Vampire in Oakland – review

Director: Pharoah Powell

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

It is frustrating watching a film and knowing that the creative behind it clearly believes in what they have made but doesn’t have the technical skills to pull it off. Vampire in Oakland was, originally, a self-published novel by Pharoah Powell and, as I haven’t read it, I cannot comment on the book. It has then been filmed by the author and, well it just isn’t well made as a film. However, the fact that Powell wrote the novel and then filmed it shows that there was belief in the project.

entering the store

It starts with a couple of women walking down the street and going in a store for booze for a party. They are hit on by Eric and eventually they give him an address for the party. Cut to a rapper with a couple of dancers… is it the party? It seems like a bar but Eric is there with Playboy D. We know their names because we get a filtered/graphic intertitle moment that introduces them as Eric the Hustler and Playboy D the Player Foreal… Within moments a vampire, Sarene, eats Playboy D and here we have a crux of the issue.

blood tears

We get characters introduced (like Playboy D) who are meaningless… he plays no further part in this that I noticed. Other characters aren’t introduced this way so the consistency is not there. Further to this we get a host of characters with snippets of story. So, the next scene has four girls going into a flat, even though it seems sketchy (their words). Suddenly a woman is there who is going to turn them into vampires – why isn’t answered. They are amused until she bares fangs and cries blood. This is all short lived when a vampire hunter arrives.

taking over operations

Labelled as Queen of the Hunters (or some such) she demands to know where the vampire Queen, Amanisha (Candace Coogler), is. Refusal leads to a beheading – off screen. The vampire hunter appears later in a couple of scenes but there is no real story arc. We get a back in time moment of the vampire Queen taking over the drug operations of the area but, if she has run the scene for decades, how come the human mobster boss didn’t seem to know about her? There is also a story about renegade vampires getting caught on camera. There is also a story about a lone vampire who hadn’t met another for a couple of hundred years.

bite

We get a bit about witches (which seems to connect to the lone vampire) and werewolves (no shifting, of course). It’s all bitty and, with a cast of many characters but no engaging narrative thread, the viewer is left underwhelmed. The lore we get is also bitty. Vampire blood will heal, however it is forbidden to heal anyone over 18 as they get extra strength, speed and a couple of hundred years of longevity – honestly, why the age rule wasn’t explained (no one would want a kid like that either) and why the Queen told this to someone who wanted to heal a mortal rather than just keep him in the dark was not explained. Silver only works against werewolves and even the Queen (who is a couple of thousand years old) doesn’t know how to turn someone into a vampire as it involves a lost ritual and so vampires are created randomly.

introduction intertitle

Over all this isn’t great. The same skyscraper followed by church aerial establishing shot was used ad nauseam, the sound was really quiet in the mix (that might just be a fault with the file uploaded to Prime), the dialogue wasn’t great and the actors seemed, for the main, like they struggled with that dialogue – due to lack of experience or poor direction, I don’t know. The effects were mostly non-existent. Powell would have been better taking one thread of the story (probably the slayer Vs Queen thread that went nowhere, especially as the hunter had a natural screen presence) and running with that, with a smaller cast – starting small and building more later. As it is, I can see that there is belief in the project but it doesn’t save it from a 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK