It ain’t easy making cheap exploitation movies in a time when Hollywood studios are the ones rolling out the monster movies, slasher flicks and gore-fests starring guys in togas. But Ottawa filmmaker Lee Demarbre and his collaborators have been fighting the sleazy fight for 10 years now, making a series of Z-grade productions that would have been primo fodder for the continent’s grindhouses if they hadn’t all been demolished to make way for condos.
Making its Toronto premiere at The Royal (608 College) this weekend (Feb. 15-16), The Dead Sleep Easy is the follow-up to the much-cherished Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. It’s something of a step forward, Demarbre moving beyond cheeky genre territory toward something that’s both artistically ambitious and totally skeezy. Made in Mexico for $20,000 and starring wrestler Ian “Vampiro” Hodgkinson, it’s a squalid yet oddly heartfelt combination of overripe melodrama, lucha libre action pic and homage to that most macho of auteurs, Sam Peckinpah. While Demarbre’s newly lofty aims may often be too much for his cast and his budget to handle, The Dead Sleep Easy offers plenty o’ bruising action sequences and more egregious scenes of cocaine abuse than a home movie by Amy Winehouse.
As was the case with Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, the hoots and hollers of a rowdy audience is really what completes the grindhouse experience promised here. And if exploitation moviemakers are a vanishing breed, then Demarbre is gonna make like Pike Bishop and die on his feet.