Vampire biker midgets. Three words that, when used separately fall into the proverbial "hit or miss" category with the latter more often than not being a guaranteed "hit" in my book... which is bound in the flesh of the non-believer and inked in the blood of priests and pornographers.

Vampires are only as good as their characters. You could have all the power in the world, but if you're a moping little piss ant who sobs about his station in life as an immortal parasite not worthy of being seen by the eyes of man because you had a moment of weakness 400 years ago in a back alley in Paris, then do the world a favor and stab yourself in the eyes with Linda Blair's crotchafix. You can also make or break a bloodsucker not so much on their attitude, but with the extent of their power and how they use it. You can be Captain Asskick, but even if you spend half the movie showing how invincible you are and unkillable you may be, all your fang cred goes down the shit bowl if you forget what time of day it is and wind up roasted in the day's first cancer rays or don't realize that your coffin is stored in a room with barrels of flammable liquids. In short, das whampir can be classic cool ala Near Dark or Vampires In Havana or they can be Cleveland Steamer lame circa Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula or Vampire$... that's right, Vampire$ sucks and John Carpenter lives solely off the blind praise of his fans. The man hasn't done anything worthwhile since... hmmmm... let me get back to you on that.

Bikers are usually pretty cool, but much like vampires it can take one simple character flaw to break them from this stereotype of badassitry. I'm not talking the rice burning, jumpsuit wearing, wheelie popping, rap video making, "Ruff Ryder", "Biker Boyz" clowns neither, but the staples of American culture. They can be the rough and tough, "push everybody around because they're bigger and meaner looking than everybody else" variety or they can be the pseudo rough and tough, "come out at the last minute with a heart of gold to help the lost puppy/desperate family/goofy man-child on a mission to find his stolen bicycle" type that makes me ashamed to ride a Harley, grow a beard and screw fat biker sluts. You all know what I'm talking about.

As for midgets, well, you can't go wrong with midgets. It's movie commandment seventeen, article three, subsection theta: Thou Shalt Make Thine Film Superior With The Inclusion Of Thy Lord's Earthly Jester - Yon Half-Man. Midgets make the world go round. And when they're drunk? If you missed Vern "Austin Powers In The Spy Who Shagged Me" Troyer during his disturbing run on VH1's "The Surreal Life", then you missed a whole season of drunken half-pint debauchery that made my Shasta go all McNasty!... and if you got that joke and you're NOT Jake Busey, punch yourself really hard in the head and pray for amnesia.

It would be easy for an amateur movie crew to botch any one of these three elements, but it takes a true team of professional ass-jackers utilizing all the dark forces at their disposal to ruin all three... or a group of completely incompetent morons with their heads firmly planted up each others' asses and not the faintest trace of skill or talent between them. Figure out which one made Ankle Biters.

Yes, even the sacred folk-of-diminutive-stature who have fought so hard to earn their respected place as living punchlines were not spared the idiocy and inabilities set forth upon them by the Coalition for Ruining My Life: a non-profit organization dedicated to breaking me down to my basest form of self-loathing for purposes of their own amusement. How could such a bastard stepchild of abuse and grotesquery have been conceived? What were the debaucherous events and skin crawling situations from which such unloved and vomit spewing stupidity were hatched?! I'm gonna guess it went a little something like this... cue the "Unsolved Mysteries" music Tinfoilio, I'm going into dramatization mode.

*Initializing Robert Stack Voice Modulator*

Picture if you will a darkly lit room in a small Southern town (possibly a place called Belton, somewhere in Georgia). Local grease monkey Adam Minarovich has topped off a long day of tuning cars, tweaking spark plugs and inhaling deadly amounts of carbon monoxide with a typical night at Skanky's Bar and Topless Fine Dining Establishment where he goes to drink himself into a stupor until his crack whore sister Shelby gets off the stage after the 2am donkey show special: fun for the whole family and kids' appetizers half-off. Adam, Shelby and their seven deformed inbred children (all lacking lower jaws and at least four chromosomes each) head back to the Minarovich residence for coffee ice cream, WD40 and a few rocks of crack cocaine before bed time. While the children convulse soundly under their soiled sheets, mommy and daddy/brother relax in the living room, watching the former rental video copy of Blade they bought each other for Christmas from Ed's VHS Repair and Rental Castle. While Shelby's teeth soak in a fizzing glass on the nightstand, her ragged gums massage Adam's member with the love and gentle caress that only a drug addled sister can provide. Adam watches the movie and suddenly has the epiphany that, "Hey, if a colored can make money off’n these movies, why caint I?! How hard cun it be to make uh movie like this?!". The idea raced through his mind all that night and distracted him in the shop the next day, where one of his toes was severed in an auto shop accident.

