Vampire's House of Cain – review

Director: Greg Galloway

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

I don’t actually know if it was budget or script that defeated this film, but defeated it was. The story was fairly simple but managed to muddle itself and that seemed to be through narrative leaps that sort of didn’t make sense.

The film starts at a party in a club – we later discover it is a place called Bliss. In the club women watch men dance and strip. Those men happen to have fangs… Early morning and two women are jogging. One drops back but when she reaches her friend again, the friend is in shock. Looking to where her friend stares she sees a body that appears to be self-immolating.

at the crime scene

Obviously the police arrive, including Detective Mani Reed (Erica Hubbard), and we discover that this is one of several murders where the bodies have been drained and burned (of course we realise that they are victims who turn and die in the sun). Reed questions one of the joggers who, it turns out, vaguely knew the latest victim – she can’t tell her much, only that she liked late night spots.

in the club

Talking with her Captain (Terrence 'T.C.' Carson) she suggests that she has made a connection between victims – all of them had attended a club called the Mist Lounge. The Captain seems concerned around her wellbeing and she does fall asleep outside the club in her car. However, woken, she heads in, flashing her badge and speaks to the barman and is directed to co-owner Hanson (Karon Riley). He speaks to her but is pretty evasive. After she leaves, he calls a meeting.

Diana Lovell as the Matriarch

The meeting is with the matriarch (Diana Lovell) of their vampire clan and she is shocked that there have been obvious vampire attacks. Their way is not to kill and they use a synthetic blood mostly. It doesn’t take too long to hear about the new vampire clan – the House of Cain – operating out of Bliss and soon the two clans are at loggerheads. As for Reed we get a clumsy exposition about her having relationship issues but then she is bitten by one of the House of Cain and saved by Hanson (we discover that vampire bites are pleasurable). He wipes her mind, but it doesn’t work too well (putting her on a hit list but also having her dropped off the case, and forced onto administrative leave as she keeps going vague) and they fall for each other. Eventually the tension between the Houses will lead to a showdown.

fight

So I mentioned narrative leaps and this took the form of things that made little sense, for instance she has her mind wiped and yet sees a conflict between Hanson and one of the House of Cain in a dream, that she wasn’t privy too and the viewer didn’t see outside of the dream-sequence. There might have been an attempt to suggest she and Hanson were psychically linked but, if that was the case, it failed to communicate it well and the filmmakers did practically nothing with it. Worse, it more felt that a chunk of narrative was missing and I got that feeling a couple of times.

dying

As well as being able to wipe minds the vampires become more powerful as they age (the House of Cain kills Hanson’s ‘brother’ by ganging up on him and wearing him down). If you kill a vampire, then all those it created die also. Death sees them breaking down to nothing (unless they are burning to a crisp, of course, as they need to be found by random joggers as a plot point). Some of the performances do feel phoned in but other actors do what they can with a very thin plot. The film is quite short and could have done with the missing narrative and more character building. One wonders whether an apparently low budget caused the narrative woes. Within this there was a decent, if simple, tale waiting to get out and so I think 4 out of 10 is fair.

The imdb page is here.