex-boyfriend was a more fleshed-out villain so we root for his potential demise, but this is a threadbare complaint for a movie shot on 8mm. As Dupah and Dolores get to know one another, we buy into their adorable relationship, we want them to be together. Along the way, we’re entertained by succinct and likable side characters, especially Dolores’ dingbat roommate who talks like a valley girl and is the last one in on any joke.
Now that we’re on the subject of characters, let’s talk about the queerwolf.
Pirro’s next venture, Curse of the Queerwolf, is an LGBTQ classic, but it really rides a thin line between offense and camp. For reasons pertaining to the dynamics of the plot, I feel like Pirro is liberal-minded, so the film is assumed to be harmless fun and a treatise on toxic masculinity—but maybe I’m reading too much into this story about a man bitten on the ass by a “queerwolf”, a ravenous transvestite who can only be killed by a silver dildo. The reason I bring this movie up (besides highly recommending it to fans of good-bad cinema) is that we see our first queerwolf in a hot tub with Dupah. It’s a small scene, but actor Paul Farbman makes the most of it, and I wish he showed up in Curse. This initial encounter in Burbank has the makings of a horny monster Justice League that sadly never came to fruition.
One of my favorite things about Pirro’s movies is that you never know how they’ll end. The final scene in this film is one of the most bat-shit things I’ve ever seen, and I’m guessing this is where the bulk of the $2,500 went. A Polish Vampire in Burbank isn’t trying to solve world hunger or completely change up the horror genre. This is an immature movie that wants to show you a good time. And it does.
GENRES: Funny, LGBTQ+, Monster/Creature, What the Fuck Was That
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