Night Carnage – review

Director: Thomas J. Churchill

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

At the end of Night Carnage I was left unsure as to whether its raison d'etre was a commentary on the influencer phenomena or just on dating. Whilst having vampires, werewolves and hunters, they seemed almost a secondary aspect, strangely.

After scenes in the city we see a man outside a door, he has an earpiece and breaks into the building. In his ear, Aiden (Mike Ferguson, Dracula Eternal), tells him to scout only. Inside he finds a coffin surrounded by candles. Instead of retreating he opens it and stakes the vampire within. A male vampire, Michael Connor (Christian Howard), drops from the ceiling behind the hunter and kills him (with rubbish CGI blood spatter – the film really had some of the worst I’ve seen). Aiden tells his boss (Sonny King, Ravenwolf Towers) that they’ve lost another knight.

Baker Powell as Marcus

The boss is bed-bound and his son, Marcus (Baker Powell, United States of Horror: Chapter 1), visits. Marcus is a bar owner with a taste for the macabre and dad tells him of his heritage. The Von Holsen’s are descended from Van Helsing, they are monster hunters, knights as they have it, and it is his birthright. VH was killed by Michael Connor and he should avenge him. Despite mentioning that Van Helsing is in horror novels, he takes this news in his stride it seems and is pretty darn calm when dad dies there and then, message delivered.

Logan Andrews as Tess

Elsewhere we see Tess (Logan Andrews) exercising on a beach, By trade she is a blogger who blogs about relationships and essentially goes on dates and then writes about them – this reminded me of the film The Night is Young but also, I guess, Sex and the City came to mind as she voice-overed a blog later. We see a disastrous date with SteveO (Nick Waters) and then SteveO being killed by a werewolf. The film distances (by silence) Tess and the werewolf for no adequately explored reason as we quickly discover it is her (and, to be fair, the werewolf practical costume looked pretty good). Also dating (and then killing dates) is Michael Connor but he is rather taken by Tess, who looks like a lost love whose portrait he has (yup, that old chesnut). Meanwhile Marcus has taken control of the knights.

vampire

Not a huge amount particularly happens. We see two dates each both ending in eating the date (Tess because her dates are dirtbags, Michael because they do not live up to his high expectations and are not his lost bride). All the dates are at a restaurant called Renfield’s – it is creditable that Marcus recognises the name as coming from a horror novel, less so that the primary source is never named. It is at the end where the three storylines converge and the film again uses pretty-darn poor cgi blood spatter – given the practical werewolf, one wonders why? Some of the photography is well done. There isn’t much to be said about the acting, it does what it needs to and there are some naturalistic moments, but this never grasps the key plot point nor makes a thriller/horror of it, and is not the greatest as a result. 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

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