Marriage Bites – review

Director: Quinn Gardner

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

This one snuck onto Amazon, almost missed as their search engine for Prime videos goes from bad to worse, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to get when I pressed play. In essence it’s a character driven, horror themed comedy and I was rather tickled by it.

It starts with a couple of vloggers staking out a cemetery. After being scared by Milton (Darren Ewing) from the mortuary, they are confronted by a Goth/rock vampire and then we hear them got off-screen. We then move to Martin (Joe Komara), sat morose at the breakfast table. His voice-over tells us that he and his wife, Linda (Ashley Hargrove), have been married fifteen years and are kind of in a rut. They have a teen daughter, Morgan (Ava Connolly), and he has a boring job. Things are about to change…

bitten

Martin is out at night when a woman grabs and bites him, leaving him fallen to the floor. When he eventually gets up he is a vampire (and has a great set of bite marks). He gets home but can’t enter the house, phones Linda and, eventually, she invites him in – bemused by what he suggests is a role play. Interestingly he knows what he is and knows (by instinct or pop culture?) why he can’t enter the house. He discovers, in the bathroom, that he has no reflection and, when trying to shave by feel, cuts himself and immediately heals.

Linda and Martin

Getting in bed he decides that it will be torture, drawn by Linda’s aroma and neck. He eventually decides to sleep in the garage (or sit up, as he figures he’ll sleep by day). Linda has a dream and in it is Milton from the morgue and he is revealed as a vampire. In the morning Martin is in bed when Linda gets up and opens the shades. Martin leaps off the bed and then discovers he isn’t burning (later he’ll use sunblock as he’s worried about more direct sun). Of course Linda realises what he is and they research off the internet. They also discover he is horny (yes, the pep pops in their marriage), holy water burns (she gets some from a nearby church) and later we discover it will destroy a vampire if they are sprayed with enough. Strangely, given the holy water, crosses don’t work, neither does garlic, but staking kills, they have eye mojo and stabbing in the eye is icky.

doused with holy water

Later we’ll discover that whilst a deep bite turns, a nibble won’t immediately and it takes three, and the vampire is staking a claim to the victim being nibbled. We also discover that the town is suffering a bit of a vampire infestation. Later Martin will get Linda some fake fangs but the vampires can smell the aroma of someone still human. And, you know what, the film works, really quite well. The performances by Ashley Hargrove and Joe Komara are central to this; her exasperated at times, he trying to behave but also embracing his vampirism like a naughty schoolkid, with a genuine chemistry between them. It is their presences and performances that make this a genuinely funny flick. 6.5 out of 10.

The episode's imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Night Patrol – review

Director: Ryan Prows

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

Gangs, cops, vampires… presented in a gritty thriller style… on the surface this should wow and, at first, it certainly holds the viewer attention and yet it loses itself, cutting from realism (albeit a realism with vampires) to silliness without breaking stride. This really should be better than it is, and that’s a crying shame.

Wazi injured

It starts in an interrogation room and Wazi (RJ Cyler) is injured with a stone spearhead (for want of a better description) stuck out of his side. A cop, Captain Freeman (Nick Gillie), enters the room and has him sign a statement (presumably that he has not dictated), signing a second copy when Wazi gets his blood on the first. Cutting backwards and we see Wazi on his bike. He goes to a car and meets Primo (Zuri Reed). Theirs is an illicit romance, him being a member of the Crips and her a member of the Bloods.

Zulu ring

He has clearly read too much in as he has brought her a ring (quickly suggesting it as a gift not a proposal). The ring actually belongs to his mother (Nicki Micheaux) and is of Zulu origin. Suddenly there is a car there and members of the Night Patrol – an elite gangbusting police task force – are there. Among them is Ethan Hawkins (Justin Long, House of Darkness). He is expected to execute Primo and does. Wazi runs and chase is given but as one of the Night Patrol finds him and is about to approach, he notices the ring and backs off. Hawkins has Wazi’s bike and it has his gang tag painted on it.

Carr and Hawkins

Hawkins is giving a talk to a bunch of highschoolers. A man bursts into the gym, his face covered and fires off a machine gun. Hawkins falls, the man terrorises a student when Hawkins sits up and congratulates his partner Carr (Jermaine Fowler) – the machine gun firing blanks. Outside, however, he remonstrates with him, it wasn’t part of the script. Carr was brought up within the Crips community and Hawkins asks about the tag on the bike – Carr does recognise it, as Wazi is his brother, but suggests he would ask his brother whose tag it is. Later Carr discovers that Hawkins has made Night Patrol and this is the last day rolling together.