In an effort to keep Adam from making things "too legal" with the accident, Mr. Minarovich was offered a video camera and two days paid vacation from the shop's owner. Excited that the means to his newly realized life-long goal were being provided to him at the cost of something as insignificant as a toe (not even a big toe at that!), Adam quickly took the offer and signed several papers clearing his employer of any and all responsibility for the incident. Eager to share his dreams of fame and stardom with his chums, Skanky's was abuzz that night with Adam's talk of the future blockbuster that would cost him only pennies to make, but would net himself and his friends billions in box office revenues. How did he plan to improve upon Blade's formula of a half-breed human-vampire hunting his bloodsucking brethren to cleanse the world of their tainting influence? Dwarves.

Luckily for Adam his beloved hometown (or at least the town on whose borders he parked his trailer) had the highest dwarf-to-norm ratio in the state thanks to the now abandoned birth control pill factory whose unregulated chemical run-off was emptied into the local water supply back in the late sixties. This went on for eight long years before the company finally had to close down, not for environmental contamination or anything, simply because labor was cheaper in Mexico and the people didn't speak English.

And so, with a cast of drunken bikers, old men who were in town for the annual antique car show, the Skanky's employees and six midgets, Adam went about giving his dream form, molding it in a clay of incompetence with hands strengthened by ignorance. Ankle Biters was torn from the bleeding, hemorrhaging womb of irredeemable bad moviedom to be used as a deterrent for bad children, an initiation for fraternities allergic to alcohol and a legitimate source for "temporary insanity" defenses in the American legal system. Congratulations Adam, you've earned yourself a comfy little spot nestled between Hitler's ass cheeks for eternity as a Nazi dingleberry.

As for the cinematic afterbirth that we're left with, I'll break it down for everyone in the simplest of ways to expedite this trial by (rectal) fire. Drexel Vennis (wha?!) is a half-vampire, half-human hybrid who feels it necessary to go around killing the undead bloodsuckers of the world. Why? Cuz that's what they did in Blade. However, whereas Wesley Snipes had tough street attitude and martial arts ass-kicketry to back up his crusade, "Drexel" relies on his unbearably weak Clint Eastwood impressions and what equates to three minutes of a Tae Bo lesson, which he utilizes to their fullest extents to make himself look like a walking, talking, about-as-useful-as-a-blunt-rock-on-a-busted-carborator, certified tool... and I'm not talking Craftsman™ here, but more like Crapsman™...

As if Captain Punchline wasn't already batting a solid goose egg, Wesley Snipes had Kris Kristofferson as his aged gun happy sidekick, while all Drexel could afford was a pint-sized biker thug named T-Bone (the only film roll of Michael Moore... not that guy, the other one... no, not him either... yeah, the 3' tall one, that's the guy) who spends his time either having short jokes thrown at him by our "hero", distracting the bad guys by making himself an easy target or playing the role of the general liability that distracts the hero from doing his job long enough to let the bad guys get away and carry out their evil schemes.

Speaking of said evil schemes, there's a gang (i.e. trio) of fanged biker dwarves whom Vennis and Bone just can't seem to finish off for the life of 'em... because that would end the movie and WHO NEEDS THAT?! Seems these pint-sized withdrawal artists from the Blood Bank are the only vampires left (which completely goes against the whole theory of "survival of the fittest"...) and, for whatever reason, are only able to infect other midgets with their carnivorous disease and not the other 99.9975% of the population. Why this is is never explained, but the solution to the problem is when two antiques dealers (supposedly from Europe... and both of which look and sound like they just fell off the manure spreader) come halfway around the world to a nameless backwater shitburg town to sell a supposedly rare and valuable sword to a mysterious collector on an abandoned bridge in the middle of nowhere... give my brain a minute to bring the swelling down to a more operational level.

Wait! I liked The Thing! That was the last useful thing John Carpenter's done for society! Okay, anyway...

