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Umbrage: The Last Vampire (V)

“The problems with ‘Umbrage’ are legion––from the silly-ass story to the complete lack of scares to the Adam and Eve flashback rape, it’s a movie that seems ill conceived from the very beginning.”

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Boasting a big-breasted vampire seductress, a mush-mouthed Irish cowboy, a shit ton of family drama, a plot rooted in creationism, and a lilting country-western soundtrack that kicks in at the most inappropriate of moments, Umbrage: The First Vampire isn’t a genre mash-up as much as it is a genre clusterfuck.

Beginning with a stylish old-West preface that has a gunslinger taken down by a snarling vamp, Umbrage promptly settles into present day movie-of-week mode after the opening credits, as supposedly teenaged Rachel is sent to live with her ex-stepfather and his pregnant wife in a big house out in the English countryside. The goth-grunge Rachel is petulant, confrontational, and hyper-annoying––in fact, most of the first third of Umbrage consists of screechy family arguments, with poor Doug Bradley (that’s right: Pinhead, himself) trying desperately to match the volume of the two headache-inducing females.

When not focused on grating family melodrama, Umbrage cuts to a couple of male campers, drinking wine and ripping farts out in the woods. A woman approaches their campsite, claiming to be a bird-watcher (?), and one of the campers attempts to seduce her, farts and all. When he’s later found propped against a tree with his chin and genitals ripped off, the remaining camper and the birdwatcher flee to the country house, where they takes refuge with the Bickering Brits. A big fat wad of incoherent mythology follows, a buncha horseshit about obsidian mirrors and flesh-tearing shadows and wiener-ripping mother vampires and ages-old vendettas, all of it interspersed with the occasional slo-mo cowboy montage backed by strains of wailing harmonica.

The problems with Umbrage are legion––from the silly-ass story to the complete lack of scares to the Adam and Eve flashback rape, it’s a movie that seems ill conceived from the very beginning. Writer/director Drew Cunningham certainly has his moments of visual panache, but his best efforts as a cinematic stylist are repeatedly sodomized by his own asinine script.

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New ‘Sleepy Hollow’ Movie in the Works from Director Lindsey Anderson Beer

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Sleepy Hollow movie

Paramount is heading to Sleepy Hollow with a brand new feature film take on the classic Headless Horseman tale, with Lindsey Anderson Beer (Pet Sematary: Bloodlines) announced to direct the movie back in 2022. But is that project still happening, now two years later?

The Hollywood Reporter lets us know this afternoon that Paramount Pictures has renewed its first-look deal with Lindsey Anderson Beer, and one of the projects on the upcoming slate is the aforementioned Sleepy Hollow movie that was originally announced two years ago.

THR details, “Additional projects on the development slate include… Sleepy Hollow with Anderson Beer attached to write, direct, and produce alongside Todd Garner of Broken Road.”

You can learn more about the slate over on The Hollywood Reporter. It also includes a supernatural thriller titled Here Comes the Dark from the writers of Don’t Worry Darling.

The origin of all things Sleepy Hollow is of course Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which was first published in 1819. Tim Burton adapted the tale for the big screen in 1999, that film starring Johnny Depp as main character Ichabod Crane.

More recently, the FOX series “Sleepy Hollow” was also based on Washington Irving’s tale of Crane and the Headless Horseman. The series lasted four seasons, cancelled in 2017.

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