JESUS CHRIST VAMPIRE HUNTER is one of the weidest movies ever made. It's the kind of movie that's so bad, it's good. It's too low-budget, low-brow, and low-profile to love, yet too light-hearted intentionallly hilarious, and unintenionally hilarious to hate. It's way too goofy and to keen on the teachings of Jesus to be a sacrelige, yet to poorly finaced, written, and choreograhped to be an award-winner. As a Vampire movie, it's no BLADE; as a martial arts movie, it's no ONG BAK; as a religious movie, it's no PASSION OF THE CHRIST.
But as a bad, bad, bad movie, it's no SOUL PLANE. Now that's a blessing from God if I've ever seen one.
Jesus of Nazereth (Phil Caracas) is in Ottawa, once again teaching people to love one another and be more spiritual. But vampires are running wild in Ottawa,able to withstand sunlight with human flesh graphted onto their bodies and Jesus decides to put off his spiritual quest to fight the vampires, who are particualry enamored by lesbians for blood. Armed with wooden stakes, some holy kung fu and allied with masked Mexican wrestlin Champ El Santo (Jeff Moffet), Jesus heads to the local barber shop for a shave and a hair cut. He aquires another ally in the form of Mary Magnum (Maria Moulton), and is now ready for action!!!
JESUS CHRIST VAMPIRE HUNTER is everything theaverage student film is: Poorly made, poorly written, hilariously entartinaing in it's sheer lack of anything that could be called a budget, etc. It's also intentionally funny and enterataing. The musical number, with Jesus rallying Canadians all over Ottawa to his cause while healing people of their various handicaps, is perfectly funny and captivating; apparantly, the filmmakers drew as much on JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR as they vampire and kung fu movies.
The martial arts sequences are another story. Being a blackbelt myself, I have long entertained the notion of Jesus as a martial artist. Even though in his life, there is no record of him having any martial arts training, his teachings make him, in my eyes, a true martial artist. But on the physical end of martial arts, Jesus is not too good. The big fight occurs in a big park full of people who completely ignore Jesus beating up an army of Atheists. Yes, that's right, Atheists, who come at him a waves of five (the movie's director, Lee Gordon Demabre, apparently thinks thirty-six people can fit into a jeep) and are defeated with Jesus giving some of the sloppiest kicks ever captured on film. The very fact the there is NOBODY in the movie who is any good, and EVERYBODY engages in fight after fight, is an amusing, hilarious, if boneheaded concept. The same can be said for the movie's narrator, and the spinning cross that comes as a direct reference the 1960's BATMAN series
But of course, you can't make a movie about Jesus without biblical messages, even if he is hunting vampires. Jesus actually talks to God through a bowl of cherries ("Call your mom; she misses you" the Almighty intones); He heals a vampire's throat after slitting it ("Not even this separates you from my love"); experiences a modern-day good samaritan experience first-hand; And gives a sermon on a mount. Jesus also questions why the vampires select lesbians for their skin-grafting experimnets; he is told that their deviant lifestyle makes them ir-redeemable in the eye's of the Church, so no pries will bother investigating this "Critical Lesbian Shortage". And Jesus says something I honesty suspect he would say about Gays, "There's nothing deviant about love." And trust me, I'm not Gay.
JESUS CHRIST VAMPIRE HUNTER is a movie that must be seen to be believed, not for it's martial arts action, not for it's messages about accepting gays as children of God, not for being a biblical movie, but for being definitive proof that any really, really bad movie can be funny, when it means to be, and when it doesn't.