The Gist: After a run in with a healer, a teenage vampire has developed a conscious and now must stop her fellow vampires from feeding on her new friends and classmates.
Clarification: A movie based on a novel of the same name for the Lifetime Network it is very much a teen angst style film which comes off as a carbon copy of the Kids BBC Series Young Dracula. Only difference being that the young chosen one who is being groomed to rule vampires but is secretly protecting humans is a young girl.
Selling Point: Before she develops a conscious she's a pretty bad ass vamp.
Female Vampire Factor: The main vampire in the film is Pearl played by Cierra Ramirez
She starts out as your stereotypical blood sucker in the film, tracking down and hunting desperate young guys who she can sweet talk and then bite.
The main plot point during this portion is she is cocky and careless which eventually gets her staked but not through the heart to kill her. When she wakes up she can now walk into the sunlight. Once her family learns this they decide to use her to get victims for a vampire ceremony for the king of vampires in which her job is to infiltrate the local high school and get kids to invite her over (that way they can be drained since vampires can't come in without being invited.
Another side effect of her new found power is she now has human emotions so once she gets to school she ends up standing up for other kids and eventually becoming very popular.
This leads to her not being able to go through with the plan and instead now wanting so save the kids of the school from the rest of the vampires of the city in a very "Buffy the Vampire Slayer film" like finale.
While the plot is like a very rushed version of BBC's Young Dracula it also have a very "My Babysitters a Vampire" feel to it being that Pearl has a lot of qualities of "Sarah" from that show. I give this a Vampire Beauty Rating of 4 out of 5. Once she starts acting human fang flashes are few and far between but they do still happen.
The Gist: A 91 year old vampire who was turned at the age of 16 is recruited by authorities to go undercover at a high school to solve the case of the suspicious death of two teenagers.
Clarification: If you love movie cliche's you will absolutely love this film. Originally created as a pilot for a television show about a vampire teen detective it aired as a stand alone film on the Lifetime network and has been on constant rotation on the Lifetime movie network since 2013.
Best described as "Forever Knight" for teenagers it's pretty cheesy even by that shows standards and nowhere near as dark. Obviously if she's going undercover as a school girl (literally with plaid skirt and all) the whole "vampires can't be out in the daytime" rule is completely thrown out the window in this film. The unoriginality doesn't stop with the Forever Knight detective premise. The school she attends in this film looks straight out of Twilight and like Twilight this film also includes a vampire falling in love with a student sub-plot. On top of that all her main powers are swiped from the NBC TV show "Ed" down to being able to get information from people just by touching them. You also get a random subplot about the woman who recruited the vampires family being murdered but as stated before this was to be a regular TV series so there is a good chance had it been picked up that would have been addressed further along with many of the various plot holes left over after the films end.
Selling Point: If you miss Forever Knight but wish Nick was a Teenage girl you'll love this.
Female Vampire Factor: The vamp in this film whose name is Raven and is also followed by a raven wherever she goes (for reasons never explained) is played by Canadian Actress Tiera Skovbye.
The film falls more into the action cop drama category than anything in horror. There's pretty much only one scene in the film where she goes to bite someone and that is in the films start where they go into the cliche "damsel in distress turns out to be a monster who can easily defend herself" scene.
As seen above when she does fang out no matter where the situation is (indoor, outdoor) a strong gust of wind complete with lighting effect shows up. She mostly fangs out when she's angry which is during fighting scenes more often than not. As far as feeding goes she drinks out of blood bags. While the films stereotypically angry male police captain brings up the "what if she looses control" factor and the film poorly hints that she could, it doesn't even come close to happening with the exception of one scene where she kisses her future love interest and (you've already probably figured it out) accidentally bites his lip leading him to bleed and her to storm off afraid of possibly hurting him. This means fang flashes are there but very few and far between.
This is one of those films that tries to be too much but is above average by Lifetime movie standards. As a stand alone movie it isn't that satisfying as there are a ton of plot holes that would have been addressed with a regular series and Raven's struggle as a vampire probably would result in some very good flashback scenes down the line of her loosing control since it's mentioned several times that a woman named "Gran" took care of her and taught her how to live normally and provided blood for her when she was turned meaning she had no control at first. Sadly (or not) it never got picked up and this is pretty much all we get. I give it a Vampire Beauty rating of 3 out of 5.
The Gist: A vampire photographer on the hunt falls in love with the investigator trying to solve the case of the deaths of those she's fed on.
Clarification: While the Lifetime Network isn't known for making too many "guy friendly" movies they've actually done pretty well the few times they've attempted to delve into the vampire genre mainly because the all powerful vampires are usually women with the victims always being men with the only exception being the TV show "Blood Ties" and even that had ONE EPISODE which had a super hot, super power sexy female vampire who was practically unstoppable. In this case they hide a love story as a horror film in time for Halloween.
Selling Point: The vampire is Laurie Partridge from the Partridge Family. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Susan Dey
Female Vampire Factor: So as stated above the payoff here is that if you were a kid in the 70's you probably had the hots for Laurie Partridge and get to see a much older (This was made in 1995 but she's still cute) Susan Dey in knee high leather boots sporting fangs and putting the bite on random guys throughout this film.
While nothing too sexy (this is Lifetime and could care less about the male demographic after all) it's still one of those "things you want to see before you die" type things (Kind of like if Brittany Spears ever did a vampire flick). Plot wise it's pretty much Dey's character "Rebecca" complaining about how lonely and desperate for companionship she is and her man servant constantly telling her to suck it up because she's a vampire (and rightfully so, if you're lonely then what's the man-servant for?). I give the film a Vampire Beauty Rating of 3 out of 5 as in between whining and complaining she does hunt (sort of, this is Lifetime so lots of rapists everywhere to eat) so unlike some films at least she acts like a blood thirsty killer.
Blood ties is a Canadian crime drama which aired on the Lifetime network in 2007. The story followed a former police officer named Vicki Nelson. Vicki left the police force as her eyesight began to fail her due to a medical condition. Instead of just quitting altogether she decided to become a private investigator. During a case in which people were being found dead with their blood drained she meets and befriends a vampire named Henry Fitzroy who helps her solve the case (it ended up being a demon and not a vampire). From then on they worked together to solve cases (most of which were supernatural in nature) while fighting their own feelings for each other.
In this episode models are being found dead via being completely drained of their blood with various clues pointing to the vampire culprit being a woman named Christina who is connected to the women as the photographer assigned to work with them. Christina also happens to be the woman who turned Henry into a vampire in the first place. Eventually we find out that Christina turned a young male model from Montreal into a vampire and he resented her for it resulting in him trying to ruin Christina's life.
Vampiress Cast
Laura Mennell (Christina)
Though Christina was a victim in this episode, outside of the whole stalker issue she was not innocent at all. Stories are told of her once attempting to kill Henry in the past are mentioned in this episode and she is VERY threatened by Henry's feelings for Vicki which she had no problem going to Vicki and letting her know at all. Her and True Bloods Lorena could have a lot to relate to each other about (had Lorena not been killed of course).
