Avia Vampire Hunter

Avia Richards (Allison Valentino) is a restless soul. After her child is murdered and the rest of her family are turned into the undead Avia becomes a katana wielding, butt-kicking vampire slayer that will stop at nothing to rid the world of blood-drinking vermin. But when she becomes romantically involved with a detective working a series of vamp-like slayings will Avia kill the local head vampire or be thrown back into an asylum from whence she came.

"Avia Vampire Hunter" is a fairly nice looking shot-on-DV production. "Avia" is not original by any stretch of imagination. It screams "Buffy" rip-off all over. The acting, as one would expect is rather bland with little or no believable emotion emitted by the actors. The director did manage to give the film interesting style (for a DV film) and the camera work is pretty good overall. The musical score sometimes reminded me of Danny Elfman and was quite good but it rarely seemed to match the on screen action. The sound design was quite good and the makeup effects were better than you'd normally see in this kind of film. But as you can get with DV the clarity does hinder the believability of the makeup. All-in-all "Avia" is passable fare but quite removed from anything remotely exceptional.

I have no idea how this movie has a professional looking cover, because it looks like it was made by high school students with mom's camcorder. The crappyness started with the beginning credits which consisted of canned music playing for about 20 minutes in front of a bunch of blurry halloween props and basically naming everyone who even stood near the movie. The movie starts with detectives or something in suits examining a body when Avia comes along and cops an attitude. Then she's in their car and has no idea what's going on. They walk into some nerdy goth kid's house and pull some of the worst stunts and cop etiquette i've ever seen in a movie. And then avia kills some ugly 80's metal guy with fangs (an artistic scene showing her lunging her sword into nothing from 10 different angles). Then all of sudden Rodney "jamal" jackson moves in with Avia and they have sex with their clothes on. Avia has a bunch of weird scenes where she runs around with a sword and a dumb look on her face. Then there's a dramatic, heartfelt scene where Jamal finds out Avia used to be in a mental institution and she's wanted for murder, even though he boasted about doing a background check on her before. Some weird stuff happens, Avia takes drugs. I'm not even going to spoil the ending for you.......because I don't even really get what happened. The entire movie makes no sense and there's no plot. It's not a horror or a thriller, it's complete cheese. How anyone decided this was good enough to put in a professional DVD is beyond me. The soundtrack was really generic and nothing even comparable to Danny Elfman. The acting was abysmal (with the exception of jamal, who wasn't THAT bad), not that the characters had a script to work with. Even walking around and silent scenes were murdered by these "actors". The funniest scene was one where Avia walks outside dressed in full out Ninja garb (sword included) in the middle of suburbia.....and hails a cab! Only get this movie if you want to laugh at it.

I don't know why I rented this movie - It must have been one that got on my recommended list at Netflix. The write up says that where Buffy leaves off this begins so I guess I thought it would be decent. I would not recommend it to anyone unless they are a film student and wanted to see someones project. I did enjoy some of the sound effects and the music but the sound wasn't balanced very well. I ended up fast forwarding through most of it. Even the menu is not professionally done. If you liked Plan 9 From Outer Space you will probably like this - or if you have to see every vampire movie available - otherwise Don't Waste Your Time.