Review of The Night Watchmen

"The Night Watchmen" is a vampire movie with clowns … but the clowns are the vampires and – in fact – the titular night watchmen are the clowns! Does that make sense? If not, it doesn't matter. It's a horror comedy with the emphasis laying heavily on the comedy part, and although enjoyable enough while it lasts, it's probably one of the least memorable movies you'll ever watch. The script, written by two of the lead actors, contains a few inventive gimmicks and a small handful of genuine laughs, but overall it's a routine and largely uninspired fan-boy movie with the usual splatter effects and infantile fart, weed and bimbo jokes. We're introduced to the four night watchmen of the Baltimore Gazette newspaper building, located somewhere in the harbor. Their job is generally boring and monotonous, so they entertain themselves by peeping at the sexy office ladies, playing human bowling, smoking weed and stealing other people's lunch packets. Tonight will be different, however, because the coffin of a famous dead clown mistakenly ended up at the newspaper building. The clown mysteriously died during a tour in Romania and got repatriated, but he quickly rises from his coffin and goes on a violent killing spree during the one night that everybody stays in the office to work on a deadline. Personally, I think that the concept of eerie vampire clowns entering the USA via the Baltimore harbor and gradually bloodsucking their way through the rest of the country might even have worked as an actual horror movie, complete with atmospheric tension and scary clowns' make-up, but apparently the makers decided it was better to focus on incompetent watchmen instead. Thanks to the copious amounts of fake blood and the exaggeratedly bad acting, "The Night Watchmen" is entertaining enough to watch at a festival or in the company of drunken friends, but don't expect to still be talking about it a week later.