Vampiras: The Brides – review

Director: Ivan Mulero

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

A, mostly, Spanish language film that was filmed in Spain but is set primarily in LA, this film looks at the brides… Now, Stoker never refers to the vampire women in Dracula as brides but that name became attached within the wider megatext and the female vampires in this are (or were) the brides of Dracula. The film itself is low budget and there are some telling cgi moments, it is also probably 20-minutes too long but, despite this, I found it rather engaging.

the trophy

A castle on an island is the starting location, we are in Transylvania in 1888 and we see a bride, later revealed to be Luna (Bruna Rubio), who is in a wedding dress and has blood on her. She reveals fangs. Another vampire, Adriana (Milett Figueroa), enters the room calling her sister. Lastly to enter is Van Helsing (Carlos Lozano) holding aloft a vampire’s head – clearly belonging to Dracula (Octavi Pujades). It becomes apparent that the two brides aided Van Helsing. He holds aloft some jewellery and it blasts white light at them…

at the photoshoot

We are then in LA in 2022. A professor (Malik Yoba) is lecturing on vampires. Katya (Yuri Vargas) gets in late, stays and chats to him and then meets up with friends. This is a perfect example of a scene we didn’t actually need and could have been trimmed, it added little to nothing to the story, not even the vampire lecture really foreshadowed anything, though it did suggest that the book Dracula did exist in this world. We then move to a photoshoot with a couple of models and a photographer. The boss, Adriana, comes in, berates the photographer for using sex as a sales point (it’s a shoot for a perfume) takes one shot herself and says the session is done.

Luna undercover

We next meet Detective Luna Santos – and I should add that, whilst it is clear by the names that Luna and Adriana are the vampires we saw, that wasn’t necessarily clear in the film at first. But, as we’ve observed that she is a vampire, it is worth noting that it is during the day and sunny. She has entered her precinct wearing a red dress with plunging neck – she has been undercover. After experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace, she speaks to Detective Kenner (Salvador Zerboni) telling how she is getting close to a main player in a criminal gang. As she leaves, Kenner immediately rats her out.

the mysterious contact

So, the film then jumps through scenes. Katya is in a club with friends and blows a self-inflated DJ off, leaving him in no doubt that she isn’t interested. Adriana is in an art exhibition and a businessman comes on to her; she refuses him, leaves the building, and he goes after her. She refuses him again, walks away and he is grabbed by a fast moving something. Kenner meets his mysterious contact (Johanna Fadul) who is a vampire and she kills him, taking his file he was looking to sell. The DJ pursues Katya outside the club and she pushes him away with supernatural strength and then, after putting distance between them, calls Luna and says she was close to killing him due to not having fed – Luna sends her the address of Ingrid (Maria Conchita Alonso, Vampire’s Kiss) who can supply her with blood. However, Luna has been drugged and subsequently passes out.

blood moment

The next day Adriana leaves a guy in her bed whilst she goes to get some bagged blood. When she gets back up there he is bleeding out and a voice seems to tell her to drink from him – which she refuses. She goes to Ingrid’s also and it becomes apparent that Ingrid works for the Van Helsing organisation. The magic jewellery takes away memory and neither Luna or Adriana remember each other – indeed they both believe they were turned in the 1960s (indicating they’ve had their minds wiped at least twice each). They are trying to become human by abstaining from feeding on the living and certainly not killing them. Luna, 6-months before, was responsible for Katya being accidentally shot and turned her to save her life. But who is the mysterious vampire messing with their lives?

brides with guns

Though the flashbacks added story background, at times they, and some of the extraneous scenes, threatened to throw the pace off and, as I indicated earlier, it could do with twenty-minutes shaving off the running time. Nevertheless, the film holds a decent story (the not killing rule vacillates a bit and we do get baddies shot dead as well as injured). The acting is ok – it won’t set the world alight, but the principles did what they needed to do. Some of the CGI effects irked (gunfire for instance) but overall the film did what it set out to do. This was surprisingly entertaining. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US