Nest of Vampires – review

Director: Chris Sanders

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

I feel really quite bad about this one as I really wanted to like it and there are some elements within the film that work. Unfortunately, this budget UK flick lets itself down mostly in two areas. Firstly, in the story, which is just all over the place, and definitely in prosthetics. Other aspects are a mixed bag, such as the acting on display.

The film opens with an intertitle that tells us that lapis lazuli, which has been enchanted by witches, allows vampires to walk openly in sunlight. The stone is mentioned once in film but this serves more as something to allow day and night action and no more than that.

Jon-Paul Gates as Mario

We see a man, Mario (Jon-Paul Gates, Revamped), in the daylight and given the intertitle one might assume he is a vampire. However, I don’t think he actually was. A woman (Lucy Marshall) is inside looking for something (a file it turns out) when there is a knock. She goes to the door but no-one seems to be there. She says “Enter, if you dare”, which feeds into the view that he may be a vampire, being an invitation, but also is the last thing someone would say. He does dare...

Anna is killed

However she hasn’t seen him and he sits around holding a knife as she shouts to daughter Anna (Daria Krauzo) about the file – to no response. She only notices him when he deliberately bangs the knife on a surface and comes out with the unlikely, “do you know who I am?” Mario, for his part speaks in Italian and grabs her, dances with her and she threatens that her husband will kill him if he doesn’t leave. Mario grabs her throat and squeezes so hard she haemorrhages from her nose and eyes (and despite this feat of superhuman strength, I still don’t believe he was a vampire). With her dead he goes after Anna.

Tom Fairfoot as Kit

Two months later and Kit Valentine (Tom Fairfoot) meets with Edward (Frank Jakeman, Lifeforce). They are both MI5 operatives and Kit is the husband whose wife was murdered and whose daughter, we now discover, was taken. In a bar Edward passes him £5k in an envelope and the photos of several people who work for Samuel Archer (Hans Hernke) and their location. Do what you have to and get back to London, is the advice. This is clearly off the books.

killing Mark

So, Kit goes to the location Archer is operating from and immediately finds one person Mark (Rizi Timane) who he briefly questions and kills. He then takes his sweet time finding anyone else. What he doesn’t know is that Archer is controlled by Marshall Mabus (Chris Sanders) who will later suggest he too is MI5 and who is also a vampire with several female vampires in tow. He suggests that, had he known Kit was “one of us”, a vampire in other words, he wouldn’t have attacked his family. Archer doesn’t know about vampires but is human trafficking – kidnapped girls are sold to rich clients for satanic rituals (yes, that urban conspiracy gets an airing here). Anna, he decides, he wants for himself.

vamp face

The thing is, not much happens for ages. Kit goes around and only finds Simone (Jet Jandreau) who manages to manufacture their meeting, knows who he is (he doesn’t spot that) but not what and they have conversations that either overly share with a stranger or run in riddles that actually don’t add to the thriller/mystery side. As Kit later suggests that the vampires put him in place to stop trafficking rings that impinged on their interests (ie meals) it is astounding that he and Marshal weren’t aware of each other but the story is disjointed, the narrative has gaping holes (not in plot so much as in the exposition) and is senseless in places. This is the biggest problem – the film relies on dialogue over action/horror and the dialogue fails to build a coherent narrative.

female vampire

The next issue is in the sfx. So, bits, like a hand chopped off, are ok (though the logic of trying to fill a bottle with blood from the hand and not the stump beggared belief and might have been indicative of a limitation in the practical effects) but the vamp face. Oh, I really am sorry but it was bad. The facial prosthetics looked pathetic, you could see the joins and they just looked really bad. Honestly, I don’t understand why, when they saw this in production, they didn’t just sack off 'vamp face' and stick to fangs and contact lenses. We get very little vampire lore. Anna knows what Kit is; we discover this in a flashback, in which she has manipulated a victim into the family home and killed him for her (adopted) father. It is implied in that scene that Kit’s wife did not know. Anna tells us that bullets won’t effect Kit, which is why I think Mario was human – he gets shot dead.

collected blood

The acting was a mixed bag. Tom Fairfoot came across really well and the biggest issue was his dialogue rather than performance and the same can be said for Jet Jandreau who offered an earnest performance despite the obscured dialogue she had to deliver. I thought Daria Krauzo offered a confident performance also. However some performances were simply amateurish or just plain poor, I’m afraid. I thought the photography looked good but there was an issue (again a budgetary one, I’d guess) with some of the locations that felt out of place. Whilst Archer was in town for a short while, the establishing shot of the small suburban house he was staying in didn’t say 'kingpin of human trafficking' to me.

snarl

As I mentioned at the head of the review, I really wanted to like this and probably would have been more forgiving if there were issues but just not as many. The basic idea was good but the narrative felt overly complicated and failed to elucidate on its complexities and got lost trying to execute what was there. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The film can be rented or purchased from its homepage.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK