[This is the first of three movie reviews that were won in the auction, which assists fans of color who want to attend SFF conventions, principally WisCon.]

So, when won one of my movie reviews, I can only assume she picked Hong Kong action flick Vampire Effect (aka Twins Effect, for reasons unknown to me) because she thought it was the worst movie ever and she wished, more than anything else in her whole entire life, to make me suffer.

She must not have been aware that I have been working on getting “shitmazing” into wide usage, as the word to use when something is so spectacularly bad that it passes all descriptions of “awful” and eventually becomes its own sort of surrealist masterpiece that makes you question an objective universe.

With this word in hand, I was more than ready to tackle Vampire Effect: The Twins Effect (even the title’s shitmazing). It’s a breathtaking kaleidoscope of wonder about a mysterious world in which defeating vampires requires liberal application of banana extract.

For serious.

This is vampire prince Kazaf and his vampire butler Prada (for serious). Here, Prince Kazaf wants this movie to promise something it just cannot promise.

There is, in fact, endless sucking in this movie.

So, Prince Kazaf moves into a church, which takes thirty minutes. (Fun fact: everything in this movie takes thirty minutes, no matter how inconsequential or important. It’s very…egalitarian!)

Meanwhile, in Movie B, Reese and his partner are vampire hunters, about to take down some vampires in a train station that is conveniently not in use in the evenings. Reese and his partner drink vampire blood, which gives you vampire strength and speed for an hour, and then turns you into a vampire. This is important later. (It will take thirty minutes.) Reese toasts:

Well, SOMEBODY is not going to survive this fight scene!

Reese defeats some random vampire and his cadre of other random vampires, and then carries the corpse of his partner through the train station, bitching about how now the Federation is going to send him a new partner whether he wants one or not, and he’d rather work alone, which seems to be a very cogent point given the subtext that he’s killed all his other partners by toasting to them at inopportune moments!

Meanwhile, in Movie A, Kazaf and Prada go to a restaurant where they drink only the blood they brought with them (rude!), and get interrupted by Helen, who shows up demanding that her ex cut off Some Body Part because he threatened never to cheat on her and then he did, and after the dude gets away she walks up to the vampire table and ganks a glass of blood right out of their hands. She’s a charmer.

(These are some priceless expressions, right here.)

She also doesn’t notice it’s the consistency and taste of human blood, so she’s maybe not so bright. Not that it stops Kazaf from falling in love with her instantly, of course.

Back in Movie B, Reese welcomes his new assistant, who will help him kill vampires, and be his housekeeper in her downtime. (Feminism!)

She looks like she was heading to a Joss Whedon casting for Quirky Girl and took a wrong turn someplace. It would explain the confusion!

Back at home, Kazaf can’t get Helen out of his mind. He also can’t stop decorating his churchpartment:

Prada is not even interested in the decor or in his boss, and tends to the household instead.

Don’t worry, that’s blood in wine bottles, not wine. They’re not trying to get the bats drunk; that would be irresponsible pet ownership.

See? Also, ask me how much I love that they package it as wine to get it through Customs and then LABEL IT “BLOOD.” Shitmazing.

Also, the vampires themselves can turn into bats, so that might not be a pet at all. Those two bats may well be parts of a relative. We don’t know. (…anything about this movie. Ever.)

Anyway, Kazaf is moping around. Prada the Vampire Butler doesn’t approve of this, and says so:

Kazaf doesn’t think that’s funny.

(I bet Edward Cullen did fall in love with a bag of pork rinds once, though. He didn’t want to buy it because it wasn’t about ownership, okay, it was just about love, and then he stood in the store all night just to make sure the bag was okay, and when someone else tried to buy it he flipped out and knocked over all the displays and drove away with it, yelling at it to never, ever worry him like that again.)

Helen, meanwhile, has come home to her brother Reese’s house to meet the new assistant. Shenanigans! To show that they don’t get along, they have a fight over a stuffed bear (for thirty minutes).

The fight scene veers a little bit into awesome. They smack bags of potting soil with enormous bamboo staffs and stuff. You know, the usual. It also includes the infamous Flying Tickle:

(I feel like this is the movie telling us, “Don’t worry, we know nothing here makes any sense. Have you seen the label on the bottle of blood yet?”)

