Director: Richard Douglas Jensen
Release date: 2025
Contains spoilers
This came up on Tubi and it seemed to have potential with the blurb talking about a new bride who discovers that her husband is a vampire. There seemed to be scope for some tense thriller moments coupled with horror. Unfortunately, the film really didn’t move me.
It starts with the bride, Carol (Saporah Bonnette), and Groom Frederick Wessex (Philip Hulford), preparing for their service. Note the bright sunlight – vampires in this are not impacted by the sun. The priest (Jeff Lapidus) at the service seems to be having moments and actually asks for forgiveness under his breath when he announces them as married – indicating that he knows something is off. A couple of gossipy women joke that they hope he knows what he’s getting in to during the service.
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| preparing for marriage |
They drive to the small Appalachian town (population 100) where Frederick is the town doctor. It is in the middle of nowhere with no cell service and, when he lights candles at their cabin, he jokes that they have electricity except for… and lists a plethora of weather conditions. However, when she explored the town it seems, overall, like a much less rural location repurposed by the filmmakers. Later we see the brothel but it is a bar, by the looks of things, where the actors pretend the exterior matches the interior. They are making do with what they have but it requires a suspension of disbelief (especially with the industrial units that appear in a background of a river shot).
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| matted eyes (enlarge to see) |
She seems to have moments and we see aspects like her walking and eyes floating nearby – that could be him watching her psychically, or a representation of her delusions; but to me it looked like a tad-ham-fisted matting. The reason it might be delusion is because she is bipolar and schizophrenic and has been in institutions most of her young life. The question then of the romance, and how he wooed her hangs over the narrative but isn’t really answered. He has wooed her to breed her, we know that much – and suggests it was due to her virginity. He is pretty sure he impregnates her first time round. He wants a child (and later we hear that the child will be cursed to be Nosferatu if he is not killed during the first full moon after conception).
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| Emma Hayley Jensen as the hunter |
That said, he claims to be in love with her and wants to make her eternal like him (he is 1200 years old). The townsfolk are his vassals and he rules over them and no one seems to bat an eyelid when prostitutes leave the brothel in body bags. Then throw into the mix vampire hunters – one who is a priest (Richard Douglas Jensen), barred from the vampire hunter secret society when he let his wife, who had been turned, escape. The other a nun (Emma Hayley Jensen) who was excommunicated due to her Sapphic exploits. How he tolerated the two in his town, especially as one seemed to live there, is not explained. Some late on rabble-rousing by another priest (Michael V. Jordan) also seemed off-kilter given Federick’s apparent control.
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| vampiric imagery |
The film did have some good vampiric images (mostly fangs on show and blood/bite effects) but the story dragged. The performances were mixed; Saporah Bonnette’s distanced performance worked given the character’s mental health and Richard Douglas Jensen was great as the Russian priest/hunter. I was much less taken with Philip Hulford’s Wessex. There is also something jarring about an Anglo-Saxon warrior with very modern tattoos (some in modern English and one in binary). This vampire’s back was scarred, true, but would undead flesh maintain the scar of a post-turning tattoo? Perhaps that’s just me. I struggled with this one 3 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
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