Zombie Room

Considering the heaps of shit that keep on flowing out from the tubes dressed up as vampires these days, I’m not envious of the directors who decide to invest their time and enthusiasm on just another vampire story set in the modern world. Vampires (2009) does that. But in order to deliver something new, one needs to face the Big Three of the modern Vampires – True Blood, Let The Right One In and Twilight, each in their own fields of expertise.

Belgian director Vincent Lannoo has been able to find an approach vector that hasn’t been explored thoroughly yet – a mocumentary with a black comedy twist (well, they all have that, don’t they). He leads the viewers with the camera crew into the world of a perfectly normal Belgian middle-class family: a man, a wife and two teenage kids – but all vampires.

As any mocumentary, the film consists of interviews with the family members and important people around them, mixed with being in the middle of the action with the cameras, stitched together to form a story. Vampires basically a reprise of Man Bites Dog (1992), the famous belgian black comedy mocu which follows the life of a serial killer – only much less shocking. Where Man Bites Dog goes deep into the psyche of a contract killer, Vampires stays on top of the mythos, never actually digging its teeth deep enough to make us believe that there really is tens of thousands of years of vampire culture behind this modern vampire family.

Vampires feels thin… Sort of stretched, like… butter scraped over too much bread. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the story, the fresh take on a worn-out mythos, and the work the actors did. But in the end, Vampires is a joke – quite a good one, I must admit – that’s been told for a bit too long by a guy who loves his voice a bit too much. It’s bound to make you laugh, but it’s 20 minutes too long, and a bit too obvious.

Had this film been done in the 90s, it would’ve become a legend. But today, the viewers expect more. See, in modern vampire film, if you even so much as mention “count Dracula”, you’re out of the game.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 09:05 and is filed under Movies, Opinion, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.