2024 Movie Gauntlet - 32: Watch a Canadian movie
I added this movie to my watchlist last year after completing my
Mad Men rewatch, when I found myself scrolling through Jessica Paré’s filmography. She had some interesting and varied work pre-
MM, and this was my first time finally dipping a toe into any of it.
Suck is a low-budget, campy, vampy Canadian horror-comedy that is so extremely right up my alley that I’m really sad it never seemed to have made a splash in the US when it was released back in 2009. It features Jessica as a goth bass-playing vampire hottie slowly propelling her touring local rock band to stardom while evading a vampire hunter literally named
Eddie Van Helsing (played by Malcom McDowell). There’s also a string of fun cameos from Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Moby, Henry Rollins and more — my personal favorite being Rush’s Alex Lifeson playing a border agent who happily proclaims at one point, “I used to be in a band! So fun!”
Despite its clear budget constraints, this came off to me as a very imaginative and fun movie, with these cool stop-motion transition sequences, several nods to classic rock imagery, lots of spooky vampire makeup and a handful of perverted jokes. Plus the soundtrack, stuffed full of original songs created for our protagonist’s in-movie band, really worked for me, and I found myself wishing it had some sort of physical media release. I could see this one pairing well with something like
Repo! The Genetic Opera … might have to do a double feature in the future!
