This is a decent piece of entertainment that manages to overcome moral idiocy and painfully clichéd "real video" film-making through brevity, hot sex scenes and creative implied violence.
Holly (Morven Macbeth) is a young woman making a documentary about the so-called "weekend vampire" subculture in England. Her work consists of taking a single camera and following 4 goth friends around as they dress up and play at being technomusic bloodsuckers. The story sets up these 4 friends as important but then almost completely disregards them as Holly meets a mysterious young woman named Vicki (Anne Walton). Vicky has her own video camera and films Holly just as Holly films everyone else. Holly lets this attractive stranger stay at her apartment when she has no where else to go and the two of them end up in some spicy girl-on-girl action. Their attraction turns out to be more than physical and Holly starts to worry about where Vicki goes when she leaves the apartment in the middle of the night. It turns out Holly is worried about the wrong person getting hurt, because Vicky is a real vampire. She doesn't turn into a bat and isn't afraid of garlic or sunlight, but Vicki does need blood to survive. Holly helps her get that blood, even after she finds out that Vicki had killed two of the goth friends from the start of the film. But when Vicki announces she's pregnant with a vampire baby and her bloodlust is increasing because of it, our lovers are forced into more and more extreme acts.
Let me start off with the significant negatives of Vampire Diary. This movie is done "real video" style with everything being either by Holly's camera or Vicki's camera and it gets annoying in very short order. Beyond the fact that "real video" pseudodocumentaries have been done to death, this movie doesn't even use the technique for any particular purpose. The pretenses of the documentary are abandoned early on and it just becomes two young women who film each other for no reasonable purpose. But after it stops being a documentary, the movie throws in a bunch of stuff like news reports, montages and even flashbacks that make no sense if it's just two people with cameras recording themselves. And then at the end of the film they just throw all the "real video" rules out the window and the camera starts zooming in when no one's operating it and other impossible things. Vampire Diary would have been much better if it had just been shot like a normal movie. These filmmakers clearly have the talent and skill to do that and it would have spared the audience all of the contrived crap.
The other problem with Vampire Diary is that it never seems to quite understand why killing people is bad. There are a few moments when Holly feebly objects to Vicki's slaughter, but there are no lasting emotional or moral consequences to the murders. By downplaying that, though, the film undercuts all the tension and suspense that's supposed to be generated by the killing. Instead of it being a case where Holly's resistance to Vicki's nature is gradually broken down over time, she just switches from being bothered by murder to being okay with murder whenever it suits the Almighty Plot Hammer.
Most films with two such flaws would suck fairly hard. Vampire Diary manages to still be watchable thanks to three main factors. It's very fast paced, Anne Walton and Morven Macbeth are good actresses who look really good naked and filmmakers Mark Jones and Phil O'Shea have some genuine talent. Once you get past the "real video" contrivances, they come up with some nice imagery and scenes that are well staged and well paced.
If Vampire Diary had dispensed with the "real video" nonsense and included some sort of moral center, it would be a very good film. As it is, Vampire Diary is a problematic film that's several steps above most low budget cinema. If you're a vampire fan, particularly a fan of lesbian bloodsuckers, you'll probably like it. If that's not your cup of tea, you might still enjoy it as a promising bit of film-making.
Holly (Morven Macbeth) is a young woman making a documentary about the so-called "weekend vampire" subculture in England. Her work consists of taking a single camera and following 4 goth friends around as they dress up and play at being technomusic bloodsuckers. The story sets up these 4 friends as important but then almost completely disregards them as Holly meets a mysterious young woman named Vicki (Anne Walton). Vicky has her own video camera and films Holly just as Holly films everyone else. Holly lets this attractive stranger stay at her apartment when she has no where else to go and the two of them end up in some spicy girl-on-girl action. Their attraction turns out to be more than physical and Holly starts to worry about where Vicki goes when she leaves the apartment in the middle of the night. It turns out Holly is worried about the wrong person getting hurt, because Vicky is a real vampire. She doesn't turn into a bat and isn't afraid of garlic or sunlight, but Vicki does need blood to survive. Holly helps her get that blood, even after she finds out that Vicki had killed two of the goth friends from the start of the film. But when Vicki announces she's pregnant with a vampire baby and her bloodlust is increasing because of it, our lovers are forced into more and more extreme acts.
Let me start off with the significant negatives of Vampire Diary. This movie is done "real video" style with everything being either by Holly's camera or Vicki's camera and it gets annoying in very short order. Beyond the fact that "real video" pseudodocumentaries have been done to death, this movie doesn't even use the technique for any particular purpose. The pretenses of the documentary are abandoned early on and it just becomes two young women who film each other for no reasonable purpose. But after it stops being a documentary, the movie throws in a bunch of stuff like news reports, montages and even flashbacks that make no sense if it's just two people with cameras recording themselves. And then at the end of the film they just throw all the "real video" rules out the window and the camera starts zooming in when no one's operating it and other impossible things. Vampire Diary would have been much better if it had just been shot like a normal movie. These filmmakers clearly have the talent and skill to do that and it would have spared the audience all of the contrived crap.
The other problem with Vampire Diary is that it never seems to quite understand why killing people is bad. There are a few moments when Holly feebly objects to Vicki's slaughter, but there are no lasting emotional or moral consequences to the murders. By downplaying that, though, the film undercuts all the tension and suspense that's supposed to be generated by the killing. Instead of it being a case where Holly's resistance to Vicki's nature is gradually broken down over time, she just switches from being bothered by murder to being okay with murder whenever it suits the Almighty Plot Hammer.
Most films with two such flaws would suck fairly hard. Vampire Diary manages to still be watchable thanks to three main factors. It's very fast paced, Anne Walton and Morven Macbeth are good actresses who look really good naked and filmmakers Mark Jones and Phil O'Shea have some genuine talent. Once you get past the "real video" contrivances, they come up with some nice imagery and scenes that are well staged and well paced.
If Vampire Diary had dispensed with the "real video" nonsense and included some sort of moral center, it would be a very good film. As it is, Vampire Diary is a problematic film that's several steps above most low budget cinema. If you're a vampire fan, particularly a fan of lesbian bloodsuckers, you'll probably like it. If that's not your cup of tea, you might still enjoy it as a promising bit of film-making.