Vampire Diary (2007)

Wonderful character development!

Simply A Masterpiece

Great Film overall

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I usually enjoy anything with vampires and zombies in it - this was the exception. The story is not very interesting, and the central theme about dependency and vampire-human relationships was better explored in Let the Right One in.It all feels very small which I suppose reflects the fact that one of the main characters is supposed to be making a documentary about weekend vampires. Still, small locations, small cast, small number of ideas.The acting is not too bad, but there is just too little to work with. For instance, a fairly intense and straight-laced young woman (albeit the product of a troubled youth) suddenly becomes a serial killing accomplice as a result of her passion for a lesbian vampire. Just doesn't work - no soul searching just a total and immediate commitment to murder.It is sexy though, so if this is a priority for you then you might enjoy it. Not for me though... My copy will be finding a new home :)

Plot: A young woman sets out to make a documentary about a group of people who spend their weekends pretending to be vampires, only she meets another woman who claims that she actually is a vampire.Budget: About $85.00.What was so horribly wrong then Smart-Guy? I think I can understand why they thought there might be a movie in this, only they forgot that in real life there is NOTHING cool about people who think that they are really vampires, not for one second. And boy does that show through here with the bunch of dickheads that play the weekend bloodsuckers.The lesbian vampire angle (always) shows promise, and there is some T&A, but now two weeks on I battle to recall anything about this flick. It is so lightweight and yawn-worthy in its own indie little way that they forgot to make anything interesting.Also, I have two words if you desperately need to see the lesbian bits, p & orn.I have actually seen worse than this, but then I absolutely hated those films too, so that is faint praise.Final Rating – 4.5 / 10. A bit of T & A can't derail this fast train to Sh*tsville.If you liked this review (or even if you didn't) check out oneguyrambling.com

This is a decent piece of entertainment that manages to overcome moral idiocy and painfully clichéd "real video" film-making through brevity, hot sex scenes and creative implied violence.Holly (Morven Macbeth) is a young woman making a documentary about the so-called "weekend vampire" subculture in England. Her work consists of taking a single camera and following 4 goth friends around as they dress up and play at being technomusic bloodsuckers. The story sets up these 4 friends as important but then almost completely disregards them as Holly meets a mysterious young woman named Vicki (Anne Walton). Vicky has her own video camera and films Holly just as Holly films everyone else. Holly lets this attractive stranger stay at her apartment when she has no where else to go and the two of them end up in some spicy girl-on-girl action. Their attraction turns out to be more than physical and Holly starts to worry about where Vicki goes when she leaves the apartment in the middle of the night. It turns out Holly is worried about the wrong person getting hurt, because Vicky is a real vampire. She doesn't turn into a bat and isn't afraid of garlic or sunlight, but Vicki does need blood to survive. Holly helps her get that blood, even after she finds out that Vicki had killed two of the goth friends from the start of the film. But when Vicki announces she's pregnant with a vampire baby and her bloodlust is increasing because of it, our lovers are forced into more and more extreme acts.Let me start off with the significant negatives of Vampire Diary. This movie is done "real video" style with everything being either by Holly's camera or Vicki's camera and it gets annoying in very short order. Beyond the fact that "real video" pseudodocumentaries have been done to death, this movie doesn't even use the technique for any particular purpose. The pretenses of the documentary are abandoned early on and it just becomes two young women who film each other for no reasonable purpose. But after it stops being a documentary, the movie throws in a bunch of stuff like news reports, montages and even flashbacks that make no sense if it's just two people with cameras recording themselves. And then at the end of the film they just throw all the "real video" rules out the window and the camera starts zooming in when no one's operating it and other impossible things. Vampire Diary would have been much better if it had just been shot like a normal movie. These filmmakers clearly have the talent and skill to do that and it would have spared the audience all of the contrived crap.The other problem with Vampire Diary is that it never seems to quite understand why killing people is bad. There are a few moments when Holly feebly objects to Vicki's slaughter, but there are no lasting emotional or moral consequences to the murders. By downplaying that, though, the film undercuts all the tension and suspense that's supposed to be generated by the killing. Instead of it being a case where Holly's resistance to Vicki's nature is gradually broken down over time, she just switches from being bothered by murder to being okay with murder whenever it suits the Almighty Plot Hammer.Most films with two such flaws would suck fairly hard. Vampire Diary manages to still be watchable thanks to three main factors. It's very fast paced, Anne Walton and Morven Macbeth are good actresses who look really good naked and filmmakers Mark Jones and Phil O'Shea have some genuine talent. Once you get past the "real video" contrivances, they come up with some nice imagery and scenes that are well staged and well paced.If Vampire Diary had dispensed with the "real video" nonsense and included some sort of moral center, it would be a very good film. As it is, Vampire Diary is a problematic film that's several steps above most low budget cinema. If you're a vampire fan, particularly a fan of lesbian bloodsuckers, you'll probably like it. If that's not your cup of tea, you might still enjoy it as a promising bit of film-making.

Many people have addictions; food, alcohol, drugs, or other ungainly habits. Welcome to Vicki's world as a vampire and her addiction to blood. When I watched this film, I felt her pain as her addiction to blood may be different than the norm, yet perhaps not too far away from anyone else that suffers from unstoppable urges to do what we shouldn't. Watch this brilliant film and learn how to appreciate being human and have empathy for someone who struggles to do what is right under impossible circumstances. Contains a good mix of chilling, passionate, and humorous scenes from beginning to end with the beautiful Anna Walton leading the way.