Seems this rare and valuable sword (no doubt purchased from one of those late night "decorative knife and samurai sword sales extravaganzas" for three easy payments of $19.95 with Mr. Minarovich's MasterCard after a freshly polished off case of Miller Lite) is decorated with a jewel (*cough*plastic*cough*) imbued with the blood of the last normal sized vampire. This bloodstone thus gives the wielder of the sword the ability to transform any normal sized human into a vampire when run through with the pig sticker of power. This opens up a whole new barrel of radioactively endowed super worms that come burrowing through my forebrain, sucking out my eyes and eating their way through my innards with the pain of nuclear fire before exploding from my ass and tap dancing on my hollowed, still living body... And by that I of course mean it's time to go sprinting merrily into my next diatribe!

Why are the only vampires left on Earth dwarves?! The rules say that mini-vampires can only infect mini-people, but I'm assuming the same doesn't apply to norms? If norms and short-stacks could only infect each other based on height, then where did the first half-pint vampire come from?! Furthermore, can a midget infect ALL other midgets, or only midgets smaller than themselves? Can these shorty ghouls infect norm children? Is this some kind of psychosomatic vampire carnival ride with a "You Must Be This Tall..." height requirement thrown into the fine print?! WHY ARE ALL THESE FUCKING VAMPIRES STROLLING AROUND IN DAYLIGHT!? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHY ARE ALL THESE WORLD CHANGING EVENTS HAPPENING IN A SMALL REDNECK TOWN 300 MILES FROM CIVILIZATION?!

Okay, those two I can at least answer: these vampires' only real weakness is budget restraints, which means they're unaffected by sunlight because lighting setups for night scenes cost too much (i.e. "more than zero") and they're operating out of Bumblefuck Arkansas because it's the only modicum of established civilization where filming doesn't require a permit and extras work for day old cheese fries. As for everything else, I guess you could whip out the universal fix-all known as the "they made this shit up as they went along" protocol and save yourself a lot of aneurysms.

The evil dwarves kill the antiques dealer (who just kinda lies still while the pint-sized pint-suckers feed off of his lower extremities...) while the old man's trigger-happy, f-bombing little bitchface sidekick ("I toldja I was gunna bust some caps!") manages to escape, whimpering like the proverbial little girl with a skinned knee... which I never really thought of as an absurd thing, cuz if you skin your knee (especially on asphalt), you're gonna shed a tear and pop out that fit lip whatever your age or gender. Anyway, back to Drex and Bone, they pay a visit to a local lower class drinking establishment whose owner has been fingered for passing out party fliers for the mini-Nosferatu and their rave parties... seriously though, can you really call a room full of late-twenties-to-thirty-somethings ambling around a room lit by various novelty party lights purchased at Spencer's Gifts™ a "rave"? Maybe "down south" they do, but us Yankees up north call that the saddest looking singles night ever... and I mean EVER! E-V-E-R! As in "encompassing all of time and space, past present and future"! You could shove your hand up Dom Deluise's heavily greased cornhole and pull out almost anything better than what these backwoods longtooths are trying to pass off here!

You know, I always used to laugh at those little teeny douche bags who cut themselves to deal with the "pain and suffering" brought on by living at their parents' homes for free and having no responsibilities beyond going to school and having friends, but I'm starting to see the appeal in "pain as a distraction" right now. I'm not kidding either. You won't catch me with little retarded 'x's carved into my arms or whiny phrases scarred all over my chest, but I'm just telling you to be prepared if you find various gangrenous pock marks all over my genitals from getting too intimate with a lit cigarette a time or two.

It's like Demonicus all over again...

Prepared to unleash Hell (or the "Trailer Park Disneyland" equivalent of it), the dwarven death dealers seek out the perfect target to serve as their new sucking savior. With few options in their podunk base of operations, the bite-size bad guys choose, well, a fat guy in a wife beater… whom they pay by eating him alive, of course. The guy’s a 6ft tall, 300lb biker mechanic who looks and acts like every stereotype of a motorcycle enthusiast should... except for the eternal damnation of the soul he shall suffer in Harley Hell for owning a Yamaha... or as the vamps pronounce it in their ritual chant, "Yah-Mah-Hah". The fleshy golem is turned with ease (because even one of such stature as he can't seem to fend off the equivalent of a gang of preschoolers in Junior Hells Angels wear) and Bubba sure enough proves to be too much for our grimacing, raspily whispering half-and-half hero when the two norms (well, for vampires) square off for the first time in one of the most bizarre fight scenes ever.

