Children of the night, shut up: What We Do in the Shadows is a riotous vampire mock-doc

What We Do in the Shadows asks a question we didn't know needed answering: Can a bunch of vampires share a house without driving each other crazy?

According to this film, a quartet of squabbling bloodsuckers lives in a run-down manor in Wellington, New Zealand, where a documentary crew outfitted with cameras and crucifixes films their day-to-day (or night-to-night) happenings. There's neat-freak dandy Viago (Taika Waititi), seductive torturer Vladislav (Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement) and wannabe fashion plate Deacon (Jonathan Brugh).

Their usual routine of going out at night, frequenting hotspots and finding victims to drain gets thrown for a loop when Petyr, their Nosferatu-looking flatmate, bites Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), a mortal whose loose lips and douchey, brotastic attitude eventually bring some unwanted attention to the boys. (He enjoys telling people he's like "the main guy from Twilight.") He also has a human best mate (Stuart Rutherford) who introduces the guys to less otherworldly wonders — stuff like cellphones and Internet browsing.

Practically an absurdist comic response to last year's Jim Jarmusch-directed vampire reverie Only Lovers Left Alive (which was already pretty funny in its own right), Shadows is one macabre, amusingly farcical mockumentary. Clement and Waititi (who wrote and directed in tandem) serve up some impressive visual effects — and even more impressive gags — in creating this gory, guffaw-inducing future midnight-movie favorite. The movie is quite funny, with the cast obviously pulling subtle yet effective moments of ad-libbed hilarity when they're not also trying to make you shriek.

It helps that the vampires are too neurotic and bumbling to be seen as menacing. Clement, Waititi and most of the cast portray these princes of darkness as clumsy, lonely bachelors who just happen to have gifts for hypnosis, levitating and staying young forever. They stay sympathetic even when they're chowing down on necks and hitting veins that make blood spurt like water fountains. Even the other monsters, like the werewolves (crankily led by Conchords crony Rhys Darby) and the zombies, are everyday shmoes trying to keep their cravings at bay, just like the rest of us.

A cleverly constructed riot that wrings constant laughs from its premise without bleeding it dry, What We Do in the Shadows is also another reminder that maybe we should leave vampire movies to independent filmmakers. They appear to be the only ones who make films like these that are worth a damn.

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