Never invite a vampire into your house. It’s oldest rule in horror. Follow that rule, and they’re stuck outside being weird and mopey. But…what if a vampire is the owner of your apartment? The owner of an entire apartment complex even? What then? Remington Smith takes this simple concept and uses it as a springboard into a gritty neo-Western tale of class and race with LandLord.
When the Bounty Hunter shows up at the Shadowbrook Apartment Complex to collect a briefcase from some unsavory so and so, the last thing she expects is to walk in on a well-dressed white man trying to eat a child. Soon, she and Alex (the unfortunate child) are on the run, desperately trying to outwit the owner of Shadowbrook: a morose but merciless and well-connected vampire looking for his next heir. The problem is that said vampire owns “half the buildings in town” so it’s impossible to guess where is safe. Without a car and with the vampire and the police force he has on the take hot on their heels, the Bounty Hunter is running out of options.
This film is the definition of “unpolished.” It’s rough around the edges, and the acting isn’t the best at times, but it absolutely shines. There’s a sincerity, an earnestness, that really pushes this film over the finish line. Smith could have very easily let the film rest on its horror laurels but instead chose to inject a sense of classic spaghetti western into it: a rough and rugged bounty hunter who remains unnamed forced into the role of protector by circumstances beyond their control, a corrupt local government, an unscrupulous authority figure: this film has it all. There’s also a welcome hint of southern gothic sprinkled in only have the vampiric hijinks been going on for some time now but that the humans in this town have mastered the art of looking the other way. A minister being not just a source of holy weaponry against the vampire but also as a bullhorn against the injustice of Black and poor people being exploited by the rich, make it a welcome change from the usual role of religion in vampire films as merely a weapon and not an engine of social justice.
Smith’s clear message of class and racial exploitation (White landlord literally sucking his tenants dry while authorities pretend nothing is happening) rings clear throughout the entire movie and might strike too close to home for some. Indeed, the shot of several armed White vigilantes outside a Black church is unfortunately far more of a historical recreation than the rest of the movie. The vampire choosing a Black man as his Renfield instead of one of the White cops is a choice as well, stringing them along with promises of immortality if they do just one more thing for them. In other words, he’s using someone who has everything to lose to do his dirtiest work. There’s also a shot of the vampire sadly watching footage of the sun rising that doesn’t just give the character itself an unexpected touch of humanity, but also offers a sharp criticism of someone obsessed with the accumulation of wealth: all the money in the world can’t give you happiness when there’s just one thing you can’t have.
This film is a bit long for my taste, but it’s an absolute joy nonetheless. Smith knows what they’re trying to say and exactly how to say it. There’s no sugarcoating the circumstances of the characters, no silver bullet (not from a narrative sense anyway) that leads them to a happy ending, no easy way out. Smith offers a vision of a world in which justice must be wrenched from the hands of the powerful and sacrifices must be made to do so.
