OOPS! YOU’RE A VAMPIRE * USA 2022 Dir: Phil Messerer. 86 mins
Indie filmmakers have numerous obstacles to traverse along the way to create an original piece of genre cinema that could hold it’s own next to the big budget, mainstream successful and studio produced films. These ambitious filmmakers often have idiosyncratic ideas with off-the-wall concepts that aim to disrupt the status quo. With Oops! You’re A Vampire, Phil Messerer aims to inject fresh blood into the Vampire Horror-Comedy genre.
Twin sisters Lara (Eilis Cahill) and Helen (Devon Dionne) Baxter are polar opposites.
Lara is a black-haired goth who has a shrine to Anne Rice, while blonde, goody two-shoes, Helen is in the church choir. The girls live with their religious mother (JoJo Hristova) and older brother Raymond (Michael Strelow), who is a medical student. Helen unexpectedly dies of blood loss after Lara takes part in a late-night ritual, but she doesn’t stay dead and returns home from the morgue. Raymond exams her blood and concludes that his sister has a rare blood condition, Vampirism!
The family decides to protect and feed her, but soon they realize that the undead can’t be bargained
with.
With the odds stacked so heavily against indie and low-budget filmmakers to create new projects and have them stand out in a saturated and studio-run industry, the importance of a decent, if not great, script is of utmost importance. These blueprints or backbone to a film is incredibly difficult to master and often take a long time, and many drafts, to complete. Phil Messerer did his homework in his script for Oops! You’re A Vampire as he presents an interesting teen-comedy take on a well-trodden vampire/goth trope. Eilis Cahill, as Lara, in particular has a few deviously fun lines and her voiceover injects a light-hearted, carefree sensibility. But unfortunately, like so many other indie filmmakers, Messerer was so excited about the prospect of bringing a new idea to life that he neglected to fine tune the script into something coherent, cogent or competent. The opening sequence, stock footage resembling a 1980’s Chichén Itzá travelogue documentary, is disjointed and confusing. The project starts off shaky and struggles to gain any control or pathos and remains uneven and lacklustre. The film comes across like a work-in-progress, with a filmmaker not lacking in imagination, but rather a failing to execute with creative focus and discipline.
The film’s title hints at a mischievous, tongue-in-cheek experience while the sibling rivalry between the two sisters promising Jennifer’s Body (2009) or Ginger Snaps (2000) dynamics and conflicts, but this petered out before the end of the opening credits. Experimentation with the soundtrack also falters and the music becomes overbearing as dialogue is lost due to the volume and sound recording quality, another one of the usual Achilles Heels of modern indie filmmakers.
Phil Messerer is a filmmaker with promise and an eye for interesting stories, but with Oops! You’re A Vampire, he fails to get the viewers’ blood pumping or raising their pulse above a dull murmur.
Review by Louis Du Toit
OOPS! YOU’RE A VAMPIRE is available on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and USA