Suck

• Made on a CAD $3.5 million budget with principal photography wrapping in just 20 days, shooting in and around Toronto's real underground clubs and bars starting November 23, 2008.
• The rocker cameos play against type: Alice Cooper plays a deadpan vampire bartender, Iggy Pop plays the band's producer (a character actually named Victor), Henry Rollins plays a radio DJ, and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson turns up as a border guard.
• Moby — a famously outspoken vegan — plays "Beef" Bellows, frontman of a rival band called the Secretaries of Steak whose stage gimmick is having raw meat thrown at them, a joke built entirely on his real-life persona.
• Malcolm McDowell's vampire hunter Eddie Van Helsing chases the band around with a flashlight because, in one of the film's running gags, he's afraid of the dark.
• A flashback sequence splices in real archival footage from Malcolm McDowell's 1973 film O Lucky Man!
• The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2009, and later screened at SXSW 2010, drawing a mixed critical reception.

The band's name — The Winners — drips with bitter irony throughout: every character who "wins" fame through vampirism loses their humanity, suggesting the film's monster metaphor is really about the transactional soul-death of the music industry, where you only become a star by becoming something that feeds on others.

Jennifer doesn't get attacked so much as she chooses to leave with Queenie after a show — the film frames her turn as an act of appetite, not a violation. Read that way, the vampirism is less a curse than the moment she stops playing bass in someone else's band and starts wanting something for herself.

Joey spends most of the film fighting to get Jennifer (and himself) back to human — but the bittersweet ending, where a mysterious bartender revealed to be even more powerful than Queenie offers them fame again and they're implied to take it, undercuts any read of Joey as the one character who holds onto his integrity. The real joke is that the hunger for fame always wins in the end, no matter how hard you fight it.

The Winners are a going-nowhere Toronto rock band until bassist Jennifer spends a night with Queenie, the swaggering vampire frontman of a rival act, and wakes up craving blood instead of applause. Her turn rockets the band from empty rooms to packed houses, but the fame comes with a body count as bandmates get pulled into the vampire fold one by one. Frontman Joey wants Jennifer — and himself — human again, so he teams up with vampire hunter Eddie Van Helsing, who tracks them with a flashlight because he's afraid of the dark, to take Queenie down for good. They win that fight, but the film's closing twist suggests Queenie was never the real predator in the room.