Lifeblood – review

Directed by: Steven J. Niles

Release Date: 2006

Contains spoilers

I was really looking forward to this one. The write up on the back of the Brutal Bloodsuckers DVD box gave nothing away plot-wise, simply stating “Destinies intertwine in a tale of gothic horror and intrigue set in the seedy underbelly of Philadelphia. ‘Lifeblood’ is a suspenseful neo-noir, featuring music from some of Philadelphia’s hottest Goth industrial bands including a special appearance by Carfax.” That would be Carfax Abbey, who do appear and who I have a fondness for (though, as they cover it, one imagines that it would have been somewhat amusing if they had played “Cry Little Sister” originally from the Lost Boys soundtrack).

So were did it go wrong? The film begins with a couple of nuns in a church and a man entering behind them and we can see the two main places it went awfully wrong immediately. Firstly, and it might just be the print used on this DVD, the film was awfully dark – so dark in fact that at times through the film you cannot see what was going on, which is just plain annoying. Then we had the dialogue and the delivery thereof, it truly was risible - one might say stagey but it wasn’t just that, there was a raft of bad delivery running throughout the film (mainly, in fairness, with more minor characters). This is a shame because the film contained some good ideas.

Anyway the man is a vampire, we later discover to be called Demetrius (Kevin D Spotts), he is searching for some ashes, kills one nun and then, after telling the second “Everyone should sin once before they die,” spots where she glances and then stabs her. Things vampiric to note here, the vampires can obviously enter holy ground, Demetrius moves with inhuman speed at one point and uses a blade (although later we see that the vampires sometimes use fangs).

In the city a man picks up a prostitute and they drive off and go to her apartment. She tells him to make himself comfortable and whilst she is out of the room he takes out surgical instruments, lays them out and then hides them below a magazine. She returns and after some banter she suddenly slashes his throat and begins to feed. This was a really nice turn around, it built up to him being the vampire (one guesses he was just a common or garden serial killer/nutter) and switches ground quickly. A man enters, who we later discover to be Carl Spencer (Steven J Niles, the director and not the comic book author) and fights the vampire. He nails her hands to the floor (a nice moment again) and demands to know where Demetrius is, she doesn’t tell until he threatens her with a stake and then tells him to find a drug dealer called M.D. (Greg Niles). He is going to leave but then, after a taunt from the vampire, stakes her. Once staked she begins to burn, he leaves and as he walks through the street an explosion bursts through the apartment – a nice touch but not repeated, other vampires, when staked, burn but there are no big explosions thereafter. Unfortunately the burning is obviously digitally produced and looks poor.

In a club, where Carfax Abbey are playing, we ‘see’ many of the main players. I put ‘see’ in inverted commas as the visuals are so dark we actually see very little. Spencer enters the club to speak to a mystery man (a mystery because we cannot see him) who put him onto the whore and asks where he might find M.D. We meet Clara (Kimberley Niles) who is out with her friends. One of her friends, Tilly (Emily Lopizzo) meets Demetrius and goes off with him. Not long after a drunken Clara decides to leave and then Spencer, somehow, detects Demetrius and goes running out after him. Demetrius has a taste of Tilly, decides she isn’t the one he’s looking for, and eats her anyway. Spencer sees him and chases after him. Demetrius escapes, I think, by wall climbing but it was too dark to tell for sure. Clara finds her friends body and is found in turn by Spencer. She won’t call the cops as she is wanted (for robbery we later discover) so he calls the cops and then drives her home.

Clara has puked in his car and is out of it when Spencer gets her home to her worried sister, Sheila (Marci Tint-Kotay). Sheila is ill and, later in the film we discover that she has a mystery blood disease that killed her mother and that Clara is likely to come down with also.

Demetrius returns to the vampire hold-up, the vampires reminded me of the coven from Underworld, it had the same decadent ‘new romantic’ feel, though in a warehouse not a mansion. He is tackled by Wraithwood (Jef Kelly) leader of the vampires. I did actually quite like the character in a foppish, faux-British upper class accent way and he gave one of the better performances. Demetrius is searching for the two descendants, whose blood can resurrect the Countess Vrana (Kathryn Matuch). The Countess was burnt at the stake 300 years previously and it is her ashes that were searched for earlier. Can you guess who the descendants might be?

The vampires come in two varieties, purebreds and transformed. Demetrius is a transformed and can be killed by staking, no one knows how to kill a purebred (though one guesses burning at the stake was, at least, a temporary solution – temporary as they can be resurrected). The transformed’s bodies work at a higher rate, hence their need for blood. The drug dealer M.D. does say that they do not need nor want chemical stimulants (so why some of the vampires in the warehouse are smoking is beyond me) but he sells them blood. They can go out in daylight, although they dislike it, without ill effect. The mystery illness affecting the sisters (descendants of the countess) is untapped vampirism that, as they don’t feed it blood, is eating them alive.

I said there are some nice moments and there are. Spencer’s wife, Angela (Leah Schmidt), was killed by Demetrius, hence his hunting the vampires. There is a well crafted moment when we see him both in real time with a stake and in flashback with a rose, going to see his wife and finding her being fed on. His wife’s spectral appearances as his conscience also works well, more for the fact that he seemed to ignore her as much as he ignored her when she was alive (as seen in a dream memory) as anything.

The acting, as I say, was not brilliant in the main. Some of this seemed to stem from bad dialogue, this was especially the case with regards M.D. who had the worst case of bad street slang I’ve heard in a long time. That said Steven J Niles as Spencer worked, in the main, though he never really struck me as an action hero. There is a moment, when he is tied up and being taunted by Demetrius, however, when he really ramps up his acting and I totally bought into the character at that point. Spotts, as Demetrius, looked the part and, again, in the taunting scene with Spencer really did shine.

Despite the nice ideas the main story was a little clunky, things happened on occasion that was just a little too convenient or contrived. There is a nice twisting around with the ending but, ultimately, the main story didn’t do it for me. This was a shame as there was a nice build of tension and divergence of ideas between Wraithwood and Demetrius that could have been exploited but ultimately was underused. As for the actual twist, it was good and I’m not saying that it is obvious, but I found myself thinking, just before it happened, “wouldn’t it be funny if…” In that way it was actually, in some respects, even nicer.

Dialogue, acting, the too dark shots and obtrusive digital effects ultimately spoil a film that had flashes of brilliant ideas. Probably the most damaging aspect was the darkness of the shots, if the viewer cannot see what is going on and finds themselves staring at a virtually all black screen the viewer switches off. Niles, however, should be encouraged as the good ideas this film contains could be harnessed and, in the future, I could see him coming up with a really good film – the building blocks are there it just needs tightening up. This one, however, I hold at 3.5 out of 10 and the score has been bolstered because of the good ideas.

There is a homepage with trailer here and the imdb page is here