Vampires vs The Bronx
Privet Tovarischi! For this guest review, in honor of Fangsgiving, we’re going to be looking at a lovely little film called Vampires vs The Bronx. Now, this will not be a traditional review, where I talk about how good (or not) the movie is and give it a grade. I wouldn’t be doing this if the movie were terrible, because unlike Frigid, I don’t hate myself {I don’t hate myself, I just have a very honest relationship with myself}. I am possessed of Millennial Death Drive on occasion, but I don’t hate myself. Instead, I am going to be using this film to talk about themes, in my usual openly communist way {Quick note: While I fully support freedom of speech and my editors right to believe as he does, his statements and beliefs are not reflective of the review series as a whole and should only be taken as his opinion :P}.
The movie takes place in a thriving neighborhood in The Bronx, where a close-knit community, mostly people of color, actually live and work.
Very early on, we are introduced to our main character, Miquel Martinez, who is called Little Mayor by his neighbors. Honestly? He’s a great kid. He’s smart, a bit impetuous, cares about the community in which he lives, and is well-liked in his neighborhood precisely because he gives a shit. His nickname is an endearment, not derision. Which does not stop some shit-giving! Oh no. His mission in life is to try to keep the Prima Bodega open, because it’s fallen on hard times, and he practically grew up there. See, the owner, Tony, basically opens his door to neighborhood kids and keeps them out of trouble, giving them a supervised place to hang out, provides life-advice, and is basically the neighborhood omnibus uncle. To do that, Little Mayor went and organized a block party to raise funds, basically to help Tony pay rent. In the brief introductory period, Little Mayor notices that more and more of his neighborhood is being bought by a single real estate investment firm, and at the same time, people are just straight up going missing. It should come as no shock at all that it’s vampires doing both things. They are buying up all the real-estate, and they’re eating people.
So that’s our basic set up. Now, what this movie is really doing is talking about gentrification using the lens of vampires. This shouldn’t come as a shock. Vampires have, if you’ve been paying attention to prior Fangsgivings, often served as a stand-in for whatever social ills the author of a particular work had an axe to grind about {A common role for monsters but vampires seem rather flexible in this regard}. Sometimes, this has taken the form of The Other (In various forms, from queer people to “savages” from other places), and have tapped into social anxieties surrounding those things. However, in this late-capitalist hellscape we live in, housing security and the preservation of communities has become something of a problem.
So, what is gentrification? Well, gentrification is the process by which a poor area becomes rich, not because the people there become rich (that would be a different process called un-slumming), but because the poor people who live there are replaced by rich people. This happens when, for whatever reason, the area becomes more economically desirable. Maybe a stadium gets built, or a tech company buys up an office. Property values increase, and when property values increase, property taxes go up and price the people who own their homes and businesses out. In addition to this, rents respond to property values and not the actual costs of maintaining property because landlords are parasites who do no socially necessary labor but instead suck the lifeblood out of their tenants able to charge more for more desirable rental space in the local market. This forces more people out. Old buildings get torn down to be rebuilt into luxury condos, starbucks moves in where the bodega used to be, the smoke shop becomes a vegan cafe, the dive gay bar gets turned into an upscale gay bar with no leather night or gets colonized by straight people etc.
In this film the vampires (who are all, hilariously and appropriately, white) are buying up the neighborhood to create a kind of feudal estate, like the old days, where they have control over the local government and economy and are thus able feed and reproduce at will. Basically using the process of gentrification to settler-colonize a neighborhood “where no one [important] cares when people disappear”.
Now, Little Mayor is joined by two of his friends. I’d say that his friend Bobby isn’t the brightest crayon on the box, but that would be unfair. See, he’s poor, and he wants to not be poor, and in economically depressed communities with limited opportunities, this can lead to recruitment by gangs that offer quick cash and social status, and he’s starting on the road down that path {Which is interesting in and of itself because the research shows that most drug dealers make about minimum wage, it’s the dealers boss who makes bank. So even drug dealing is a pyramid scheme in a lot of ways much like AMway or other comparable schemes (That is true, and most gang members have day jobs, but it’s fast and in cash. Psychological trick.)}. But in his heart of hearts, he’s a sweet kid. Luis is basically the polar opposite of Bobby. He sees his way out: through hard work and education, basically looking to Get Out rather than Get Paid Within the community. He’s risk averse and bookish, and really doesn’t approve of Bobby’s tendency toward more immediate gratification {Which has its own risks}.
While hanging up flyers, Little Mayor ends up getting chased by a gang member named Slim, who is in turn killed by a vampire who had been stalking Little Mayor through the night. Seeing this, Little Mayor runs to Tony’s Bodega where he feels safe and there’s a big strong dude with a baseball bat, and is followed in by the vampire (presumably still hangry or anxious about discovery). This is when the other boys notice something is up, because the vampire doesn’t leave a reflection in any of the mirrors. So they do what every young boy should do when confronted by landlords vampires… They read Mao watch Blade to figure out how to kick off a protracted people’s war and end up with a wikipedia article about the mass-killing of landlords with their name on it kill vampires {Which is ironic because Blade disposes of a lot of the folklore regarding vampires, in order to provide more satisfying action}.
Now, I am not going to spoil the entire plot here, that would be unfair, because you really should watch the movie. However, there are some pretty obvious problems that these kids face. The first is that there are three of them and they are all of thirteen and ill-equipped to overthrow the bourgeois state and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat hunt capitalists vampires who control the government have bought the courthouse and appear to be a perfectly normal real estate investment firm, who have the backing of what Lenin called Special Bodies of Armed Men police on their side.
That means they have to convince their neighbors that capitalism is a system built on the exploitation and immiseration of the working class vampires are real {To be fair to the adults, once evidence is provided they don’t spend a lot of time refusing to believe but mobilize pretty quickly (Definitely, yes)}. This is something of a tall order, because everyone knows that capitalism is just human nature vampires aren’t real. The adults can see what’s going on with the gentrification, and they don’t like it, but for them, that is just the way the world is. It’s just their turn to get screwed. They don’t have the context to realize that there are better alternatives and that the way of the world can be changed evidence necessary to convince them that the destruction their community faces is caused by rentier bourgeoisie vampires.
So of course, the three amigos try to prove their case and find evidence of what is going on, but this backfires and gets them in trouble. Friendships start to fray, they split the party over the best way to cope with their economic and vampire situation. So the question is, can they do it? Can they overcome their differences and the deck stacked against them and be the vanguard party of the revolution that educates the working class into achieving class consciousness and rising up against the bourgeoisie convince their neighbors that they need to rise up and purge the vampire menace from their midst? Or will they die martyrs of the revolution fail and end up at best watching their neighborhood get the life-blood sucked out of it literally and figuratively? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.
I really enjoy this movie, obviously. Marxism is only subtext because no one is hanging around reading Das Kapital, and it takes aim at not just at gentrification itself, but the white-supremacy that normalizes it like Lyudmila Pavelchenko taking aim at fascists in the Crimea. However, my communist rambling aside, it is also a fun and strangely light-hearted romp with enjoyable well-acted characters who feel like real people. That’s the really amazing part. Everyone involved in this production put on performances that made their characters feel like real living people, in a neighborhood that feels actually-lived-in.
Green Text is your usual reviewer Garvin Anders
Black Text is your guest reviewer Dr. Ben Allen
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