At first I thought it was just terrible choreography, scrod-awful film reversal and a single pointless back flip performed for absolutely no reason, but when I watched it a second time my brain started to short circuit. Between my screaming "Johnny Five Alive!" (*wink*wink*pun*pun*) and randomly blinking my eyes in some kind of chaotic nexus pattern, something started to think this incompetence was intentional in a "Salvador Dali of redneck home horror movies" kinda way... until I pulled a groin muscle trying to do cartwheels in my apartment, which ripped my somersaulting consciousness back into the agonizing reality of what I was really watching.

The fight itself is interfered in by an old guy whose mouth looks like a "how to" on pissing off your dentist, when Gummy Joe starts firing off arrows into the melee... and by "firing off arrows", I don't mean he rains down a volley of pointy pain neither, but rather he stands in place, struggling to pull back the string of his compound bow and maintain the pose while fatty pulls an arrow out of his kidneys and Blade Lite walks around doing nothing of interest and letting the bad guys casually drive away at a leisurely speed so as not to mess up their beard hair... so much beard hair...

Realizing that the world (or even East Bumblefuck for that matter) can't be overthrown by one biker and his stumpy limbed amigos, the vamps go about recruiting a few more average-sized minions. On the other side of the coin, realizing that a wanna-be Clint Eastwood and a midget in a do-rag won't be enough to save the world (or even East Bumblefuck for that matter) from the oncoming vampire "apocalypse", Drex and Boner recruit help in the form of Bubba's useless sister and a few old men with shiny antique cars and a private arsenal of firearms that will hopefully be confiscated from them once I notify the authorities of this abomination in my full police report. While he's out cleaning up a "rave" with his new buddies though, Drex loses his beloved Boner companion when a raid by the undead (once again, see Blade about this) on the good guys' headquarters leaves the little turd croaked and revoked... meaning they make him into a vampire... sorry, I try to type something that sounds interesting and more often than not it tends not to make any sense. You probably figured that out by now. I'll just continue.

Instead of the semi-poignant scene from Blade where Snipes has to kill Kristofferson instead of letting his old friend become a vampire (and completely glossing over this fact later on in Blade II...), we get a muy macho "emotional scenes between guys are for fags" fight between Drex and Mr. T(-Bone) that culminates in TB bitin' the big blood sammich as three minutes of overbearing testosterone and darkness drown the audience in another round through the doldrums. Afterwards, Drex and his refugees from the vampire slayer retirement home do a three minute "guys loading guns and sheathing knives" scene (not kidding, it's literally THREE MINUTES LONG!), which is immediately followed by an equally uninteresting three minutes of the bloodsuckers pacing a joint called "SNUFFY'S" (in whose parking lot there are numerous "motorcycle-car" type vehicles like the one the midget patrol scoots around in, conveniently enough) before turning all the leather-clad, billiard balling patrons within into fodder for the coming rumble-to-be.

Speaking of which, the brawl for it all between the quartet of Nosferatu exterminators (whose combined age is probably more than that of the 15 or so ghouls they're facing off against...) and the drunken vampire extras takes place in, you guessed it, the cheapest of all set locations: the storage lot for a lumberyard!... no doubt owned by or at least employing of one or more members of the cast or their "kin". So, who will win when a "wish he were a tough guy" hero, a "short on dental insurance" codger, his geezerly old sidekick and their overweight “Wyatt Earp wanna-be" partner trade fists, blanks, boots, a few squibs, a very brief glimpse of home computer graphical editing, MORE bad choreography, MORE pointless back flips, MORE reversed film leaps and a few syringes of anti-vampire blood coagulant (remember, gotta rip off ALL of Blade, otherwise the movie will just look half-assed) with the party posse from six feet under amidst the back drop of your neighborhood Home Depot™? Well, all the good guys live, all the bad guys die and we learn what happens when Drexel gets injected with his own anti-vampire cocktail. Here's a hint, "It's either gonna kill him or make him a helluva lot stronger"... with no offense meant to the fine people at Helluva Good™ cheese manufacturers.

