Hunter' profanes, amuses

There is something innately appealing about a movie featuring Jesus in a non-church- sanctioned role. In fact, that’s probably the main draw of movies like “Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.” But that in and of itself is not enough to support a fantastically campy film. Anyone could write some awful plot and just toss Jesus in there. For “JC:VH,” what did it for me was the tagline – “The Power of Christ Impales You.” Not only is this a clever play on words, but at the same time, it is a roughly accurate plot summary. So, fully knowing what to expect from this movie, I put it on my Amazon wishlist and waited for someone to buy it for me. Trust me, it wasn’t a really high priority.This waiting turns out to have been a mistake. In hindsight, I ought to have bought it for myself much sooner, which I would have done, had I known how amazingly good it was. Or how amazingly bad.In case the title and tagline didn’t explain it well enough for you – this movie is pretty crappy. It was an independently made Canadian film. I mean, major Canadian films probably get less funding than American ones, so as you could probably guess, this movie plays like it was recorded on a camcorder and most likely stars the directors’ extended family.Now, crappy underbudget films walk a fine line between being so bad they are funny, and just plain bad. This one luckily rests cleanly on the funny side of that line. The trick is to not just ignore plot, thematic structure and basically every tenet of filmmaking, but also to disregard production value – out of necessity or otherwise.Take the idea of crappy and turn that itself into an art form. Here’s a good example from “JC:VH.” A jeep full of atheists pulls up and randomly challenges Jesus to a fight. Now, they acknowledge that he is Jesus, which in and of itself is brilliant, but they also do the following – have roughly 50 people empty out of the van, not by a special effect trick of some sort, but by cutting away from the jeep and then by cutting back later; stage a poorly choreographed kung fu fight scene between Jesus and the random atheists; fail to, say, reshoot the scenes in which the fighting is so poorly faked that you can see literally a foot of space between the fist and the face it is supposed to be pounding and then have Jesus hit someone so hard in the foot while they are lying down that they fly back 15 feet into a tree using frame-by-frame stop-motion.Now, another problem with filming a low-budget vampire film is that they might need to film during the day, since they are probably making the whole movie over the course of three days, or something ridiculous like that. But vampires, if we go by the most prevalent myths, are allergic to the sun. Deathly so, if I recall correctly. Well, who but independent Ottowan filmmakers would ever think to create a plot about stealing the skin of lesbians for the purposes of protecting your sensitive vampire skin? Well, certainly not me.Every great low-quality movie requires pseudoscience. Whether it be unobtainium, flux capacitors or oscillation overthrusters, any movie worth its salt has to have some sort of poor applications of words from science. In “JC:VH” the explanation for the vampire’s aforementioned weakness to sunlight is the fact that light is both a wave and a particle. Einstein would be proud.See, that’s what makes this movie great, the premise – Jesus comes back to hunt vampires – is supported by the ridiculous pseudoscience – vampires need to steal lesbian skin to protect their delicate epidermii.How does it end? Well, I don’t want to ruin it for you, but let’s just say you ought to put your money on the son of god.Powell can be reached at lpowell@campustimes.org.