This Benedict Mart film from 2016 was one that I really wanted to be a straight-out vampire flick – though I know before watching it that it features sirens. Unfortunately, it came out a little less than a definitive genre pic, despite flesh eating. Maybe it was the hastily explained lore vs very little observable flesh eating. It is certainly of genre interest but just missed out having that definite V factor for me.
It starts with an artist, drawing on a rocky shoreline as he narrates for us the legend of the sirens – this fellow narrates a few times through the film. With sketches and some stills of the sirens themselves we are told of three sisters, in film revealed as Callie (Rikke Leigh), Lydia (Eloise Juryeff) and Tess (Helen Rule), tasked with accompanying (and, through that company, protecting) Persephone. But they abandon her and Hades kidnaps her and so the Gods fling the sisters to a distant island (somewhere off Britain) and turn them into the “ravenous” sirens. Whilst the sketches show them with wings, in film they only have human form.
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| Rikke Leigh as Calie |
We get a scene with Chef Annie (Chloe Partridge) who is cooking whilst husband Dan (Matt Silver) looks on. He drops a heart she asks for and his comment makes it clear they have had relationship problems. He goes downstairs to throw the heart in the bin and someone clubs him from behind with a wrench. When he eventually comes round, in hospital three days later, he discovers that Annie is dead, murdered. Sometime later he is struggling with his job as a food critic as he can only face vegetarian food (much to his editor’s chagrin), not even when cooked by friend Ryan (C. Thomas Howell, Kindred the Embraced, Blood Wars, Mutant Vampire Zombies from the Hood & Justice League: Gods and Monsters). He has met and is falling for a woman online – she happens to be Callie.
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| the sisters together |
So, long story short (though to be fair the film is quite short at 74 minutes), he becomes concerned when he hears strange things when Callie is on the phone to him and then cuts off contact. Then he gets a text message from her saying ‘Rescue me’ and so goes to the island where she runs a guest house with her sisters. It is readily explained that Lydia sent the text (and we also discover that should one of the sisters leave it will mean the death for all three – though I suspect that actually meant their immortality would end, otherwise why would any of them choose to leave). The sisters feed a drink to guests, which causes their secrets to come out, though they can also charm the stories with song, and they then eat the evil-doers.
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| the bite |
There has to be more that isn’t explained as Lydia also lures Ryan to the island and so she must have some insight, though apparently not enough to simply know who is definitely bad and who is good. The issue is that whilst we get to see some stalking, a few (not overly gory) attacks and them cutting up meats, we get little in the way of horror level gore and no real feeding scenes (though we see them serve a cooked heart to hotel guests). We do get one neck bite – but it is more in anger than for feeding. It is within narration we are told by the narrator that they are “feasting on the guilty a little too eagerly” and so we know the fate of their victims through this but it all seems a little too shy, like the filmmakers pulled back from a horror that could have given us a vampiric narrative and failed to properly display the trope. The imdb page is here.
On DVD @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
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