Freddie Gibbs as Bornelius

Wazi takes himself to Bloods territory to tell their leader, Bornelius (Freddie Gibbs), that his sister Primo has been killed. The Bloods make him take them to the scene, where her body has been torn apart. The Bloods have a debate as to whether this was the work of demons or lizard people (a taste of the off the rails moments to come). Meanwhile Hawkins is actually trying to infiltrate, rather than join, Night Patrol. His father had been in the group and had vanished. He does go out of his way to protect Wazi for Carr.

metal fangs

So, what is happening? Night Patrol are vampires and they are led by Hawkins' father who is bringing his son into the fold. They forcibly turn him and intend to wipe out the Crips (and all those living in the Housing Project they run). The film, as mentioned, has been gritty thriller (bar the conspiracy spouting Bloods) and this feels like it is continuing when the vampires put in metal fangs. However, we then discover they are ultra powerful – headshots heal for instance. But then a stake through the heart heals too. It appears nothing can hurt them.

vampires, or...

There is a debate about what they are – with Wazi saying vampire – and mentions made of obayifo. According to Bane, obayifo are energy vampires from Ashanti folklore, in this repurposed to Zulu folklore but Ghana is a long way from South Africa. In the film they say (during this fairly long discussion, in the open, as the vampires devastate the Housing Project around them) that obayifo have pink skin, iron teeth and they attack the prey from trees above. They also name them Asanbosam, which according to Bane do hunt from trees though it is feet and hands that are iron and again is folklore from Ghana (and the Ivory Coast). What the film does, more than anything, is draw a line between the white cops and black gang members – at one point suggesting “One thing the colonizers all fear? Our Blackness.”

Zulu artefacts

This might be on the nose but is fine as a central premise (even if the exposition was ill-placed as the three in the discussion should have been up to their knees in vampires). However, where it goes wrong (and MASSIVE SPOILER) is in making the only thing that can kill them being Zulu artefacts but, worse, having the artifacts (ring and the spearhead that Wazi had embedded in his side at the opening of the film) glow green. Honestly, the ring looked like we’d just flipped into a Green Lantern film. We then get Hawkins flying and his jaw splitting and fanged like a Reaper Strain vampire – the realism they toyed with out of the window by this point.

reaper strain

And it is a shame. Even though the central messaging was on the nose, this worked. The gritty realism and the low key on supernatural tropes worked (having metal fangs was a nice touch). But then the mismatched power, the artefacts, the sudden ability to fly… it undermined everything the film had successfully built. Because I liked the film until the ride started getting silly I’m going to settle for 5 out of 10 – if they had maintained the tone and eschewed the superhero-like aspects it would have been higher.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Short Film: The Vampyr: A Gothic Horror

A little over 15 minutes in length this Will Nutter directed and written short was released in 2025. By the language and visuals, set in the 19th century, it certainly looks great. The black and white photography sets the atmosphere – though it does go, deliberately, very dark in places.

It starts with Edmund (Steven Hardie Colgan) narrating, as he composes a letter to his mother. He has left England and is sailing in pursuit of his love Mira (Skye McVie), who has been taken by a vampyr (Liam Robertson). Once ashore he finds someone to aid him in his hunt, known simply as the Hunter (Donnie Baxter) and together they set off to the castle.

The hunter and Edmund

Of course, one has to assume everyone is on the level… and to discover if they are, you’ll have to watch the short. Colgan carries the film, earnest but bumbling, though Baxter’s Hunter is a gruff, believable veteran of vampire hunting. The castle used for filming (I believe Lennox castle in Scotland) was a great location – though I think I may have tried to scrub the little bit of graffiti caught on camera in post-production. A minor point.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mention: The Haunting of Hill House

I had never read Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, which is shameful given one of my favourite films, The Haunting (1963), was based on it. I recently rectified the situation and read the novel, though I didn’t expect to give an honourable mention here.

I knew that the 1963 adaptation was pretty faithful to the book but there is nothing within the film that could have it (and the house at the centre) labelled as a vampiric building text. This is not true of the later (and also excellent) Mike Flanagan adaptation, The Haunting of Hill House, which made the house vampiric (and the least said about the 1999 film the better).

The house in the novel, however, is immediately coded as living and sentient (if mad):

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

There is a suggestion that it sought to feed from inhabitants when we are told, “The sense was that it wanted to consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house, maybe—”. Had the theme been expanded on then I would have been suggesting that the house was, indeed, vampiric but, as a throwaway, I will say it certainly flirts with the trope and this could lead to a vampiric reading.

The mention is offered as Jackson certainly draws the reader to the vampiric on a couple of occasions by associating the house with an imagined vampire inhabitant. In one exchange about housekeeper Mrs Dudley we get:

“‘She probably watches every move we make, anyway; it’s probably part of what she agreed to.’
“‘Agreed to with whom, I wonder? Count Dracula?’
“‘You think he lives in Hill House?’
“‘I think he spends all his week-ends here; I swear I saw bats in the woodwork downstairs.’”

