1313: Boy Crazies – review

Director: David DeCoteau

Release date: 2011

Contains spoilers

Oh dear… another David DeCoteau flick and this one part of an unrelated series of films entitled 1313 – this one being the vampire flick.

When we wonder how the director manages to get funding, perhaps the secret is in the reduced costs by using his own house over and over again as the set? I understand this is a common set in the 1313 series and was actually the set of Immortal Kiss: Queen of the Night, a vampire flick filmed by him a year later.

Monique Parent as Sheila

In this one the plot won’t take long to reveal. After a prologue that has little to do with the film (bar acting as a bookend) we meet Trent (Ryan McIntyre) who has been invited to move to a model house in LA. He gets there and is met by Sheila (Monique Parent, Blood Thirsty & Blood Scarab). She is apparently a matriarch as she simply claps her hands and the other residents, Vincent (Michael Hudson), Stefan (Lee Kholafai) and Miquel (Brendan Lamb), troop down to meet the newcomer. When Trent goes to his room the boys declare their wish to feed on him but Sheila forbids it – he has a unique energy and, instead, she has brought in an overnight lodger for food.

the boys

That night (and I’ll get to night shots in a second) Trent is having a restless night’s sleep due to dreams – dreams in which the boys snap their teeth at him (no fangs are evident). He wakes and sees them chasing down the other lodger, panics, runs and gets caught. Sheila asks him what he thinks he saw and then tells him it was a magnificent display of power. Power that he can share. The boys attack and he awakes back in his bed as a vampire. It should be noted, however, that despite the snapping of teeth and lunging at necks these are energy vampires purely and simply.

Trent fails to kill

So they can suck energy (and be killed by having their energy sucked), they are immortal, stronger than mere mortals and have heightened senses. Sheila is more powerful and can get in their heads. The interesting bit of lore is that they can project their power of fascination through photographs and Trent’s ability to do this surpasses the others considerably. This was reminiscent (especially as they are models and he is to get a billboard) of the 1949 Fitz Leiber Jr short story The Girl with Hungry Eyes - just done really badly.

hunger pangs, anguish and tight whities

How bad… Night shots… there are day for night shots with a blue tint. The film is only 73 minutes long but most of it consists of Trent wandering aimlessly (and bored looking) round the house in tight white undies that I think were reused in Immortal Kiss: Queen of the Night. During these apparently endless scenes Trent hears earlier dialogue from the film in loop and so, of course, do we. The acting is rank amateur (only Monique Parent has any spark). The story of the reluctant vampire has been done over and over, of course, and this brought nothing new to the party.

1 out of 10 – a point given because it at least made me compare (if unfavourably) to the Girl With Hungry Eyes.

The imdb page is here.