No film festival experience would be complete without the screening of a late-night, trashy, low-budget horror movie. So Monday night I fought my way through the rapidly growing crowds on Austin’s infamous sixth street to stroll into the brand-spanking new Alamo Drafthouse Ritz theater, for the world premiere of Southern Gothic.
Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea, because even though on the street outside people were concerned mainly with getting loud and drunk in preparation for SXSW’s impending music festival (and perhaps getting laid later that evening), inside the theater was loaded with cinephiles, fighting to get into Southern Gothic’s packed screening. I made it in… barely, and settled into what was without a doubt the worst seat the Alamo Drafthouse has to offer, but on that night was the best… since it was the only chair left.
Sadly, I didn’t need to be less than five feet away from the screen to see that Southern Gothic just isn’t any damn good. Visually it’s an atmospheric, dimly lit, gritty horror movie; but the story makes has no energy. It’s about a guy named Fortune, who works as a bouncer at a movie strip club, you know, the kind where nobody takes off any clothes. He befriends a new dancer and offers to baby sit her daughter. The dancer, perhaps because she is a dancer and thus coked out of her mind, finds absolutely nothing creepy about this and leaves him home alone with her underage kid while she runs off to shake her fully clothed body underneath the strip club’s dim, erotic lighting.
Meanwhile in the background there be vampires. A local preacher has just been turned into a bloodsucker, and so decides to start Armaggedon. After nearly ninety minutes of setup, something finally happens and Fortune has to protect the daughter and kill some vampires who, conveniently, do all their most grisly work off camera.
What kills Southern Gothic isn’t the bad acting or crummy script, it’s the weird decision to stay staunchly PG-13. It’s at odds with itself. It dips into this dark, dingy, vaguely erotic world, but then writer/director Mark Young doesn’t have the balls to treat it as if they’re anywhere other than sesame street. The pieces are there to make this one of those gory, scary, fun, campy vampire movies that people love to throw themselves all over, but it doesn’t have the guts to get those pieces properly topless and bloody. It’s not like we’re there for the acting. Here’s a tip: if you’re afraid to show nudity then don’t set your movie in a strip club, and if you’re afraid to get gory then don’t make a movie about brutal, crazed vampires ripping apart dozens of strippers. Make a documentary. Those look easy.
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