Later we get another mention, whilst discussing Mrs Dudley leaving the house in a car with two others (one of whom was her husband, who the characters had met at the gate of Hill House, but who the second person might have been is never discussed further):

“‘First Murderer must be Dudley-at-the-gate; I suppose the other was Count Dracula. A wholesome family.’”

The use of Dracula is interesting as Castle Dracula was meant, at one point, to be intimately connected with the vampire, collapsing on his death. In this case it is a mention in passing but I would suggest the mention was deliberately used in order to invoke a particular Gothic feel for the reader. Nevertheless, the invocation of Dracula within the text opens the opportunity for me to mention the book here.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Cursed Hearse – review

Director: Matthew Luke Tucci

Release date: 2026

Contains spoilers

Vampire machines appear in genre films on occasion and, on some occasions, those machines are cars/motor vehicles. In this case, the vehicle is a hearse and that seems rather apt. As I’ll explore, we don’t see the hearse feed, nor do we get a sense of any supernatural healing that some variants of the trope show. We do get a definite impact on the driver/owner though. Perhaps we might consider it possession even.

hearse for sale

As the film starts, we find ourselves in small town USA and we see a hearse with a for sale sign, the vehicle looks derelict. Willoughby (Louis Rocky Bacigalupo, Vampz!), or Will, is sat in a tow truck. It is the third time this week his car has died. The sheriff (Johnny Halloran) stops on by before Will gets the tow truck to drop the car off at his Uncle’s garage and drop him off at work.

co-workers

Work is a tele-sales place, with his friends Lavash (Marat Shad) and Sid (Anthony Mcgee). After shift they are walking, for his part Will is off to his second job at a Halloween store. As they walk he spots the hearse and is distracted by it. His boss at the store is a dick. However, there is something good there in the form of co-worker Rosemary (Arina Bacigalupo). She gives him a lift home and asks him on a date. Home life is weird; he lives with his Nana (Marnie L Hall) but she has a young lover, Greg (Justin C. Schilling). Lavash and Sid are coming over but he runs out on them determined to buy the hearse.

Will and Rosemary

He crosses a bridge, where a blind man seems to sit vigil, and goes to the couple who are selling the hearse. The man is creepy, but his wife comes out and essentially offers him the hearse for $400. When he has left it is clear that it is a set up and they refer to the hearse like a living being. He doesn’t have $400 and so convinces Sid to loan him the money as an investment – Will suggests he will convert the hearse into a limo as a business venture.

vampire breath

So, the car is a vampire and starts whispering to him, making him offers. The car is described as hungry and when we get the backstory it consists of a funeral home director who was part of a cult that fed the hearse the blood of the dead, but it wasn’t enough and she insisted on fresh blood. She is able to somehow possess Will, which gives him long talons, red eyes and a maw full of fangs. When he attacks a victim he expels breath into them, which seems to sedate them. Later he will say he thinks he drank blood, which he did, and a cult member says “How do you think we feed her?” This suggests that she consumes blood through a possessed servant. I’d have liked to have seen the hearse become pristine as it gained blood but it remained as is, and I suspect that was a budget thing.

Vamp face

The film has a neat idea – though some of the lore such as the breath and the symbiosis between car and servant are under-explored. Unfortunately it isn’t sure what it wants to be. It feels like it pulls its punches when it comes to horror and much more atmosphere and tension could have been explored. This may be because it styles itself as a comedy too, but that fell flat for me. There are pregnant pauses and awkward silences in scenes between the actors, as though they are waiting for direction and, to me, it really felt like it could do with tightening up. Not terrible, just shy of what it might have been. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

The Bitter Taste – review

Director: Guido Tölke

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

Horror, vampires and pentathlon – it seems a strange mix and yet here we are. I say vampires, in truth we are really in the bailiwick of Erzsébet Báthory, but the filmmakers changed the name to Badesky – why is not too clear and they kept the basic outline of her story. It has an interesting lore idea in it but several stumbling blocks as we will see.

It starts with a woman emerging from a lake, she has a gun but drops the bullets from it… Elsewhere there is a hunting party looking for stag. Marcia Lorenz (Julia Dordel) is acting as a hunting guide to Matheus King (John Keogh). She is an ex-pentathlete, though I am not sure she ever says that outright, it just becomes evident, and is injured, causing a limp. He takes a shot at a stag, feels pain in his arm (recoil you might assume, but no) and falls over a tree stump.

