“Dude, you could be making so much money. There are millions of freaks just like me that would pay to see hot vampire chicks on the internet… for a higher price you can get the real vampire experience.”
These words, addressed by Wes (Drew Marvick) to Scarlett (Nina Lanee Kent) and her fellow vampires Reese (the wonderfully named Kansas Bowling), Zooey (Meredith Mohler) and Selena (Adriana Uchisiba), summarise the premise of Onlyfangs – something that the film’s punning title does too, and with even greater concision. For once workshy wannabe monster hunter Wes discovers that his beloved Reese and her pals are bona fide bloodsuckers, far from being alarmed, he sees only opportunity, and as someone who travels in the same circles as assorted male crackpots and conspiracy theorists, he knows all too well that there is an audience out there ripe for exploitation.
The exploitation cuts every which way in Angela de Alba and Paul Ragsdale’s feature, which first shows these vampiresses as slaves to the will of their male master Harvey (Nick Zagone), and then has them turning the tables on both him and a legion of online incels, truthers and alt-rightists, even as Scarlett builds an army of female vamps around her to take on the more patriarchal undead élite. Scarlett’s expanding network recalls the all-female vampire nests of Dennis Gansel’s We Are The Night (Wir sind die Nacht, 2010) and Brad Michael Elmore’s Bit (2019) and comes with a similar feminist agenda, as it reclaims from men what one new recruit (Allison Fluty) terms “a little blood debt”. Yet the theme of women’s empowerment is somewhat strained in the arena of pornography and sex work where, as recruit Eva (Bebe Bardot) puts it, you’re “dealing with pervs” – and even as the film confronts its male viewers with their often abhorrent attitudes towards the opposite sex, it also rewards them with plenty of good old-fashioned T&A. These are the contradictions of the sex industry, where there can be exploitation on all sides.
Scarlett’s vamps are not just liberated women facing a fanged establishment that has recently infiltrated the Republican Party and is recruiting its own army of idiot men, but they are also opposed to a broader capitalist hegemony that always disempowers women. “Corporations are the real vampires,” Scarlett tells Wes’ sister Gwen (Jessa Flux), “they suck you dry.” Yet even this proves as double-edged as Wes’ ‘Lord of Fire sword’, given Scarlett’s own love of lucre, and her inclination not just to bring down the male order but to take – and exercise – that same power for herself. In the middle of all this is Wes, a genuine ally to Scarlett but increasingly troubled by her return to violence and murder.
Though it briefly opens 100 years in the past, Onlyfangs is a satire of today’s polarised America, using montages to poke fun at the blinkered bubble mentality of a populace universally dumb, utterly appetitive and all too easily manipulated. The film takes an eclectic and highly flexible approach to vampire lore, with characters favourably namechecking Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985) while rejecting the Twilight franchise (“Do I look like I sparkle to you, bitch?”, as Selena tells a fan of the franchise). These vampires are not killed by sunlight, are visible in mirrors, and can survive even dismemberment – and while Selena, in other respects no traditionalist, insists that her followers bite necks only (“Vampires don’t suck butts!”, she says), in fact they do suck butts, and balls, and the backs of bald heads.
The film too caters to multiple tastes, and indeed is broad enough in its targeting to guarantee that it misses as much as it hits – but without ever taking itself too seriously, this low-budget ensemble effort deploys anything-goes plotting, mixed messaging and breezy montage to show decidedly disUnited States whose systemic hierarchies and oppressions are ever difficult to escape, in any century. Look closely enough, and you might also discern in this LA-set lampoon an allegory on the stresses, and also the freedoms, afforded by independent filmmaking in a city where the studio is master.
strap: Angela de Alba and Paul Ragsdale’s vampish satire reimagines Los Angeles seduced by sex-working bloodsuckers
© Anton Bitel
