NIGHT CRAWLERS Can Bite Me: Why This Movie Shouldn’t See the Light of Day

Rating: 🧛

Small towns are notorious for urban legends (and not just the VHS copy of Urban Legend I wore out during my formative years). When I was growing up, the two heavy-hitters were Goatman (which is a story for another day) and an allegedly famous horror movie that was shot at the old high school. After some research (aka a cursory glance on IMDb), I couldn’t find anything about the fabled horror movie (I believe it was called Hangman’s Curse, which absolutely sounds like something teenagers would make up), but lucky for you all, I found something even better. Even luckier for you all, it turns out I unknowingly OWNED this little fanged flop, so I decided to watch it for your reading pleasure, and I can honestly say I would have rather hung out with Goatman for 76 minutes. 

Night Crawlers was shot in and around my hometown back in 2009 and stars, no joke, Joey Greco aka the host of Cheaters, alongside three other main characters who all kind of look like a celebrity and would make your friends absentmindedly say, “oh yeah, I could see that,” when you made the comparison. There’s Amanda Harris’s Macy, who favors Anna Faris a la Scary Movie, Lee Trull’s Rob, who is mostly a doppelgänger for Schitt’s Creek Dustin Mulligan, and Gabriel Horn’s Coop, who has been made to look like a Joe Dirt rip-off, to try to fully immerse audiences into the world of small town Texas in a hopefully satirical manner. 

To give you essentially the same recap Rob gives Macy (yes, he recaps the ENTIRE movie for the girlfriend he rescues, and we’re given flashbacks to the SAME movie we’ve been watching), Rob and Macy find out they’re expecting just as Joey Greco’s vampire villain, Delacroix, walks (seriously) into town. Coop and Rob have been best friends since childhood, and Coop and Macy hate each other’s guts, causing animosity in Rob and Macy’s relationship. Rob and Coop take a job helping Delacroix retrieve a “deed” (if you can’t tell by the quotes, it’s absolutely something nefarious and not a deed), in exchange for $50,000. As you probably guessed, the “deed” is actually an ancient scroll that holds all of the secrets to immortality, including how vampires can walk in the daylight (I think?), so with giddiness (and cluelessness) of Bo and Luke Duke, Rob and Coop break into a house that happens to be guarded by a vampire with old-age makeup that gives Mulder’s cotton ball and glue getup in the “The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati” episode (if you know, you know) of The X-Files a run for its money. 

As it turns out, Delacroix is a bad guy (the black, thumb-sized soul patch under his chin should have probably been a giveaway), and he’s after Macy to drink her blood because she has a birth mark that vaguely resembles a sword if you squint really hard because her blood is the key to immortality (again, I think?), so he turns the entire town into bloodsucking good ol’ boys, including Coop’s ex-fling, who runs around in her underwear and boots after knocking boots (in her boots) and getting her neck chomped by Delacroix, who mistook her for Macy. Coop’s fanged ex-flame bites him, and Macy and Rob eventually stake the entire town through the heart with signs for Coop’s mayoral campaign, only after Rob saves Macy by, I kid you not, flashing a cross tattoo that looks exactly like something out of small town stud starter pack (and numerous guys I went to high school with all have) to get the vampires to release her. I promise you I’m not kidding; that is an ACTUAL plot point, but I digress. 

Macy stakes Decroix with the pencil she keeps behind her ear to let us know she’s a waitress, and the two drive off into the sunrise. Meanwhile, Coop rises from the dead, goes back to the haunted house, chats with the grizzled gatekeeper, drags both of them outside where they die (yet again, I think?), and the neighboring cops arrive on the scene and take the scroll to evidence. That’s it. That’s seriously the movie. Oh yeah, and there’s also an older, blind gentleman who kind of narrates throughout and laughs at the end, revealing his fangs, meaning he may or may not be evil. 

I want to start by saying I’ve never made a movie in my life, but I know it’s stressful, so I respect the hell out of Benjamin Wilbanks for trying. This movie does have some heart; however, that heart was quickly staked to a bloody pulp. The humor often lands with the grace of one of those paratrooper toys you would get out of a machine at a Cici’s Pizza for a quarter. The scariest part is Joey Greco’s soul patch. The color scheme is akin to watching a LimeWire downloaded file on a Video Now. It watches like someone saw Near Dark and Lone Star State of Mind on cold medicine, but the pages got stuck together in their mind, and the result is a Rachel Green trifle of a film. Night Crawlers tries, but this is definitely one I shouldn’t have resurrected. It doesn’t even have enough charm to be a beer and pizza movie, and that’s what really sucks.