Main cast: Chad Lowe (Neville Burlington), Isabelle Cyr (Carmilla), Marie-Josée Croze (Dominique), and Terence Stamp (The Host)
Director: John Hamilton
Hey, it’s that sad-faced guy from that old TV show Life Goes On!
In A Matter of Style, Chad Lowe, who will always live under the shadow of his more famous brother, plays a fledgling vampire Neville Burlington, who is being schooled in the art of seducing humans into being their prey by the much more senior vampire Carmilla.
In this episode, vampires have the traditional aversion to sunlight, but they can do some pretty cool things like materializing things out of nowhere and teleporting all over the place, and one’s powers only grow over time. Well, Neville is a new vampire, only a day old actually, but he doesn’t know it until he is approached by Carmilla.
She’s assigned to be his mentor, and when he learns of all the cool things he can do as a vampire, he is thrilled. Yeah, yeah, whatever, as she is more interested in teaching him how to seduce his victims into being his prey and then moving on with her own life.
Unfortunately, he’s supremely gauche when it comes to the opposite sex, and it’s not long before he becomes the butt of jokes among vampires and humans alike—much to Carmilla’s exasperation.
Eventually, Neville claims that she can’t be so hard on him because, as the embodiment of every man’s wildest dream, she can have any victim she wants so she doesn’t understand his plight. This gives her an idea: maybe they can make Neville appear as a woman and see if “Nevilla” would be more successful at the hunt!
What can go wrong, right?
Yes, this is a comedy, with very little scare or raunch. There are some pretty dated and unintentionally hilarious special effects, but some ghastly fashion that screams either the 1980s or French—maybe both, heh.
The story itself isn’t well developed enough to give a particularly coherent or memorable story, but Mr Lowe and Isabelle Cyr have a playful kind of chemistry that elevates the material that they have to work with. The dynamics between the two characters are fun to watch, and they remind me a lot of those hokey teen horror films of the 1980s that often see some horny young fellow getting seduced into being a vampire or werewolf, with farcical results to follow.
Actually, that’s why I like this episode, now that I think about it. It looks and feels a lot like those old teen horror films, for better or worst, such as My Best Friend Is a Vampire. Sure, this isn’t a remarkable episode, but I suppose there are worse ways to enjoy a bout of nostalgia.
