Opening scenes usually set the tone of what is to follow and here it’s a menstruating woman attacked in a toilet cubicle but toilet humour is not really what Bogieville is about. Instead its Ham (Arifin Putra) and Jody (Eloise Lovell Anderson) having both lost their jobs on the same day find their day gets worse when they run someone over outside the Bogieville , a ramshackle caravan park in Georgia. It’s also where grubby overall wearer Madison (Sean Cronin who also directs) lurks in a basement with his niece Lily (Poppie Jae Hughes) like some Southern gothic Josef Fritzl tribute act. But it’s Madison’s brother Crawford (Jonathan Hansler) who is also Lily’s father who has an ulterior motive to helping out Ham & Jody because ultimately he is a Reinfield like carer for Madison, Lily and others lurking in the shadows as they are all vampires and he’s keen to offload his duties onto the unfortunate couple.
But into the mix is also thrown a Sheriff and a local doctor (Angela Dixon) on the trail of the increasing number of the neck knackered bodies and it’s this investigative element of the film that does slow the pace down making what is ideally an 90m minute film into a 110 minutes. It’s a pity because there’s enough going on here without them mainly Harker’s relationship to the hordes of vampires he oversees in Bogieville and best of all is Poppie Jae Hughes as his vampire daughter. She’s a striking screen presence all fang faced and bloody and the story could have benefitted far more with her character.
From a script by Henry P Gravelle, a prolific writer but this is his first produced feature film script. Low budget vampire flicks often have the most interesting exploration of the vampire myth – Cronos, Let the Right One In, Near Dark – but there’s little really of that here and it’s the Renfield-esque aspect of the plot that deserved exploring especially with the little girl Lily.
related feature : Scream Queen Barbara Crampton talks to us about being a vampire in, ‘Jakob’s Wife’
related feature : ‘Renfield’ director Chris McKay talks Nicolas Cage, eating insects and those hidden Easter eggs
We chat to actor-director Sean Cronin about the film…..
Here’s the Bogieville trailer……
