tigerfish50

Adam and Eve are a hipster vampire couple who have been married for centuries, but are living separate lives in Detroit and Tangier. Nowadays they bribe laboratory assistants at clinics to obtain their blood supplies rather than biting the necks of humans. Between running errands for this essential grocery item, they gripe about the barbarism of mankind, whom they call zombies.

Eve decides it's time for a reunion, and soon after she arrives in Motor City, the pair receive a visit from her spoiled younger sister from LA. This sibling is a regressive delinquent vampire who upsets their languid lifestyle and starts creating problems. The film makes few demands on the actors and is short on horror, tension, thrills, laughs or action, but heavy on irony. Unfortunately it's a lot less clever than it seems to imagine itself.

A film about friendship and death should possess some depth, but Almodovar's 'The Room Next Door' treats both subjects with glossy shallowness. A former war correspondent Martha is ill with terminal cancer, has already acquired a suicide pill, and asks her old friend Ingrid to be her companion when she commits suicide. There are possibilities of legal consequences and Ingrid is fearful of death, but she reluctantly accepts this role.

The two women depart for a luxurious rental outside NYC and wait for Martha to choose the right moment for her demise. In death's waiting room, their conversations and flashback reminiscences lack any kind of intensity or credibility, and the conclusion is as much damp squib as the rest of the proceedings. The only positive is watching two excellent actors trying to make the most of third-rate material.

'Serena' is clearly inspired by Shakespeare's play about Macbeth and his dangerously ambitious spouse. The setting is changed from medieval Scotland to Depression-era Appalachia, but the screenplay merely follows the general arc of the original story without adding anything new.

The intro presents a lumberjacking operation run by two entrepreneurs called Pemberton and Buchanan who are having problems with a local sheriff. Pemberton takes a break in Boston and returns with an upper-crust new wife, Serena. At first she makes useful contributions, in between wandering about the muddy lumber camp in silk nightgowns, but soon she causes friction with Buchanan. The sheriff starts tightening the screws on Pemberton, but the script neglects to provide much motive for crucial decisions made by the couple, and with the two lead characters uninteresting, unbelievable and fairly disagreeable, it's hard to care about their fate.

It's curious how talented actors and their teams couldn't discern the screenplay's shortcomings before they started shooting this lackluster project. The cinematography is passable, but editing, direction, acting and everything else reflect the material's flaws.