First released in 1998, Vampire Time Travelers is not an easy film to describe.

The film opens with a title crawl that informs us that, years ago, a vampire stalked the members of a sorority but fortunately, the vampire was defeated.  In fact, vampire Lorelei (Jillien Weisz) was forced into a coffin.  A cross was put on the coffin, trapping her there.  This was all apparently engineered by her sister, Natalia, who is never fully seen but who is often heard.  In the five years between Lorelei getting put in the coffin and the rest of the film, Natalia is killed by a sorority girl named …. wait for it …. Buffy.  Now, Buffy’s younger sister, Susan Ann Marie (J.J. Rodgers), is pledging to the same sorority and Natalia’s spirt wants revenge.  A man in a hood whispers to two kids that there’s copies of “Pet House” stashed in the coffin.  (Both boys look directly at the camera as a guitar riff plays on the soundtrack.)  The boy remove the cross and Lorelei is set free.

Sam — as Susan Ann Marie prefers to be called — is attending a sorority initiation at a professor’s house.  Also at the initiation is bitchy Vaughn (Lynne Baker), former tennis star Heidi (Ali Elk), surprisingly tall Jenna (Micky Roth), and aspiring rock star Zoe (Kat Facchino).  Natalia attempts to bite Sam’s neck while she’s sleeping but it turns out that she’s not strong enough.  She has to drink the blood of the other sorority sisters first.  But since she can’t find the strength to pierce anyone neck, she has to bite a different location.  “Bite her in the butt!” a bearded man says.  “Ewww, gross!” Lorelei says.  I agree!

Lorelei is not the only monster lurking in this film.  There’s also the Man Who Lives In The Closet (JC Grigg), who represents the childhood fear of something hiding in the …. well, the closet.  And then there’s The Man Who Won’t Call Back (played by the film’s director, Les Sekely), who haunts Zoe’s nightmares.  While Lorelei is forced to undergo remedial vampire training, Zoe bonds with The Man Who Lives In The Closet and Heidi seeks revenge against those who she blames for ending her tennis career.

Got all that?

There’s a lot going on in this 69-minute film and none of it is meant to be taken seriously.  Vampire Time Travelers is a SOV horror film that cheerfully sends up all of the cliches that one associates with SOV filmmaking.  The acting is intentionally over-the-top.  The dialogue is full of deliberately bad puns.  The plot is so twisty that it’s impossible to follow.  Usually, all of this would be a problem but, in this film, the incoherence is the point.  It’s not supposed to make sense.  Instead, the film is about tossing out one joke after another and seeing how many of them work.  For every joke that falls flat, there’s one that works wonderfully.  I laughed a lot more than I thought I would.  This movie may be crude but it’s also surprisingly clever.

Vampire Time Travelers is an effective SOV mix of horror and comedy.  It took me totally by surprise.