Over the years there have been many attempts at combining the horror and comedy genres. Some films have judged the balance between the humour and scares perfectly such as Gremlins or the original Fright Night, some have missed the target spectacularly like Doghouse and the remake of Fright Night. Now from the writing and directing team of Matt Jespersen and Maclain Nelson comes Vamp U, a take on the vampire myth brought up to date at an American college campus.
In 18th century Romania a vampire called Wayne (really? Wayne? And Wayne Gretsky at that!) inadvertently kills the love of his life Mary in a fit of passion. Fast forward 300 years and he is now a college history professor with a problem. Since the loss of his soulmate he has been suffering from a form of vampire impotence. Wayne can no longer “vamp out” meaning he cannot grow his teeth, does not have exceptional strength and lacks various other related benefits. That is until Chris joins his class. Chris reminds him of his true love and suddenly he begins to regain some of his powers. As his therapist puts it, she is like vampire viagra to him. The problems begin however when Wayne and Chris enter into a turgid affair and on one particularly passionate encounter he bites Chris turning her into a vampire with an unquenchable blood lust. As she embarks upon a murder spree Wayne must find a way to stop her.
The first problem with Vamp U is that I just didn’t find it scary. The vampires are not very frightening even when trying to be at their meanest and there are none of the horror staples you would normally associate with a film of this type; hardly any attempts at “boo scares”, little gore and no unpleasant deaths to speak of. The second problem is that I didn’t laugh once. There are many attempts at humour but much of it seems to be aimed at the young teenage market with lots of coarse, bawdry sex jokes that passed me by somewhat. The plot twists that there are are predictable and a little forced, and there is little here you will not have seen before.
The performances are generally decent with Adam Johnson passable as a vampire with issues and Julie Gonzalo throwing everything into her dual role as Chris and Mary. The supporting cast are fine on the whole, if a little stereotypical, but Gary Cole is underused as the advice giving Arthur. On occasion the story seems to pause for a moment so that the characters can explain what they’re doing and why which did become a little annoying and wasn’t necessary. The direction is fairly standard but the story does seem to jump around a little, as if the filmmakers were never quite sure if they wanted to concentrate more on the comedy or the horror and end up falling somewhere in between.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Having said all this I can see Vamp U finding a market. I can understand some audiences enjoying the basic humour and finding the characters engaging but I’m afraid I didn’t. In the end I couldn’t decide if this was an attempted spoof or a black comedy but either way I didn’t feel that it worked. Unfortunately I just found Vamp U a little boring and that’s probably the worst criticism of any film.
