Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Vampiress Review: "Always From Darkness"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825650/
The Gist:  A down in the dumps guy who lives with his sister finds himself neck deep in trouble when he becomes the object of a female vampires affections.

Clarification:  Ok...see the gist. Had the makers of this film just gone with that and kept with it despite how amateurish the whole thing is the movie would have been enjoyable.  Unfortunately this film falls into pretty much every "do not do" that amateur film makers find themselves in.

From a storytelling perspective it has serious A.D.D.   The movie starts out from the point of view of the main character Jude typing out his life story and narrating.  Once the movie gets going this is never visited again.  Then the sound is almost non existent with the background music drowning out the dialogue in most scenes not that the night time scenes are bright enough to see anyway.  After that you have the unexplained randomly thrown in side stories.  Apparently there is some type of vampire government that the main vamp Anastasia is a part of  that she has to ask permission in order to be able to turn Jude which she asks for in a ridiculously long and drawn out scene that constantly goes back and fourth from a stationary camera to a camera that is literally a guy walking around a room constantly (IE shakey and unwatchable without motion sickness).also she has bad blood with another vampire in the group "Delilah" but there is never any explanation as to why that is (other than the fact that amateur film makers love having people argue on camera for some reason).

Speaking of which you then have the awkward relationship between Jude and his sister where they basically argue for no reason about stuff no normal brother and sister would argue about which just makes him out to be socially awkward and her a nagging bitch.  In other words there are no likable characters in this film to get an emotional investment in one way or the other.

Finally in odd side story world you have the story of Jude's sisters best friend Amy who all of a sudden always knew that Judes new girl was a vampire because she's been stalking them for awhile because she wanted to be turned but this is only found out just before she's killed mid film despite Amy meeting Anastatia MUCH earlier in the film when she comes to pick up Jude for their first date giving her the ability to give both her best friend and Jude a warning to stay away from her (which she doesn't). 

All of this could probably be forgiven if it weren't for the fact that the films ending just screamed "we got lost in our own story and have no clue how to end it so we'll just roll credits here".  This happens when you add 92 sub plots to a movie whose main story could have and should have carried it.    I had the same complaint for the movie "Kiss of the Damned" but that was forgivable since the entire movie before that looked good.  Not so much in this case.

Selling Point:  There is nudity...that's a plus.

Female Vampire Factor:  So you have your main vampire Anastasia (Danielle Paccione).

Then you have the vamp who hates her Delilah (Kaitlin Chadwick)

Finally you have random naked vampire chick that shows up whenever Jude is about to or has encountered Anastasia who is known in the credits as "Vampire Succubus" (Michelle Trasattie)
No real explanation of her purpose .  You see her twice and both times it ends with her climbing on top of Jude and as she gets close he wakes up from being asleep.

I give this a Vampire Beauty rating of 2 out of 5.  As I said the story idea was there and they seemed to drop the ball.  The writer/director of the film probably should have watched Fright Night 2 or Vampires Kiss as an inspiration on how to pull this type of film off.   Anastasia should have been the main antagonist of the film using Judes depression over his last relationship against him and haunting him at every available moment (no backstory of why she's doing it would then be needed because the reason would be she's evil). Jude would be the movies pawn that you feel sorry for and the further he falls into Anastasias trap the more he changes as a person and alienates his family.  That would leave Judes sister as the would be hero of the film fighting the evil female vampire for her brothers soul because she loves him.  Now was that difficult?


1 comment:

  1. That is always the problem with films like this, they try too hard and fail miserably..

    ReplyDelete