Around Midnight – review

Directors: Laura Giglio, Christopher Kahler & Andrew N. Shearer

Release date: 2004

Contains spoilers

A shot on and straight to video effort, If you are able to track down this anthology film it is going to look just that – with the fuzz one expects from such a film.

The wraparound is hosted by Suzi Lorraine (The Last Revenants & Drakul), speaking directly to camera and identifying as a vampire (though she does nothing vampiric). There are three announced segments (the feature runs for an hour) but only one is vampire related. That said there is an additional segment tagged onto the end of the third that is vampire (and I’ll cover that, of course).

attack

The first segment is entitled Vampire’s Kiss and, in the introduction, Suzi Lorraine suggests it is about a woman who wants to be a vampire (presumably that is the first of the two women we meet). The two women are played by Debbie D (Vampyre Tales, Deep Undead & Requiem for a Vampire) and Barbara Joyce, the end credits does not suggest which roles they play. The first we meet is in the bathroom brushing her hair, not seeing the man (Dean Paul) who enters her room until she turns round as, being a vampire, he doesn’t reflect. He mesmerises her with hand movements, has her strip and bites her but something startles him and he skedaddles.

bound

We move to the second woman, see her get ready for bed, the vampire enter her room, wake her and mojo her also. He takes her to his lair and chains her up, rips her nightie (because, boobs) and feeds from her. Eventually the first woman enters the lair whilst he is absent, with a stake through her belt. She goes to rescue the victim but, once free, she reveals fangs, and the new slayer kills her and awaits the male vampire. Not a lot else to report from this one.

fangs

The other two primary segments feature an encounter with death and, in the second, a woman having a psychotic break (which is by far the longest segment and is paced really poorly) – in fact the vampire segment mentioned is probably the best, though it has little story and is very short. After the third one, as mentioned, we get a mini-segment which has a guy (Christopher Kahler, Dracula’s Orgy of the Damned, From Dusk Till Dawn – the series & Preacher) on a couch watching TV. We het a news report about the Anubis Syndrome – a phenomena causing the dead to rise. He goes for a shower (and it was a nice reverse for a video of this pedigree to have the man do a shower scene) and a woman appears in his home. He goes to his bedroom and she follows, his reaction on seeing her is appropriately sleazy for this kind of straight to video fare and she bears fangs and attacks – that’s it.

staking

So it looks terrible – we expect that (though the staking of the victim turned vampire looked ok – probably because the poor print papered over the cracks) but the issue is that the segments aren’t great. Nevertheless, it does technically have three vampire spots. I think 2.5 out of 10 is overly generous but that’s what it can have.

The imdb page is here.