Maxine Schreck (Murielle Varhelyi) sneers at the son of God in "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter."

July 14, 2010

by Joel Crary

The image of a lesbian vampire graced the cover of the first copy of the Xpress I ever laid eyes on. Back in 2001, I was new in town and had yet to set foot inside the Mayfair Theatre, the Bytowne Cinema, or the Library and Archives Canada auditorium – the holy trinity of independent and art cinemas in Ottawa. After three years spent building a working knowledge of schlock, screened on nights spent with fellow gluttons for punishment and for pizzas, a flick entitled “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” seemed to herald the onset of post-college b-grade nonsense. A second coming, if you will. This time, it was filmed in my own backyard.

It was my curiosity over bad cinema that drew me to LAC and the Mayfair, where I first became aware of Ottawa’s local film scene. I remember a night of independent shorts shown at the Archives, headlined by Lee Gordon Demarbre’s “Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy,” as a night of pure enjoyment wrung from the creativity and spirit of local filmmakers. It was something new. No one I’d ever known had made a film, and suddenly the streets seemed to be teeming with artists, arming themselves with cameras, learning how to use them through courses at the SAW Video Production Co-op.

Certainly none of it dawned on me at the time. I was simply watching movies. “Aztec Mummy” featured a funny actor named Phil Caracas and his sidekick, a Mexican wrestler known as Santo (Jeff Moffet), no stranger to battling vampires in cinematic lore. When the Mayfair screened “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” a year later, I had already seen Caracas on the big screen. During a scene in which Santo touches down on an airport tarmac, I clapped along in recognition with those in the theatre who were also in the know. It was one of the first truly communal experiences I had in Ottawa. There seemed to be a language afoot, and I was learning to speak it.

At the time I was proofreading for Andrew Borntreger, the military man who has been updating Badmovies.org for over a decade now. I emailed Demarbre an appeal for him to submit “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” for review, and Andrew gave the film two “slimes” out of five. Slime and star ratings carry different universes of evaluative meaning. How good can a bad movie be? When Andrew gives Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive” five slimes, it places the film in a pantheon of bad taste. If a movie like “Dead Alive” is the “Citizen Kane” of bad films, “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” may well be the b-movie realm’s “Babes in Toyland,” complete with musical number.

Watching “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” is like watching a decade-old Ottawa travelogue. It’s one of the only films I’ve seen, and I can’t immediately recall another, that mentions Ottawa by name and features its locations prominently. To know “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” is to know Ottawa. It isn’t simply knowing the players by name. It’s knowing that Caracas had a stint at the Bytowne Cinema box office, or that mohawked man-of-the-cloth Glen Jones tended bar at the Dominion Tavern. And it’s knowing that the aforementioned SAW Video co-op, located in the Arts Court building on Daly Avenue, doubles effectively as a lesbian drop-in centre.

It’s the title that draws interest. Serving as an ode to midnight ‘Fu flicks as well as its more obvious superman-versus-undead subject matter, “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” is the type of title that would put the hard-line devout in an uproar if the movie were big enough to attract that kind of ruckus. Its lesbians aplenty no doubt serve to titillate the horror fanboys who discover the movie in “Have you ever heard of…?” forums. But Ian Driscoll’s script is as sharp as Maxine Schreck’s dental work. Christ’s one-liners take the form of fierce, pun-saturated and quite liberal sermons, consistently quotable and all about that age-old dichotomy of brotherly love and kicking ass.

Granted, not a lot of those kicks actually land. “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” isn’t a well-made film. It reeks of a lack of resources and plays as though it were put together by a group of friends for little more than a laugh (a fact I doubt Demarbre and crew would deny). It was also quite clearly built out of an appreciation for bargain-basement action movies that the general populous has never heard of, proudly showcasing the type of badly overdubbed and incomprehensible dialogue found in 1980s-era Italian-produced post-apocalyptic fantasy pictures. Cheesy stop motion and weird framing choices are both used to depict crazy fight scenes, while plenty of mouths packed with fake blood wait for a misplaced punch to spatter it onto adjacent walls. None of it is particularly convincing, but hey, isn’t that the 1-for-1 pizza shop at the corner of Lisgar and Bank?

I’ve been reflecting on Ottawa a lot, now that I’m about to leave it. While the city’s status as a filmable locale has been improving slowly, the films produced within Ottawa have tended to result in esoteric efforts at schlock horror or else render the city completely invisible in the final cut. (No doubt to my discredit, I’m bypassing the city’s thriving experimental film scene purely out of ignorance.) A couple of months ago, Christian Slater rolled into town to film “Sacrifice,” an upcoming direct-to-DVD release. Slater ended up on the cover of the Xpress. From a local lesbian vampire to the guy from “Pump Up the Volume” in about nine years.

I make these observations to reach a larger conclusion about cities, I suppose. “Ottawa” is the general designation of an area enclosed within invisible boundaries. It’s characterized by buildings, streets, neighbourhoods. An exchange of funds keeps its cultural blood flowing, from the infrastructure and council financing distributed by the federal and provincial governments down to those who shell out the cash for a repertory movie house membership. But it’s also characterized by people, their relationships, their in-jokes and shared experiences. “Ottawa” is the sum of the thoughts and feelings I have while walking through Centretown, spotting fliers and local papers covering new films or art events, wondering which familiar face I’ll inevitably run into.

After too many drinks at the Dominion Tavern, I’ll wander down to the basement and see the stall in the men’s washroom where an actress was stabbed in the solar plexus with a stake for the sake of a gore shot, and I’ll crack a bit of a smile. For that lingering college-aged kid inside who still likes to occasionally revel in bad taste, it’s an image wholly important to Ottawa’s filmmaking legacy. Another attraction on the twisted tourist map of the city’s underground. My home for the last nine years.