Vampiress Review: "Karmina"

The Gist: A vampire Baronet from Transylvania who was to be involved in an arranged marriage escapes to Quebec to find love on her own.

Clarification: This is a 1996 French Canadian comedy.  Karmina goes to Canada to live with her aunt who lives among humans with the help of a potion she created that makes her seem human (like Vampirella).  She then uses her aunts dating service in an effort to find a boyfriend while struggling to fit in the modern big city lifestyle she finds herself in.  Meanwhile the man she was supposed to be engaged to is sent by her father to find her and bring her back.

Female Vampire Factor:  Karmina is played by Isabelle Cyr (who also plays a vampire on an episode of the Showtime series "The Hunger".)

Her biggest issue for the bulk of the movie is that the potion she takes to suppress her vampirism only lasts for a limited time and throughout the film she either loses them or forgets to take them.  This results in a few situations where she loses control of herself.

The other female vampires in the film consist of Karmina's mother and aunt but neither are much to write about and their scenes as vampires are limited to a fight scene with each other at the end of the film.

I give the film a Vampire Beauty Rating of 3 out of 5.  The character Karmina is great.  She's just trapped in a goofy slapstick comedy that's hit or miss in the entertainment department.  A sequel to this was made in 2001.

Vampiress Review: "Matt Spade's Vanished"

The Gist:  A young man who survived an outbreak of kids going missing when he was a kid goes back to his home town when it starts happening again.

Clarification:  Tommy was a kid in a small town in 1993.  During that time kids were going missing, usually after hanging out at the local graveyard including his babysitter who went missing the same night she took him there and eventually his parents.  Eventually he grows up and moves to Philadelphia and puts his past behind him but is loured back when a girl who prevented him from having the same fate during that time tracked him down to let him know it was happening again.

Selling Point: Sometimes you watch a movie where you realize the person who made it just gets it.  This is one of those films.   Matt Spade set out to pretty much make a movie like Steven Kings "It" but with vampires.  He pulls it off very well. The short film this was an extension of (which is reproduced for the first part of this film) was just as good.

Vanished from Matt Spade on Vimeo.

Female Vampire Factor: It's eventually revealed that there was a deal where the main vampire in the film would only feed on the towns undesirables.  With the small size of the community and lack of criminals and homeless people the undesirables ended up being teenagers.  Especially the promiscuous school girls who entertain older men in the town which there seems to be an abundance of.

This results in most of the people being turned being 18 and 19 year old girls who then go around biting the young boys of the town who hang around the cemetery around dusk.

This includes young Tommys hot babysitter who was turned after taking Tommy to the cemetery one day.

We're eventually shown in a flashback after Tommys grown up that he was almost a victim as well but one of his young friends, a girl named Charity helped him destroy her.

The film does go the twist ending route so that leaves it open for maybe a sequel as we find out all the vampires aren't dead with good old adult Charity being turned herself.

I give this one a Vampire Beauty Rating of 5 out of 5.  This is a horror/suspense that doesn't try to be anything other than that.  Great storytelling, vampires are emotionless and evil with no gimmicks or A.D.D subplots diluting the film. Plenty of re-watchabilty,  I definitely recommend this.

Vanished Trailer Official from Matt Spade on Vimeo.

Vampiress Review: "Female Vampires Online"

The Gist: A college student recruits his friend and a college professor to follow two girls to Vegas in order to save them from a brood of vampires who run an adult website.

Clarification:  The concept gets an A+.  The execution gets an F--- (yep that's three minuses this one is pretty bad).  So from what I understand this was a web series that was then re-released as a full film.  Problem is the story goes all over the place. In order to pull this off the film needs to be re-edited to tell one story instead of the several stories split up by episode that you get in a web series.

Biggest Complaint: The bulk of this film revolves around a search for a peeping tom.  This storyline does get resolved by the end.  Problem is it has no bearing on the films advertised main plot. This happens quite a bit with subplots that get introduced that in the end never relate to the main plot of the film and are just time filler making almost the whole film filler.  That results is basically you being told in scenes about the vampire story while the less interesting stuff plays out on screen. It also doesn't help that none of the characters in the film are likable at all.  Basically 3 out of the four main protagonists are in a battle for who can be more obnoxious. 

Female Vampire Factor: So we start with the concept that the vampires are killing guys who just watch their website by appearing behind them and biting them.  That makes this seem like it's going to be a horror in the style of The Ring.  Don't get used to this as it never happens again.

From there the plot completely dumps the "vampires attacking perverts in their home while they're distracted" (much better) plot for the concept that they are only a threat to the people they are molesting and biting on their website. They're only killing men it should be noted.  It's later revealed that men can't be turned so basically men are food and women are recruits.

There's also a sub plot about a female vampire who is standing against the others.

This plot is the only time the female vamps get any real screen time and it only amounts to two scenes so this plot does not get resolved whatsoever in this film and goes against the last two attempted plots of they only attack perves who log onto their site or people on videos through their website.  This is too bad as it had potential.

So in the end we just have an un-finished web series merged into a hard to follow film with no payoff. I give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 2 out of 5.  This is one hour of movie in which only 8 minutes actually has vampire or anything related to them in it with the rest being a very poor attempt at raunchy comedy.   This one is a miss.