LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS is a bit of a pain in the neck. Chortle.

(Apologies to the distributors and to Simon for the late posting of this review. The editor's fault...) The evolution of any movie career- particularly those that involve a successful beginning in television- is an intriguing spectacle. For the few that win sustained notoriety, thousands fall by the wayside, no matter how auspicious their beginnings. With Gavin & Stacey, James Corden and Mathew Horne struck comedy gold- the storylines, the humour and the pathos were just sublime and the series' two spell-binding seasons and Christmas specials easily stand shoulder to shoulder with The Office and Flight of the Conchords as the best comedy series of the past ten years. Why they then had to follow their sitcom up with the terrible "sketch-show" formatted Horne & Corden is a total mystery to me, and could well have spelled the end of their flirtation with stardom, like the proverbial second experimental album spelling the end of a potentially huge rock act (Terence Trent D'Arby, know your shame). So, the success of their inevitable and often difficult transition into a big screen project on the back of a tenuous immediate track record looked less of a certainty as it may have had Lesbian Vampire Killers come out immediately following the phenomenal reception of Gavin & Stacey. So, on to the film itself. You can see Alex's original review of it here, but I would like to add a few things, and counter a few of the comments made in it. It is hardly a ground-breaking production, but there's enough self-awareness in its silliness that it is possible to take some enjoyment from it. It's just a shame that a lot of the humour is of that particular new brand of British lad comedy that focuses too brazenly on cocks and poo and "unexpected" explatives New British comedy these days is a strange creature- in the wake of The Office, we were forced to endure a deluge of sub-standard pseudo-real comedies, heavy on that particular form of squirmy discomfort that could only be classified as Gervaisian and far lighter on the family element that dominated sit-coms of ten and twenty years ago. Now though, aside from some excellent exceptions (notably Psychoville), comedy shows seem to be adhering to a model that looks like a garbled attempt at recreating the surrealist charms of The Mighty Boosh, while catastrophically stripping it back to the idea that anything sufficiently zany or outfield must be funny. Thus Horne & Corden had way too many gratuitous gay jokes and belly-shots, and things like E4's abysmal We Are Klang somehow finds space on a schedule- there is no thought-process and little joy behind a creation by a collective whose idol is clearly Rick Mayall (circa Richie from Bottom era). Thank God Lesbian Vampire Killerssteers well clear, tending- albeit in its "lads-mag" slant- towards a Shaun of the Dead approach, where the comedy is still situational and founded in the very British fear of the destabilisation of normalcy. How perverse an idea for two proper British blokes going on a bit of a jolly to be confronted with the idea that the hot nubiles they encounter want to kill them and bonk each other, instead of wanting to shag the lads until their genitals shrivelled like Gordon Brown's must every time he hears the words General and Election! More than any other, British comedy deals best in the shattering of dreams, and the corruption of comfort- Americans, on the other hand seem to prefer character-lead or relationship comedy. British comic-horror: like Severance, like Shaun of the Dead, and now likeLesbian Vampire Killers work (in their various levels of success) because they take the very essence of British normalcy and make it threatening. For Severance, the horror revolves around a team-building trip (the pinnacle of British endurance: it is after all an American phenomenon), for Shaun of the Dead the local pub becomes a potential tomb rather than a womb-like sanctuary and with Lesbian Vampire Killers, a lad's weekend goes tits up. But that's about the only intellectual thing that can be said about the film- it's a standard issue British horror/comedy, neither adding to, nor saturating the sub-genre. As a DVD release, Lesbian Vampire Killers is pretty standard issue. Extras-wise youre looking at a fairly dreary Making Of- including an unnecessary extra look at Corden's character Fletch, which smacks a bit of an over-zealous attempt to make a pretty ropey character into something of an ambitious (and unfounded) legend. Elsewhere there's the obligatory music video (overrated VV Brown warbling on about something or other) and the near-obligatory Webisodes, with additional on-set "hilarity". It may seem like a simple comment, but it's good to see that the DVD distributors have taken time to consider the aesthetics of the DVD: too little focus is given to the product these days- just look at the ugly Watchmen covers from last week- when in all honesty, in purely retail terms, the cover sells the product. The old addage that you cant judge a book by its cover is bollocks: something I found out to my immediate detriment when I bought Pathfinder last year- gorgeous cover, frankly shit film. With Lesbian Vampire Killers, there is clear evidence that some consideration for the buying punter (and not necessarily just the film junkie) has gone into the production of its aestethic. Tits and ass will always sell, and those are some good gazzungahs.