The Night Watchmen (2017)
Some men were born heroes... It wasn't these guys.
Did you know that Amazon Prime offers a bunch of movies to watch for free if you have a Prime sub? I mean, I guess it’s not technically free if you have to pay for a sub, but the point is there’s a bunch of movies on there - and in anticipate-able fashion, not all of them are something that you expected was a huge success. To make sure I don’t lull anyone into a false sense of security about only doing grade A movies that look on the level of box office success, I decided to tone it down a little and find one for this week that looked like it could be, for a lack of a better word, pretty dumb. Pull up your belts and holster those tasers, tonight we join The Night Watchmen.
The plot is pretty simple, but before we get into it we need to address the kind of movie we are going for. It’s a comedy movie - but perhaps not a high brow comedy movie, no. If you happen to have seen the movie about the guards in the high rise that gets taken over by terrorists - no, not Die Hard, the other one - then you kind of know what to figure for this one. It’s comedy is a bit crude, perhaps some will be a little offended by moments of it - there’s no real great portrayals of anything in this one. There is, however, a concept and they stick with it the entire way.
Story revolves around a popular Baltimore clown who happens to mysteriously die in Romania. Him and his entire troupe get sent back to Baltimore, except his coffin ends up in the wrong building. Turns out, it’s not so “mysterious” how he died after all - he’s a vampire, and he’s starting to do what vampires do. On the try and survive side of things is the buildings guards and the staff staying late to do some work. Things escalate quickly, and it becomes up to the misfit crew of guards to try and save who they can and defeat the vampire menace. Simple - stupidly simple - and to the point, there is no real mystery about this one. If you were hoping for something more elaborate, then unfortunately you may find the movie quite lacking.
Hey, didn’t I say it was a comedy? Well, yes, I guess I did say that. Here’s the thing - comedy is always hit or miss, and I point it out every time I do a comedy movie so I know we are all on the same page even if it’s the first one you are looking at. If anyone reads all of these, they probably want to clap the back of my head with their palm for repeating it so much, but the point stands here as well - it’s one of those dumb comedy movies. Crude jokes in relation to pretty near anything - weed, perverted activities, being surprised while watching porn, innuendos, and an absolute metric truck load of farts. It’s not for everyone, and despite it being dumb I still chuckled over some of the farts because that’s just the low pole of my humor bar - my kryptonite if you will. Did it get a little old when every dead vampire farts? Yeah, but I still can’t help laugh at fart sounds man, it’s just how it is.
Working hard or hardly working?
What about the acting? Well, its rather fine. I mean, is it the best thing ever? How could it be with the type of movie it is? It’s one of those kind of movies where I blame the movie and it’s writing far more than I do any of the performances in it. They do a good enough job for the movie, and never take you out of it - but it is a dumb comedy with plenty of dumb jokes, so expect a lot of over-acted reactions, flamboyant screaming, and people acting cooler then they are. The vampires generally act like zombies as far as movies are concerned, just with the better agility of what you’d expect of vampires. There’s some moments in which they act different for a joke - like one that seems to get a bit aroused by defense methods, or the one who can’t see without their glasses - but largely it’s the classic “oh look a person, lets go eat them!” with plenty of piggy-back rides and chasing around.
The effects department is pretty well keeping it together. There are a lot of blood usages, practical all over the place, with anywhere from casual amounts hanging around on clothes to hose-fed sprays coating people. There’s also a bunch of neck wounds - but none of it is really graphic to a discouraging amount. I imagine most would be more upset over the few times some bare lady chests bounce across the screen then they would the over-the-top blood sprays. There’s also a nice full-body burn in the movie, and the vampire teeth and other prosthetics end up looking quite well done. Of course, they double down on trying to scare people by having the clowns in there, and that’ll probably be rather effective for the people who are afraid of clowns. There are a few effects that aren’t quite well done - particularly the fire effects at the end of the movie - but it’s mostly all positive here.
Audio is pretty decent. It does it’s job, and one might expect me to be way more excited over the synth soundtrack - but this time around it really didn’t stick out nearly as much to me as last weeks’ movie. Audio is balanced well, no trouble hearing any lines when they were spoken. Line deliveries as mentioned can be a bit over-done, but it fits the genre of movie honestly and I kind of expected it to begin with. The setting works for what it is going for - the cubicle space and warehouse spaces being the ones probably most used, and they do some neat things with the vampires not showing up on cameras in the security room that are nice little bonuses.
Everyone talks about bloodbaths, but nobody mentions blood showers.
In the end, it was a better movie than I thought it would be, but mileage is still going to be incredibly dependent on the person. Some of the jokes probably are not going to be appreciated by most, and it isn’t really horror enough in most regards to really pique the interest of the scary movie buffs. If you like these kind of movies though, it’ll fit right in with the rest and the spin of having vampires involved keeps it from being like every single other one in the type.