Slayers

Vampire slayer Elliot Jones has made it his life's mission to take revenge on the bloodsuckers who killed his teenage daughter. After long years of tracking vampires down and taking them out, he has finally found their hidden base. However, in order to get in there and finish them off once and for all, he'll need some help from a motley crew of social media superstars who have been invited to party at the compound that is hiding the vampire lair.

Thomas Jane is cool, I like him, but he’s also one of those actors, much like Dichen Lachman or Summer Glau, where if they show up in some sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre thing… well, it’s a pretty reliable sign that this shit is not going to be any good. This isn’t a commentary on their acting ability either, they’ve all got talent, but what they clearly do not have is the ability to choose good projects. This isn’t always true, sure, it’s fair to say that even a broken clock is right twice a day, but it’s also fair to point out that broken clocks are also mostly wrong.

This is one of the times where the broken clock is wrong.

Very, very wrong.

In Slayers, Thomas Jane plays your basic grizzled old bastard, a tough as old shoe leather son of a bitch who is getting too old for this shit, but who also has a big ol’ heart beating under all that graying stubble and weathered skin, as he pauses to sip from a battered flask, wince, and grimace. Cranky old vampire slayer Eliot Jones is a man who has long looked to take out an ancient family of vampires, who in this film are also used as an allegory for the uber-wealthy, privileged, and well-connected 1%. This particular vampire family, in a kind of Five Families meets the global corporate elite with political power idea, are led by a patriarch with the look and feel of a Tech-bro Entrepreneur Salesman white guy. His latest evil plan is to seduce a bunch of vapid influencer celebrant cliches in order to transfer his vampiric essence from the prison of his aging form into one of their fresh young bodies.

Enter Elliot Jones, grumpy old vampire slayer.

As a fairly rote “day to day dumpster life of a mundane blue collar worker, haunted by past sins they can never atone for, as they try to make a fantastical living in some kind of a strange world setting,” the best you can say about Slayers is that at least it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Unfortunately, that’s its lone upside, because it’s otherwise a mostly hammy and uninspired snoozer, filled with easy cliches, and dominated by a continual drone of tired-out old man grievances with the modern day world, that it clearly believes to be righteous and clever. The film spends way too much self-amused time and energy on its “edgy” spoof of influencers and The Media, but in reality, it lacks any interesting or clever or even new insights, because the ever-evolving world outside their door scares and confuses them, which is why they hate it so, and as a result, they don’t actually know anything about it.

Slayers is the definition of tone-deaf and try hard.