Then Helen goes out to meet Kazaf for their first date. He agreed to a daytime date (neither one of them is too sharp, I guess – well matched!), so he’s wearing special vampire sunscreen. (Um.)

And he and Helen are crashing a wedding, because she’s just that whimsical, and also because Jackie Chan needed some cash.

He shows up later as an ambulance driver and fights vampires for thirty minutes. It’s just a thing.

That night, Helen shows up at Kazaf’s house with banana muffins in hand, and they have an adorable date. He doesn’t want to tell her he’s a vampire, because he lives in some imaginary world in which vampires are not considered unspeakably hot and sexy. So instead, he just makes excuses until she thinks he’s a banana-obsessed loser who sleeps in a coffin for fun. Thumbs up, Kazaf!

Luckily, she’s hard to shake.

Just what every guy wants to hear, amirite?

(To be fair, his coffin has a sound system and a TV and everything, so it probably was pretty comfortable.)

Ah, love!

P.S. Despite watching this movie twice, I still don’t know what the plot really is, so we’re just going with whatever at this point.

Also that night, Reese and Gypsy go out hunting vampires (for thirty minutes). They discover the Duke is in town to get Prince Kazaf’s blood to open the Day for Night book and something something all-powerful something.

That little onscreen bio has more backstory than anything else in this movie put together. When I read it, I was like, “Oh, that explains a lot!” (It did not explain a lot. It just explained slightly more than nothing, which is all I could ask at that point.)

Anyway, because Gypsy is a Whimsical Assistant, she accidentally gave Reese some banana extract instead of banana extract plus vampire antidote, so they run home, only to find that Helen’s banana muffins are all made from vampire antidote! Reese had better stuff his face STAT!

This poor dude shoved, like, four of these into his mouth in the surviving take. I can only imagine the baked-goods carnage behind the scenes.

Anyway, now he and Gypsy are in love, because everybody knows that once you shove someone’s face full of medicinal baked goods, their heart is yours forever.

Also in love: Helen and Kazaf, who at last reveals his true nature to Helen by showing her his blue hungry-vampire-eyes and his fangs. THESE ARE THE CONTACTS OF A KILLER, BELLA!

She speaks for disillusioned True Blood watchers everywhere, Bill. Get yourself together before Season Three, all right?

Meanwhile, Reese and Gypsy go out to hunt down the vampires from earlier (they are not very successful vampire killers, I am just going to put that out there), and Reese is taken hostage, and Gypsy goes to Helen and Kazaf and demands they help him against the random Duke vampire, and they do. Though by “help,” I mean Helen and Gypsy kill all the vampires themselves, including the Duke, with their Ye Olde Light Sabres:

And Kazaf mostly wears a blazer with buttons all over the shoulders and then passes out:

Reese dies in the process, by the way, because he was a horrible murderous vampire suddenly, because of…some reason, and he was trying to kill Helen and Gypsy, and Gypsy just stabbed him right through the heart. I laughed really hard. (I am an awful person.)

Anyway, now that he’s toast, Helen and Gypsy are the vampire hunters, and also Helen’s vampire boyfriend, even though he’s demonstrably useless. Also, there’s no one left to hunt, since they killed all the vampires back at the church and Kazaf is pretty much the last of his kind, but far be it from me to knock someone’s hobby!

The building in the back keeps rising behind them, for no reason, right through the end of the shot. I’m sure it’s supposed to look menacing, but instead it just looks like they’re shrinking really fast. Microscopic vampire hunters, ahoy!

The full trailer for this movie is below. Warning: it makes the movie look like a very serious action flick, which worries me a lot, because I thought this is pretty clearly a comedy, and if they intended this to be a serious film then they should have probably recut the trailer and maybe also eliminated the huge teddy bear fight. Just putting that out there.

Surely, when “shitmazing” finally hits the dictionary, there will be a picture from this movie right next to it, of that one dude stuffing his face with banana muffins, and the caption, “Reese ingests vampire antidote.” Just saying.