Julia Dordel as Marcia

She helps him up, but he has dropped an envelope that is wax sealed. She picks it up and he snatches it back – extolling the fact that it is worth a small fortune. They continue and he spots a doe, he takes aim and she pushes his rifle as it is not doe season. As it is, he wings it and she says to follow – he rejects the idea as the adrenalin will spoil the meat (we return to that idea later). He gives her a revolver but refuses to come. She finds the doe but another guide gives it a mercy killing and asks what she has done – getting back to the hunting lodge, King has had a heart attack whilst on his own and, having been found by another guide, has been taken to hospital.

narrow escape

Marcia is sacked without pay for leaving her client – she needed the pay to put towards an operation to fix her leg. She steals King’s abandoned jacket – with the envelope – and leaves. Whilst driving on a road through the forest, a woman (the one from the lake) runs into the road and Marcia hits her – but the woman is alive and urges her to drive them away. Suddenly a bad (and when I say bad, I’m sorry, but the best descriptor is “piss poor”) cgi creature chases them and is able to catch the car. Marcia breaks, throwing it off, lightning strikes a tree that falls across the road/creature, she reverses and crashes. The woman is pulled from the car (wearing King’s jacket) and then Marcia is attacked. She eventually loses the creature by jumping across the path of a steam train, that hits it.

the castle

She gets the cops, who come in the form of George Balough (Anne Alexander-Sieder), and she doesn’t believe Marcia's story (or maybe George is covering events up). The axel is broken and she ends up selling her car for the money for a train ticket (a train that drops off two women in sports training gear) but ends up not leaving and then she is in and out of peril, finds the first woman on a meathook, meets Josh (Nicolo Pasetti, The Last Voyage of the Demeter) a handsome hunting lodge caretaker/eel fisherman and is embroiled in a supernatural tale…

lore book

So, roughly, what is going on? Countess Badesky and her four acolytes become vampires but were trapped on the land by the church and a curse. The curse was enacted by being tricked into signing compacts and coincidentally the envelope Marcia stole just so happens to contain those compacts, which they need to escape. Bathory discovered that human flesh, stressed and then eaten, extends life and bathing in/drinking blood restores youth. As there are no military conflicts round the property to cause the flesh of victims to be stressed, they sponsor and then invite pentathletes and hunt them. The pentathlete aspect was odd, but I liked the different properties of flesh and blood for the vampires.

the countess

Beyond the bad cgi – some of the practical effects are good, but the cgi, oh brother… - there are more issues with the film, and the biggest one was unlikely coincidence… King happens to have stolen the compacts, and happens to have them on him whilst hunting, and happens to have a heart attack, and Marcia happens to steal them (unaware of what they are), and happens to have an accident on the Badesky’s land, and happens to become embroiled, and happens to be a pentathlete, and happens to be able to find Badesky’s sigil online having seen it in a dimly lit cellar for seconds, and King’s driver happens to be the woman Marcia accidentally injured in training (King and she come into it again later on, and though there is a flimsy reasoning to how he found Marcia, it didn’t add up). It is really unbelievable as a string of coincidence.

blood spattered

The dialogue is a little hokey – though the actors try their best with it – but the length of the film (over 2-hours) outstays its welcome and could do with some generous pruning. The vampires are truly immortal, it would seem, and we end up getting some The Thing-like body horror towards the end. The twist, which revealed the Countess’ fourth acolyte, was broadcast early on and came as no surprise. An interesting idea around the vampirism, and interesting to merge horror and pentathlon. But a victim of its own hubris. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Blood Craving

Blood Craving is an extra on the Blu-Ray of Date With a Vampire and is a short film by Jeffrey Arsenault but is a bit of an oddity that I’ll date to 2002 (per IMDb). Arsenault directed the film Night Owl and if you look at my review of that film I mention: “I understand that the film was reissued in 2003 as Blood Craving and that a wraparound was added showing some new vampires and some chained victims as well as some extra explanation as to the fate of Angel – but I also understand it was new digitally shot footage that hardly fit in with the grainy aesthetics of the original movie.”

This short seems to be that additional footage (mostly) packaged together as a film in its own right. The IMDb page clearly references the edited version of Night Owl, this short is 29-minutes long and the listing on IMDb says 1 hour 15 minutes (still shorter than Night Owl’s 1 hour and 17 minutes, suggesting that the edit lost footage as well as gaining it). I say this is mostly additional footage as the interview with Caroline Munro is recycled into this (and is as much a strange addition as it was in the previous film as it is literally an interview with the actress). The short is shot in (rather washed out) colour, rather than black and white, and the Munro footage is in colour rather than black and white as it was in Night Owl.

Tiffany Helland as Jilian

As a short it really doesn’t make a huge amount of sense – a story regarding some form of disease impacting younger vampires, with Jillian (Tiffany Helland) sexually luring men to drain them of blood that she’ll feed to Angel (Israel Monrroy) – handcuffed for his own safety and presumably impacted by whatever is affecting younger vampires. Angel, as mentioned above, was a character in Night Owl – though it is a different actor playing the character. An oddity at best.

The imdb page (for the feature length release) is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US