Jason Flemyng is a cracking actor, but on the strength of this, his debut as director, he’s unlikely to be making a permanent career change. Comedy-horror is notoriously hard to get right — for every American Werewolf in London there’s an American Werewolf in Paris — and, sadly, this doesn’t feel like it signifies the arrival of a new voice in the genre. Still, if you’re going to splice two wildly different films to make a third, at least the idea of blending Zulu with What We Do in the Shadows is appealingly barmy.
Spend your precious time watching something else.
Sadly, the execution is unappealingly amateurish, to the point where it’s clear it never even occurred to anyone making this that, rather than mucking about with a few chums, they were making something that people would one day be expected to pay money to see.
A multi-generational cast of British stalwarts — including Charlie Cox, Freema Agyeman, Vincent Ward and Annette Crosbie — are on hand as a coven of vampires of various degrees of ancientness, attempting first to feed on newcomer Billy Cook, then introduce him to their number. However, Mackenzie Crook is on hand as a priest with an SAS team of I-know-that-guy actors. They stake out the coven’s isolated farmhouse and attempt to rid the world of their evil — and that’s about it, until ninety-ish minutes are up and it’s time to wrap things up.
After taking an aeon to get going, Eating Locals neglects to include any gags or scares that might justify the geological age it takes to get its simple siege set-up going. Instead, Flemyng inexplicably and awkwardly quotes everything from Crocodile Dundee to Terminator 2 to Lock Stock — which he was in — with the recognition factor presumably meant to stand in for constructing a single dramatic or comic moment. Dexter Fletcher and Ruth Jones show up for extended cameos as a farming couple with a secret, but it’s genuinely unclear why either of them are there from a story perspective.
The overall feeling is simply, alas, of a film made in a rush by people just not in command of the material. The strong cast are presumably doing their mate a favour, and the wrap party was likely a laugh — bizarrely, Jamie Oliver is thanked in the credits — but when that’s the only real positive to the whole enterprise, does it even need to exist?
Vampires live forever, but you won’t: spend your precious time watching something else.