One of the coolest aspects of the Phoenix Film Festival is that it encompasses The International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival. When the sun goes down, the bodies pile up.

The horror/sci-fi screenings kicked of Friday, April 7, and I caught two of them: the Finnish slasher film Lake Bodom and the screwball comedy The Night Watchmen.

Lake Bodom

This film (in Finnish with English subtitles) riffs off a real-life unsolved crime in 1960, in which two teenage couples were stabbed and bludgeoned during the night while camping by Lake Bodom, near Espoo, Finland. Three of the four were killed, the fourth injured severely.

In the movie, directed by Taneli Mustonen, another set of teens – two girls and two guys – camp at the site where the 1960 incident took place. The guys ostensibly want to re-enact the crime to test a theory. To lure the girls into coming along, the guys tell them they’re going go a party at a lakeside cabin. The girls play along but have their own agendas.

It’s never clear that the characters are two couples. Elias (Mikael Gabriel) and Nora (Mimosa Willamo) swim together in their underwear and then retreat to the tent, but the film is ambiguous about what, if any, shenanigans take place therein. Ida (Nelly Hirst-Gee) and Atte (Santeri Helinheimo Mäntylä) hang out by the campfire until they decide it’s safe to join their friends in the tent – that Elias and Nora probably are done doing whatever they were doing.

But if that last point implies that Elias and Nora were fooling around, one might expect them to die first, according to convention for slasher films. Instead, socially awkward Atte is the first to go, stabbed from behind while poking his head into the tent to speak with Ida, who can’t see the attacker.

Elias is the alpha male, a heavily tattooed, Polynesian-looking guy who seems out of place in rural Finland. Atte is a geek, a long-haired guy with self-esteem issues. Ida is a stunning blonde trying to emerge from a dark period in her past, her face masked in sadness. Her friend Nora is wild, tomboyish brunette.

Like many Scandinavian films, Lake Bodem is visually dark and austere. The production quality is professional, and there is some interesting camera work.

As the various teens’ agendas emerge, the plot takes a number of surprising twists, perhaps too many. I found the conclusion to be muddled, with little explanation or motive.

Variety reported in February that the AMC Networks-backed genre streaming service Shudder had picked up the rights to Lake Bodom and would start streaming it in May.

The Night Watchmen

One of the slogans for The Night Watchmen is: “Some men were born to be heroes. … It wasn’t these guys.”

Following a somber, suspenseful Scandinavian film, a ridiculous tale of vampire clowns terrorizing a Baltimore newspaper office was just what the doctor ordered. And, apparently, legendary Baltimore filmmaker John Waters had nothing to do with it.

The co-creators, Ken Arnold and Dan DeLuca, play two of the security guards. Arnold’s Ken is the nominal leader, while DeLuca’s Luca is the mysterious, scary one. The team of watchmen is rounded out by Kevin Jiggetts, playing Ken’s sidekick Jiggetts, a pot-loving African-American Jew, and Max Gray Wilbur as a washed-up rock musician in his first night on the job.

Following their mysterious deaths while performing in Romania, Baltimore icon Blimpo the Clown and his troupe are shipped home for medical testing. After a delivery mixup leaves Blimpo’s coffin at the newspaper building instead of the medical facility down the block, pervy newspaper owner Randall (James Remar, the only cast member that a viewer is likely to recognize) forces is it open, releasing Vampire Blimpo.

The four inept night watchmen and hot-chick newspaper editor Karen (Kara Luiz) must band together like sad-sack Guardians of the Galaxy to fight off the vampire clowns and the newly undead newspaper employees they have created.

During a Q&A after the screening, Arnold said he and DeLuca dreamed up the project to amuse themselves between jobs and that their overriding priority was to make people laugh. That they don’t take themselves or their movie too seriously is obvious from the look of the film, the cheesy dialogue and the silly subplots.

Along the way, however, The Night Watchmen lampoons the conventions of the horror, vampire and zombie genres. The movie gushes bodily fluids, but in a manner that is silly, not scary, goofy not gory. At one point, after encountering some really disgusting vampire clowns, Karen grumbles that she watched every season of HBO’s True Blood and it was nothing like this.

It’s worth noting that, for fans of horror, vampire and zombie movies, The Night Watchmen is full of Easter Eggs that pay homage to previous films in those genres. Besides amusing themselves, the writers clearly are offering middlebrow comedy for a highbrow audience. They hit their mark.

Arnold said a distribution deal for The Night Watchmen is in the works.

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Stu Robinson does writing, editing, media relations and social media through his business, Phoenix-based Lightbulb Communications.

Tags: Dan DeLuca, International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, James Remar, Kara Luiz, Ken Arnold, Kevin Jiggetts, Lake Bodom, Max Gray Wilbur, Mikael Gabriel, Mimosa Willamo, Nelly Hirst-Gee, Phoenix Film Festival, Santeri Helinheimo Mäntylä, Taneli Mustonen, The Night Watchmen