Main cast: Natalie Martins (Jennifer), Derek Nelson (Freddie), Jéssica Alonso (Izabella), Peter Lofsgard (Jack), Jonathan Hansler (Lieutenant Peterson), Mark McKirdy (Detective Noonan), Makenna Guyler (Sarah), Candice Palladino (Lauren), Grace Blackman (Lindsay), Barrington De La Roche (The Homeless Man), James Swanton (Frank Laymon), Kane Surry (Zane), Grayson Matthews (Tyler), Tim Cartwright (Director Grenik), Richard Myers (Jimmy), and Jay O’Connell (Thomas)
Director: Charlie Steeds
Don’t be fooled by the movie poster art of Vampire Virus, as this one is far less horror and more of a… well, it reminds me of a CW supernatural drama in many ways.
Jennifer is a serious lady without much of a love life, so she is persuaded one evening by her friends to have fun at a club. There, she is seduced by the alluring Izabella… only to wake up the next morning in an alleyway with a bloody bite wound on her stomach.
Soon, she is experiencing heightened sense of smell and strange thirst can’t be quenched by water, much to her roommate Jack’s befuddlement. Becoming a vampire is messy enough, but things become complicated by Jack’s beau Freddie being a cop that is part of the team investigating a series of mysterious murders around town…
The vampires here are far from scary, actually, as they have over-sized very fake-looking fangs that actually make them look comical. Also, they don’t do much other than posing dramatically and going “HA-AAA-AAH!” in their scenes, maybe because they worry about tearing all those fancy “hot vampire outfits” and incurring extra fees from wherever they borrowed those clothes from.
Still, the acting is actually pretty competent, although the poor cast members are saddled with some clunky lines that could have been ripped out of some kid’s first ever vampire fan fiction. Derek Nelson, especially, has to keep saying “Shit!” all the time that he actually looks exasperated and tad embarrassed after a while. He and Peter Lofsgard are very easy on the eyes as a lovey-dovey couple, though, and it’s actually a shame that this movie is too respectable to have them show lots of skin.
The movie is a bit bipolar in that it starts out being poor Jennifer trying to get used to her changes into a vampire and staying out of trouble as much as possible, only to abruptly shift focus to Jack and Freddie later on with vampirism even heavy-handedly portrayed as an infection that allows oppressed members of society to get back at people that even look at them funny. Because of this, Jessica is unceremoniously shoved to secondary character later on, thus cutting short her story arc, while previously underdeveloped Jack and Freddie are shoved to the front and I’m somehow supposed to care about them.
Like most movies directed and co-written by Charlie Steeds, this one feels a lot like a much better movie held back by budgetary limitations. This movie, I feel, would have been more coherent and better if it had been about Jennifer or, say, the incompetent cop Freddie getting bitten from the start. One or the other would be fine, but the movie doesn’t have enough run time to do both of them justice at the same time. Perhaps it would tell a better story had it been a miniseries on a streaming channel, who knows.
Still, the cast members manage to keep it watchable, so it’s not a complete failure!
