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Kitsch. Too artificial vampire film, and not in a charming way. Shallow and unconvincing story, characterless and with no emotion. Cheesy and noisy soundtrack. Bad acting, probably worsened by the crap English dubbing in Amazon Prime, instead of original Russian sound... Messy script. Annoying clichés. Awful...

Needless to say that I hadn't heard about this 2017 Russian horror movie titled "Vurdalaki" (aka "Ghouls" or "Vamps") prior to now at the end of 2022, as I happened to stumble upon the movie by random luck. And with it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I opted to give it a go.

Writers Aleksey Karaulov, Evgeny Kolyadintsev, Tikhon Kornev and Aleksey Timm didn't exactly bedazzle me with the script and storyline for this movie. In fact, the script was rather mundane and simplistic, almost to the point where it was unwatchable. I am impressed, however, that four writers could collectively come up with absolutely nothing worthwhile.

The synopsis for "Vurdalaki" sounded interesting and I was initially lured into picking up the movie given its cover, which I found interesting. Ultimately, then the movie's cover was actually, and sadly so, the best part about the entire ordeal.

With my limited exposure to Russian cinema, then of course I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie. However, I can't say that I was impressed with what I was witnessing on the screen. Not that the acting performances were bad per se, but the actors and actresses just had nothing to work with in terms of a functioning script or interesting characters.

For a horror movie then "Vurdalaki" was a swing and a miss. And this is not a movie I would recommend you waste your time, money or effort on, some of us did so you don't have to.

And "Vurdalaki" couldn't even boast having impressive special effects. So there was no points to be had there in order to alleviate the shortcomings of the subpar script.

My rating of director Sergey Ginzburg's 2017 movie lands on a two out of ten stars.

The government secretary Lyubchinsky Andrej Vasilevich (Konstantin Kryukov) and his servant Paramon arrive at an old monastery in the Carpathian Mountains to bring an invitation from the czar to the local monk Lavr (Mikhail Porechenkov) to move to the capital. However Lavr refuses since the local village needs his services and Andrej and his servant stumble upon the beautiful villager Milena (Aglaya Shilovskaya) in a lake nearby the road while returning to Moscow. Paramon is accidentally wounded by Milena and she brings them home to treat the man. Soon Milena and Andrej fall in love with each other. Meanwhile the Master of the Vampires Strigev is brought back to his castle in the mountains by two servants with the intention of raising an army of vampires and capture Milena, whose blood is capable to let the vampires live under the sun. The battle between evil and good are about to start.

"Vurdalaki" is a great Russian vampire movie that recalls the good films from the old times, with vampires afraid of crosses, sun and holy water. The story and screenplay are attractive, combining creepy moments with funny ones. The cast is excellent with a great chemistry between the gorgeous Aglaya Shilovskaya and Konstantin Kryukov. The cinematography is top-notch and one of the most beautiful in recent releases. It is difficult to understand why this film is so underrated in IMDb. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Vamps - Morte Não Existe para o Amor" ("Vamps- Death does not Exist for Love")