Vampire Boys – review

Director: Charlie Vaughn

Release date: 2011

Contains spoilers

There is one element missing from a lot of gay orientated horror and I’m afraid to say that it is the actual horror side. I can appreciate that a group of men looking like they just strolled out of a boy band is going to ring the correct bells for the target audience but there is that tendency to forget the horror.

Vampire Boys is no exception to this generic statement, and it is a shame. However, more of a shame was that this forgot to be a horror so much that it tried to be twilight, ish… well, at least these vampires had fangs.

It begins with a girl (Shana Eve), she appears to be being hunted by the four aforementioned refugees from the boyband. The boys are Jasin (Jason Lockhart), Logan (Dylan Vox, the Lair and Scab), Dane (Jess Allen) and Adam (Tanner Acord). She is attacked and it is suggested that she was not ‘the one’. Mention is made of it being close to the one hundredth year.

the Bela clock

Caleb (Christian Ferrer) arrives at a house. He is to share the place with Paul (Ryan Adames), a guy he met on line. He has escaped from Ohio, to go to school in LA; he used to be a jock but wants to concentrate on academic studies. In this scene we got a highlight (for me) of the film. The Bela Lugosi clock – sorry, I know it’s sad but I really want one!

vampire sundial

Anyway Paul takes Caleb for a coffee. Cut to the four boyband escapees, they are led out in the sun and mention is made of it being great that the myths are wrong about sunlight. Jasin starts seeing mental images of Caleb and vice versa… A psychic connection is made and perhaps it distracts, just a little, from the God awful 'coffee drinking acting faux pas' in the interspersed scene.

Zasu as Tara

Anyway, short story shorter, Jasin was made by an elder vampire and thus he has to live by the same rules. By his hundredth year of unlife he has to turn a companion – ‘the one’. If he doesn’t he, and all his previous turn-ees (that would be the three other vampire boys), will die. He is still alive (despite no longer being with the vampire who turned him as a companion) because the one who turned him was greedy for love and thus turned another companion after Jasin (so perhaps the monicker of ‘the one’ is a wee bit of a misnomer). Logan has found Jasin someone he believes to be ‘the one’, a girl called Tara (Zasu). However, given Jasin's immediate psychic reaction to Caleb, methinks Logan got it wrong.

minor moment of violence

So, does anything exciting happen. Not really, Jasin comes on to Caleb, taking him out on dates and what not. This irks Paul as he fancies Caleb himself (and so Logan and Co. remove the issue for Jasin, an event that elicits little comment or concern from Caleb). Seemingly Caleb’s blood smells really good through his skin (how Twilight is that) and so Jasin and Co. feed on a couple of guys and a girl who were about to have a threesome in a field (an excuse for a schlong shot) but it produces no sense of evil or peril for the viewer.

a boyband waiting to happen

Eventually Logan freaks out because he thinks Jasin is making a mistake but it is hardly a movie-time highlight moment. What that scene did highlight was the poor script and dialogue because Dylan Vox can be great fun in front of the camera and, despite emoting like a good’un, he was ultimately wasted as an actor.

vampire attack

Lore-wise, aside from the 'eternal love' rule and the sunlight not being an issue, bullets ping off a vampire (we discover when Jasin is accidentally shot by the most apologetic biker/redneck hybrids ever), a stake won’t penetrate the vampire’s fabulous torso and so beheading is the only way to kill one. They do reflect – obvious hair grooming comment (check) – but the need for an invitation still holds as a rule.

And we are back where we started, musing over the fact that the horror element was forgotten about. Some poor acting, a waste of good actors and poor dialogue… plus too much Twilight-envy… and we have a poor film. A shame as I actually hoped it might have been, at the very least, a guilty pleasure movie. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.