So: a couple of years and a whole pandemic ago talented stop-motion animator Mike Mort managed to get finished a decent-budgeted project that he'd been developing for almost two decades. It got stuck in distribution limbo for a few years, and finally was released without making a huge splash.
Chuck Steel (voiced with aplomb by the director) is a charmless slab of beefcake, a joyless action hero with his face permanently stuck in a Billy Idol sneer; Guess it cuts down the animation budget.
He is a maverick, a lone wolf, a loose cannon, a renegade cop on the edge - that's how he literally defines himself in dialog. No punchline, just the movie informing us that it's aware of conventions without bothering to make it into a joke. Chuck lives in a spartan apartment with workout equipment and hidden gun racks in the walls (of course) but he's one of those ascetic, healthy antiheroes; Given that the main adversaries in the movie prey on alcoholics, it seems like a minor wasted opportunity not to make him into one of those cops who wake up to have whiskey for breakfast. Oh well.
He's... kind of a lame protagonist to hang a movie on, to be honest: an uninteresting caricature played too straight to be funny. Luckily there's all sorts of craziness around him - some of it cringeworthy, some of it fun, but with enough variety and energy that the movie is never boring. He goes through partners so quickly his only options by the time the movie rolls are a swedish exchange policewoman, a monkey and a houseplant. His boss Jack Schitt* (also voiced by Mort, but much less convincingly) is a tired old hardass boss stereotype, with the addition that he's trying crossdressing because... crossdressing is funny, apparently. In fact, most of the police force have been rendered inept due to sensitivity training, which is a (relatively funny in concept if not execution) plot point.
Chuck soon teams up with Professor Van Rental, an old vampire hunter who is fighting against Trampires, which he's careful to point out are tramp vampires but as in hobo vampires, not floozie vampires - they'd more accurately be called bum vampires, but that just sounds wrong. These undead feed only on drunk victims, and can only be killed by standard vampire-killing methods, except that the stake has to be through the liver, and it's holy coffee instead of holy water.
The trampires are building up to an apocalyptic ritual, led by a mysterious master, and there's a prophecy, talk of chosen ones and whatnot. It's all appropriately ridiculous and fun, and the vampire designs are excellent- more than making up for the more normal characters being unmemorable.
The script is the weakest link; It veers wildly between being played as a relatively straight 80's action movie, and then having some wacky comedy shit thrown in. Sometimes it seems to be going for satire but then completely forgets to add in some humor (Steel describing himself in a letany of 80's action hero descriptors is a good example.) It's weirdly lazy, often relying on us recognizing shit rather than coming up with a comedic or cool take on it.
Still, a few of the jokes and visual gags do land, and others are audatious enough in concept or execution that you can't help but laugh. Just thinking about all the work and care it must have taken to lavishly animate a pig's bloated, pendulous ballsack still makes me laugh; Guess I'm easily amused.
Also: there's a scene where they cut someone in half, kick someone in the balls, the disembodied testicles fly up through the severed torso, and then someone shoots the balls with a shotgun. I have no idea how this movie didn't get an oscar in the Balls category.
Oh, and be warned - a lot of the humour relies on making fun of what I'll euphemistically term 'modern concerns'. The director has blamed some of the distribution difficulties on, I quote, 'the world had become a PC hellscape since we started the film', so I guess if that bothers you, well, you might want to avoid this. For the record, most of the jokes at PC's expense all fall on the cringe side -very lame, sub-South Park stuff- so I guess the point goes to the woke crowd.
The animation varies in quality too, but most of it's pretty impressive. There's all sorts of action scenes, including a Delta Force-style-motorcycle-assisted fight against ninjas, a car chase with huge explosions, and lots and lots of brawls and shootouts. It's bloody, too, with frequent and extremely cool flesh-melting effects. It doesn't have the polish of an Aardman or Laika release, obviously, but it's as close as anyone's got, and there's a ton of puppets and sets and a lot of obvious craft on display.
I'm not a fan of the music, which leans hair metal, but there's a couple of Manowar and Judas songs on the soundtrack.
* He is, indeed, too old for this shit
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