Just when it looks like Drexel might finally have disappeared from our Fuck Awful Radar systems, our Dopplers are raped with a "Nine Months Later, Atlanta" epilogue (if by "Atlanta" you mean it was shot a few miles down the road from Lady Atlanta's Adult Book Store and Discount Bordello) as Drex and his pals hunt down a stray mini-sucker who was about to target a four year old girl for dinner. With that the credits role and we all die a little inside... unless you actually watched all of this crap, in which case you will continue to die inside from the bowel obstructing tumor this movie has implanted into the core of your being.

Credits highlights/lowlights include the inclusion of Elmo and Mitsy Fagg as "Biker Bartender" and "Biker Waitress" respectively; the Biker Vampires being cast under one credit as "HMD Trike and Rod Riders of Belton" (huh huh, "Rod Riders"); a grammatical error in the crediting of the Art Director as "Chris SMith" (not so much the capitalization of the 'M' in "SMith" as the error of saying any of this movie was either "art" or "directed" in any way); crediting Snuffy's bar as "Snuffey's Bar" after already showing us there's no 'e' while blatantly displaying the bar's banner in the movie; mistakenly thanking the City of Ware Shoals (not because the movie wasn't filmed in Ware Shoals mind you, but simply because I now know where to send the napalm); and finally for telling us that "No animals were harmed during the making of this film but several actors were", because you guys have no idea what real pain in. You were in the movie, not watching it like I was. This alone is enough to warrant my melting the flesh from your body and rending it with pork fat before pouring it down the throats of your loved ones and catching it in a cauldron as it runs boiling through their large intestines, then cooling it and serving to you through a tube formerly used to hold samples of AIDS infected blood. You want to know pain? As per our pal Pinhead, "We have an eternity to show you pain".

As if I had to explain the loathing I have toward this shitbag any further (Come on, like you wouldn't hold any malice toward an obese toothless woman in a vinyl bikini rubbing her feces all over your chest and cleaning your teeth and gums with a toothbrush bristled with strands of her pubic hair as you sit helplessly shackled to a wall trying to breath through the used tampons shoved up your nose?! Exactly.), allow me to dip into the non-story specific missteps of this clumsy toe-crushing redneck waltz. As far as the look and feel of the flick, we're forced to digest horrible off-balanced audio that forgets to mike the actors one minute and pops and screams in your ears the next, compounded with torturous acting (I haven't seen anything this stiff since I mistook those Viagra™ for Tylenol™ *rimshot*) and a soundtrack that busts the hammers, anvils AND drums of my ears with a generic metal and hip-hop fusion topped out with garbled shouting that fades out to an even more generic acoustic "cowboy" guitar solo. As if my ears weren't filled with enough noise pollution, my eyes are heavily salted with nut punching video editing thanks to lazy film reversal work, little-to-no lighting beyond the great floodlight in the sky, the back-and-forth jumps between the only two lenses the cameraman had to work with (which you can easily spot because one of the lenses leaves a black frame at the corners of the screen...) and special effects that consist of fake blood and plastic fangs on a cast of fugly podunkies. Okay, I can understand, forgive and sometimes even applaud the use of "normal people" in a cast (not only for budget but for "realism" of the story) but they should at least be able to act as normal as they look, not like there are 10" splinters lodged under their toenails. Want a perfect example of how using "normal" people can actually work? Three words: Hide and Creep.

The final six nails in this coffin? "Three feet tall, two inch fangs". When your theme music is that line screamed repeatedly over a bed of auditory ass lettuce, you don't just get the thumbs down, you get the "thumb dragged slowly and violently across the throat as a sign of violent execution in your immediate future"... which I'm doing right now, but since this is the internet, you can't really see it, so it loses it's effect.

Or does it?

Though we all know now that I hate it and will burn it once the screen shots are taken (rental copy or not!), the important question is whether or not Ankle Biters will appeal to you. If all you need for a movie experience is 90 minutes of antique cars, bikers, midgets, custom motorcycles, guns and guys in trenchcoats acting tough and sounding like they're trying to speak their lines with a golf ball lodged in their trachea, then you may have just found your Nirvana. If you need more substance to your viewing experiences or any/all of these things either don't fit your own personal bill or flat out turn you off in any way, then run for the hills, get your guns and take up siege positions around every small town in the Southern US cuz this kinda shit needs to be prevented from happening again for the sake of future generations. History is written by the victors, so let's make sure that Ankle Biters and Adam Minarovich (or all bearing the Minarovich name for that matter) lose in life and are made to suffer for it by being forever forgotten and erased from the annals of bad movie history.