Bloodsucking Bastards (aka Bloodsucking Bosses) first published by TwitchFilm
Industrious, dedicated but wishywashy, Evan (Fran Kranz) wishes he had replied ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’ after his girlfriend Amanda (Emma Fitzpatrick), from Human Resources, declared her love to him. When the floor boss Ted (Joel Murray) brings in Evan’s old college rival Max (Pedro Pascal) and promotes him over Evan to manager, things in the firm start changing fast, as previously inefficient workers start adopting a more cutthroat approach to telesales. Yet with a deadline looming for a report on a male enhancement pill (a reflex on our hero’s fragile masculinity), only Evan and Amanda seem unaware of the undead menace that has taken over the office.
Pitched somewhere between Office Space (1999), Drones (2010) and Stalled (2013), Brian James O’Connel’s Bloodsucking Bastards (aka Bloodsucking Bosses) is a corporate comedy where the new-hires are also vampires, but remain, for all the occasional big-stake takeovers or explosions of blood, more like metaphors for a certain model of middle management. With plenty of shrewd satirical observations on the life of a desk jockey, as well as the odd surreal digressions (“whimsical gimp mask”), and a final, bloody battle with the ‘puncture monkeys’ that somehow includes a game of ‘rock paper scissors’, Bloodsucking Bastards stands out from the competition by focusing on a collection of disgruntled, dysfunctional characters, and making the vampiric status of some of them a near irrelevance. For when Ted tells Evan, “The methods might seem a little unorthodox, but you can’t argue with the results,” he may as well be talking about this charmingly eccentric film.
© Anton Bitel
