Vampyre Nation

I couldn't stomach this film. It was an atrocious amalgamation of Blade and True Blood. How can I come up with this? Early on in the film, we learn about a synthetic blood substitute for the Vampires. However, in this "film", it doesn't have a name, at least I didn't catch it. Oh, and it was developed in Romania. A little trivia...Romania once was known as Transylvania. Anyhoo, there is a retrovirus turning vampires into a sub-species that hunt on whatever they can feed on. Beyond that, couldn't finish this film. Why? Let us see.

The acting was ridiculous. You can't help but not take any of the characters seriously. You have the goof ball kid from BBC's Primeval trying way to hard to hide his accent, and pretend to be a bad ass vampire hunter. Then, we have his hottie sister, who says virtually NOTHING in the whole show. Then the third member, a stripper that wants to be all pissy with the "badboy" vamp hunter, but is obviously not bright enough to remember long enough why she was mad in the first place. The cop? Eh. His sidekick? Pure comic relief...except he isn't very comical. By the way, Neil Jackson was the main bad guy in the decent Blade TV series.

Anyway, this was NOT a made for TV movie based on the True Blood novels. It was just a rip off of them. Avoid it.

Most SyFy movies are terrible, but to me there is something compulsively watchable about them, and I always do hope that they churn out something decent in a while. Actually they have, but as I've said, a vast majority of them are really bad to bottom-of-the-barrel. True Bloodthirst is one of their more tolerable movies. It is far from perfect, I have certainly seen worse special effects but they are rather artificial looking, and the creatures are more dumb than they are menacing. The script is rather hackneyed with too much of a goofy tone and more complicated than it needed to be, and the story while less dull than most SyFy features and it actually has a promising concept suffers from a lack of focus, it never knows what it wants to be, and too many scenes that fall into predictability. The characters are again an improvement, they are not that annoying and not made to do stupid things as often as these SyFy characters tend to but at the same time they could have here done with more development. On the plus side, the locations are beautiful to look at and actually used atmospherically. The soundtrack is more than decent too, not overbearing and much more fitting with the style of the film. The editing is not as choppy as I thought it would be as well, and the acting is better than average. I loved Andrew Lee Potts in Alice, he made that series work, and while not as good, he brings some charisma to his role as a vampire slayer if not as consistently hardcore as he could have been. Ben Lambert immediately appealed to me especially in his interactions with the sadly underused Heida Reed. Neil Jackson captures the angst of his character very well. Roark Chritchlow is both slimy and authoritative, his character is clichéd but he being a veteran in this kind of role he makes an effort to make it more interesting despite the accent. All in all, a tolerable if flawed SyFy movie. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Take off the corny dialogues, the needlessly overacted conversations, the poor CGI and the awfully overdone dialects and you end up with a poor script. The idea behind the film is not bad, albeit nicked from a few different sources. It's not the worst vampire film out there, but it's by far not the best. It's okay for some mindless Friday evening entertainment - unless you're a purist in which case the opening scene will already be enough to drive you to drink. Would I recommend this film? No. Would I watch it again? No. But I watched it until the end so I am proud of myself.

Maybe I went into watching this movie for entirely the wrong reasons. Primarily those were that a) I like a good vampire flick, heck... sometimes I even like a very bad vampire flick ( but not this one ) and b) I like Andrew Lee Potts. I had a bit of a soft spot for him after totally falling for Hatter in Alice that I then followed him to Primeval where that cheeky little chipmunk face just made me want to hug a pillow. So during a late night bed-avoidance TV channel surf I came across this little nugget of mucus on the SyFy channel... which incidentally should stop changing it's title cos we all know that a rose by any other name will still smell of horse manure at it's base. There are some moderate performances, but no real character depth to speak of. The best of the bunch, in my opinion, was probably Neil Jackson who came across best when he was being a bit angsty, but as for Andrew...dear sweet Andrew... no. Just.. no. Awful. He slide in and out of his accent so often I'd swear he was lubricated. The Assorted Girls With Long Hair ran around and looked pretty and there was so much clichéd sci-fi posturing I wish I'd turned it into a drinking game.

So in summary, it was never ever going to win an Oscar. The script was underwhelming, the effects look like they were funded with someone's lunch money, acting didn't overwhelmingly stink .. but you wouldn't want to sit next to it on the bus either. I gave it a 3 because sucky as this may be it's still a vampire movie, and Andrew is still gerbilishously adorable. That said, when my daughter vomited all over her bed just after the ending credits due to a particularly nasty gastric flu I can't say I wasn't relieved to have something less dire than this film to focus on as I climbed into bed.

Sucky (pardon the pun) vampire movie. An Eastern European RIP off of "True Blood" but more of a C movie rather than B. All the contrived and expected stereotypes, special effects, cleavage and scenes. Can't help but be reminded of the Sharkado series except with blood suckers.