Search - Vampire Diary (Dol) on DVD

Sarah H. (psychogurl13) from CROSSVILLE, TN
Reviewed on 4/24/2009...

This is probably the most boring vampire movie I have ever seen. The hair, makeup, and music were awesome, but if the movie is boring...well lets just say it lost my interest and I ended up cleaning up my desk because I forgot it was even on.

2 of 2 member(s) found this review helpful.

I liked it

Blade | Illinois | 11/16/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This movie turned out to be pretty good. It's a horror film about a woman who is doing a documentary about Goths, whom she calls the 'weekend vamps', and ends up getting involved in a lesbian relationship with a real vampire. I thought this movie was really good. It was also nice to see all the cool Goth characters and to have actual Goth music in the movie from bands like Fields of the Nephilim, Ghost of Lemora, Voices of Masada, Scary Bitches and NFD."

Awful.

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 03/16/2010

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Vampire Diary (Mark James and Phil O'Shea, 2007)

What a good movie this could have been (unlike the other two flicks I had the misfortune to watch the same day), and yet what a bad movie it turned out to be. I gave it a marginally higher rating than When Good Ghouls Go Bad and Troglodyte in the sense that this is the kinda-hot chick who surrounds herself with ugly girls in order to bolster her own charms, but don't be fooled; this is still an awful, awful piece of work.

Vampire Diary concerns Holly (Without You's Morven Macbeth in her screen debut), a documentary filmmaker who is making a feature about "weekend vampires", fringe-dwellers in the goth scene who enjoy dressing up in plastic fangs and going clubbing. She's fallen in with a group of them as she's been working, and has gotten somewhat friendly with the core, comprised of Adam (The Tudors' Jamie Thomas King), Haze (The Journey Home's Kate Sissons), and Brad (Miss Potter's Justin McDonald), a group presided over by a rave DJ named Eddie Strode (Seed of Chucky's Keith-Lee Castle). Things are going along all well and good until a new girl, Vicki (Hellboy II's Anna Walton) shows up at a party one night. Holly finds herself drawn to Vicki, and before long the two of them are in a relationship. It is at this point that Vicki tells Holly that she (she being Vicki) is actually a real vampire, not one of these goth-raver-dressup kids. At some point it's also revealed that she's pregnant by another vampire. At this point, you can pretty much substitute a plot summary for the second half of The Possession of Joel Delaney, so I'll stop trying to explain this.

The one good thing about the film is that Walton, Sissons, and Macbeth are all quite attractive. None of them is a terribly good actor, but you get what you pay for. Of the batch, in fact, only King is all that good an actor, and his performance tends to be dragged down by what's happening around him most of the time. Or at least what you can glean of what's happening. The film is shot as if it were all footage Holly had taken (she has cameras scattered throughout her house, etc.); while this device can be, and has been, used to excellent effect in a number of horror films ([REC] and Paranormal Activity are obvious examples), Vampire Diary attempts to use it in something that, when it comes right down to it, isn't a horror film. And here is where the movie completely falls apart. At its heart, Vampire Diary seems as if it was supposed to have been a sort of lesbian Twilight, though one where you're never sure if the vampire actually is a vampire. But James and O'Shea, working from O'Shea's original script, don't want to just make another quirky human-vampire love story, so they attempt to make a horror movie out of it without actually bringing any horror to the table. There's also, briefly, a mystery angle that is entirely without suspense. The pace reminds me of indie art-house drama, though you've gotta be really, really good to make a movie with this kind of pace and still entertain an audience. James and O'Shea will not be confused for Bela Tarr anytime soon. As you may be able to gather from those last few sentences, Vampire Diary is ultimately a movie that has no idea what it wants to be, and that is its greatest, though by no means its only, failure. *
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