“This doesn’t really have to make sense,” one character says near the end of Sanguine Teeth on a Driftless Road, and he’s right. The movie doesn’t make a whole lot of sense—and it’s not supposed to. This horror comedy veers from one sequence of jokes to the next like the rented RV at the center of its story. It’s about vampires as much as Scary Movie was about a serial killer. Some viewers will love its brazen sense of humor and others won’t, but Austin Galante’s film is definitely never boring.
The title is an indicator of how Galante is trying different things. Vampire comedies aren’t new (there’s a new one on TV right now), but making this a mash-up with a road trip movie guarantees no shortage of comedic options. After all, the audience never knows who the vampires are going to come across—and yes, that includes a few hitchhikers. But that also creates a problem: there’s too much material to work with.
This movie is over two hours long, which would be a big ask for even a big-budget film. With Sanguine Teeth, it feels like the movie is this long because the jokes themselves go on too long. There’s an early instance of one main character going down to fetch a cooler, and the audience gets a huge laugh out of the visual gag of that being inside an actual cave. The problem is that gag gets stretched to the max. The audience has to watch minutes of him walking through the cave, with the camera trailing behind almost like a video game. And then when he gets to said cooler, it’s just a regular small cooler sitting randomly in the middle of the floor. The joke could’ve been a lot shorter and had a punchline of some sort of Holy Grail-esque music or an equally strange result. There are several different examples of this in the movie, where the joke is there but it goes past the viewer’s interest.
Galante also takes his time establishing the rules for vampires in this world, which leaves the viewer wondering early on how the characters are living in modern-day suburbia without having some Buffy-style problems. Once he does set the parameters, though, he has fun with the pre-existing vampire myth, as the Black vampires complain about everyone assuming that they’re pasty white guys. And that beat is kind of Sanguine Teeth on a Driftless Road in a nutshell: when the movie is focused, it’s really funny. When it’s wandering off, it’s not so successful. There’s an even better moment much later on, when a vampire hunter declares that he’s going to burn “the darkness” and the characters take that as a racial comment, leading to an aside about unintentional racism. The film is at its best when its tongue is planted firmly in cheek.
Yet it wanders more than it doesn’t, feeling like a stream of jokes more than one complete narrative. It doesn’t have to have a tightly-plotted, meticulously organized story (again, no one is coming to a movie like this expecting perfect sense), but it does need a less freewheeling structure. It’s also worth noting that a large portion of the humor is of the crude variety, with semi-regular profanity as well as several sexual and drug references. Anyone who’s watched a ’90s stoner comedy has likely heard similar material, but viewers who don’t find that kind of humor entertaining won’t enjoy this movie. It’s mildly frustrating, because those are actually the least funny jokes; the script’s best material is when Galante works clean, such as an early robbery (or is it?) or ending up with the world’s most annoying Uber driver.
There’s possibly a version of Sanguine Teeth on a Driftless Road where it’s more effective. If some of those less successful jokes are cut, and others are cut down to make them punchier, then the film also becomes shorter and the audience is engaged more. As it stands, the audience can tell that this movie was a whole lot of fun to make, and it has its moments of being fun to watch, but this party goes on too long and goes in too many directions to be a hit.
Sanguine Teeth on a Driftless Road is now streaming on Tubi and Prime Video. Photo Credit: Courtesy of the filmmakers.
Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.
