Kiss of the Vampire (aka Immortally Yours) (2009)
Starring: Daniel Goddard, Katherine Hawkes
Directed By: Joe Tornatore
Written By: Katherine Hawkes
Grade: F

I really wanted to like Kiss of the Vampire. Being a vampire horror romance it gives it possibilities dealing with morbid complications and great tension pinning on the longing and desiring of what is forbidden. Then there’s always that great questioning of whether this is love we are witnessing on or simple deceptions that show the inevitable nature of a vampire. Not to mention, the vicious lifestyle of a vampire and that power of having eternity on your side. Kiss of the Vampire pretty much ignores all of this along with every other vampire theme and actually most of their characteristics. Why even make a vampire film if you’re not going to do anything with it? It didn’t take long to realize that Kiss of the Vampire was going to be a very lazy film. It’s clear that writer, Katherine Hawkes and director, Joe Tornatore have no grasp on the horror romance, let alone vampires in general. There is no blending or working together of the two genres. I would have rather it be strong in one genre and weaker in the other instead of having the two be so inconsistent and over exaggerations of one or the other that just end up clashing. All aspects of the story are very clichéd and even for clichés are pretty dense. The vampires are simply evil and that is about all the insight we get on them, they are there for nothing more. All of the characters are flat, empty, and don’t cause much of a reaction with the audience one way or the other.

A coven of vampires bring havoc to a small, generally safe town in the Midwest. One of the vampires, Alex (Goddard), catches the eye of a woman in this town, Estelle (Hawkes). He begins to see her, but decides that he is going to have to change who he is if he wants a future with her. He asks her if her father, Dr. Henderson, can work on him to make him in to a mortal so that they could be together and have a normal life. Meanwhile there is a few cops who have witnessed the presence of these vampires and have hired a vampire hunter to kill them. The Illuminati organization crave to profit off all of the weaknesses in the world like disease, war, poverty, and drugs. They want to get hold of Alex’s blood while he’s being operated on so they can have eternity to live.

That is really putting the plot nicely, it is far less complex than that. The film manages to make everything extremely dry, halting every aspect of the story before it even gets a chance to begin. The love story was extremely dense and I really couldn’t even suspend my belief to invest myself in it at all. At first when Alex and Estelle lock eyes it seems like Alex has found his prey. The romance could have been used as a way to lure her in, but none of these vampire characteristics are shown in this film. It goes the other way by them wanting to have a normal relationship. One of the titles for the film is Immortally Yours, which makes no sense at all since the vampire is in the process of taking his immortality away. The U.S. title, Kiss of the Vampire, tries to color the deception that this film depicts any type of romance or has any understanding of vampires for that matter. For awhile Alex just appears every now and again until he tells Estelle that he is a vampire and he has to have her father, Dr. Henderson, turn him to be mortal, wiping away all of the possibilities for eternal love. It’s okay that they decided to go a different way with this, it just takes away a lot of the powerful themes that could have made their relationship more thrilling, which it really needed. It also didn’t help that both Alex and Estelle were so underdeveloped. We knew little to nothing about their pasts, who they were, or their wants and desires. I couldn’t feel for either of them and really didn’t care what happened. There was no build up in their relationship so when they are talking about spending the rest of the lives together it just seems to stages since they are still strangers, they are even strangers to the audience. The covenant of vampires were very one sided as well.

The acting was atrocious, making the film seem all the more ridiculous. Katherine Hawkes stands out as one who gave the worst performance. Since she wrote the script you would think she would have a better grasp on her character, enough to give a somewhat believable performance anyway. Then again there isn’t much to her character so it could be hard to have an understanding of a character that is so hollow, which is her fault as well for writing it this way. Daniel Goddard was a little less noticeably bad, but his performance just seemed so lifeless. Most of the vampires were very stereotypically portrayed and really did no justice at all to the vampire sub-genre. From everyone we either get over-acting, or very weak acting. There is little reaction between characters it is all waiting for their line, so when they do deliver it, it almost seems like they have already checked out and suddenly jump back in to the film. The pacing is just not there and is all too jagged because of this. The horrible editing is constantly jumping around from the very sloppy matter it was done. Also the chemistry is non-existent especially from the two that are supposed to be in love.

The writing is horrible and in every aspect it is extremely underdeveloped. Kiss of the Vampire uses a very lazy script, horrendous acting, and little emotion conviction. It is laughable through out and has so many shocking moments, for all of the wrong reasons. You can’t help but question majority of what you see on screen and before long can’t stay at all engaged in the film. Strangely, enough sci-fi even seems to find it’s way in to the film, in a very cheesy manner. The end is one the most obviously badly shocking moments I was talking about. It just seems so random and weird. I get the point it’s trying to make, that if our villains want immortality than they can get it, just in a demeaning way since that is what they deserve. Still the way that it did this and how the vampires act makes the film seem more comic-like than anything else. Kiss of the Vampire does no justice to the vampire film and has no concept of the blending of genres. It ends up falling flat, making an unintentional mockery out of horror, romance, and even sci-fi at the end. Kiss of the Vampire is an extremely weak and underdeveloped film that fails terribly. It really trashes the vampire film and is the perfect example of the type of film that is holding all of the enormous potential back. It’s the type of film that is furthering that bad reputation that seems to be the connotation when talking about vampire films. It does this because everyone involved is so vastly unprofessional, clearly not caring about any of the genres that they deal with. Kiss of the Vampire is a personal insult to all horror and vampire fans and is already the worst film of 2009 so far. I truly hope I am not subjected to see one worse than this during the year.