It’s a foursome of vampire flicks. The fangs are fab, but are the movies a mess? Let’s find out.
BOGIEVILLE (2024)
The opener of this film—a woman terrorized by a vampire in a restroom stall—sets us up for thrills that the rest of the film rarely delivers.
The vampires have that awesome, modern multi-teeth and black eyes look, but instead of leaning hard on the horror of them running rampant in a trailer park, the movie tries to delve into a moody, Let the Right One In vibe that fails to propel the plot forward at an engrossing pace, especially considering the movie is 108 minutes long.
A small town couple runs off together and ends up at a trailer park. Almost immediately, the redneck dude that welcomes them introduces them to vampires he has hidden away. He tells them that now that the vamps know their scent, they can never escape them, so they must stay. Of course, he has an ulterior motive for entrapping the couple.
The vampires occasionally come out to attack random people, but there’s not enough intensity or suspense in the sequences. The movie just crawls along, jumping back and forth between scenes of characters who don’t have much to do and becoming very repetitive. Even vampire in-fighting fails to bring much excitement.
The best part is a sudden hi-energy battle between the authorities and the vampires in the final act, which even throws in a splash of humor. Compared to the somber tone of everything that comes before it, it feels like we’ve suddenly started watching a different movie.
The final “twist” ties up the Let the Right One In element perfectly, but it almost feels like it was conceived first with less effort given to making the unfolding of events beforehand a true slice of entertainment.
OUT FOR BLOOD (2004)
Now this is the escape the hubby and I needed—a SyFy original vampire flick from 2004 with Kevin Dillon and Lance Henriksen. Even Melissa Rivers gets a cameo.
Dillon is a troubled cop who won’t stop bothering his soon-to-be ex-wife. Lance is his boss, who assigns him to a missing persons case that started at a rave.
So Dillon heads to the club, witnesses some sexy stuff, gets seduced by a female vamp, is swarmed by pretty male vamps right out of Buffy, and is then attacked by an awesome master vampire.
It just so happens that Dillon’s ex is an author of vampire books, so he goes to her for help with his new vamp problem. So they come up with a plan to take out the master to save Dillon from a life of blood-sucking.
It is definitely as fun as an episode of Buffy, so just sit back and enjoy the campy vibes, a handful of notably funny vampire sequences, and familiar vampire makeup effects.
THE NIGHT BOYZ (2023)
This Black vampire flick has lofty goals, including the nearly 2-hour runtime, but it plods along with way too many individual components that never seem to come together.
There’s an opener in colonial times with race hate, the n word, a lynching, and I think a white dude putting some sort of curse on Black people.
In contemporary times, we meet two cousins (one of them the director of the film). They are at odds with a gang in the hood.
The leader of the gang is turned into a vampire by the “head vampire”. The cousin (not the director…the other one), is turned into a vampire by a young woman who seems to be in cahoots with his aunt, who I think is pregnant with the baby of the head vampire.
Yes, this film is very confusing.
The cops are trying to crack down on the gang problems on the streets, so they get caught up in the vampire issue as well. The sheriff is quite the daddy.
The cousin teams up with the girl who bit him in hopes of killing the head vampire so they can be human again. Naturally, the head vampire has some nefarious plan linked to the past.
Problem is, there isn’t much action, which is not good news for a movie that is almost 2 hours long. Everyone ends up in the head vampire’s lair for the last ten minutes of the movie, and we suddenly get some werewolf action (aka: bad werewolf mask). No idea why, and it whimpers out as fast as it howled in. I really just couldn’t with this movie, despite the cool vampire fangs and glowing eyes.
THE STRANGER (2014)
This is the serious, story-driven vampire flick of this bunch, and color me shocked, because it totally sucked me in despite not having any kind of cheap vampire thrills. It’s a totally complex, character-centric flick.
Somber and tragic, it has a man vamp seeking the vamp wife that ran away from him years before. He has finally tracked her to a small town, where he immediately finds himself infiltrating the life of a kid who rescues him from a violent attack by a local gang.
The leader of this gang is as douchey and relentless as they get, and his protective father is the fricking corrupt sheriff. Meanwhile, the vamp man is so intent on being good and not using his powers for self-preservation that he sort of allows the bad mortals to spiral out of control in their desire to destroy him.
We watch as these lives become intertwined in the messiest of ways, when all the man vamp wanted to do was make sure his vampire bloodline can’t infect anyone else.
I won’t say more, because you really have to watch this one when you are in an attentive mood and want a really compelling and emotional vampire story.
