Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Charbonier, Justin Powell
Starring: Nell Verlaque, Kieron Moore, Paulina Chávez, Alicia Sanz, Eoin Macken, Jason Isaacs
In 1972 Hammer gave us a Vampire Circus. True to inflation, we now get a full-blown Vampire Carnival. Operating after sunset and moving from one town to the next, circuses and carnivals would indeed provide suitable cover for bloodsuckers. The carny and the vampire have much in common - they both offer a way out for people who feel like outsiders, the promise of a new life, and in this case, a new family.
The wide-eyed star of Eli Roth's Thanksgiving, Nell Verlaque, plays Gemma, whose life was thrown into disarray when she found her father's corpse in his study after he blew his own head off. Declining to go to college, Gemma instead works at the world's most dimly lit library, attends confession and generally mopes about a lot. Her friends Ryan (Corrado Martini) and Olivia (Pauline Chávez) decide to cheer Gemma up by taking her to the gothic-themed carnival that just pitched up in their town. What they don't realise is that the carnival is a cover for a cult of centuries old vampires led by the enigmatic Toussaint (Jason Isaacs).
Vampire Carnival arrives over a decade too late to exploit the craze for vampiric romance of the Twilight/Vampire Diaries era. It knows exactly what it's doing, with a line of dialogue that sees Gemma compare a hunky vampire to Edward Cullen. Gemma finds herself caught between two bloodsucking beefcakes with insanely ripped abs - the sensitive Sebastian (Alvise Rigo) and her stalker ex Eric (Kieron Moore). Toussaint's tribe exercise a code of ethics, whereby they only drink the blood of consenting victims, but Eric is a renegade who doesn't care so much for his master's rules and sets his sights on turning Gemma into his unconsenting immortal lover.
The directors here are David Charbonier and Justin Powell, whose previous three features (The Boy Behind the Door; The Djinn; Push) all made effective use of a single location setting. With this Spanish-lensed production they're working with a bigger budget, and they attempt to make the most of it with some flashy visuals, including an impressive "oner" that introduces us to the geography of the carnival. But the duo are also directing someone else's script (Jason Filardi and Peter Filardi) for the first time, and Vampire Carnival lacks the economic intensity of their self-penned features. The script is a mess, with key details like the exact nature of Gemma and Owen's past relationship left poorly explained, as though important scenes were binned. It also features laughable dialogue like "Grief is a strange architect, it builds walls."
It's only when Vampire Carnival embraces its campier elements that it offers a fun reprieve from the insufferable brooding vampire shtick. Guyliner'd to the max, Isaacs is having a ball hamming it up, and it's a shame he gets so little screen time. When the violence arrives it's satisfyingly schlocky, but it comes too late, with too much of the run time devoted to a sub-Blade techno vampire orgy. Let's hope Charbonier and Powell got a nice pay cheque here and can return to doing their own thing next time.
Vampire Carnival is on UK/ROI VOD from October 26th.
