Vampyre Nation/True Bloodthirst.

Come on, it can't be worse than Dragon Wasps!

If you're wondering why I included two titles, well Vampyre Nation became True Bloodthirst late in the production, however it looks like most of the internet weren't told, so you'll be lucky to find much on the film by searching for True Bloodthirst. So yeah.

Plotwise True Bloodthirst is basically lots of things ripped off from better films with no attempts to mix, blend or make anything feel even slightly original. They (humanity) discovered vampyres (that is how the film spells it, so that is how I'm going to spell it for the rest of the review. Well, when I can remember at least) were real, attempted to make peace, peace failed so they (the vampyres) were chucked in what amounts to a concentration camp. A virus is devolving vampyres into a primitive, primal version of the vampyre and some vampyre hunters and some hunter...hunters have been called in to stop it. What they find is something much bigger, and much more racist, than they could ever have imagined. Blahblah.

True Bloodthirst also takes a lot of the problems from the things it is ripping off too, largely that no film in the entire world manages to keep vampyres consistent. The film keeps harking on both about the enhanced abilities of both the vampyres and the devolved vampyre bat monsters and as with all these productions, in set piece moments they live up to their hype but spend most of the film claiming to have these special abilities and yet being no different than the human characters around them. For all the complaints about the Twilight Saga vampires, at least they actually gave a consistent sense of immense power. The vampyre bats were even worse, despite apparently having double the threat value of a normal vampyre, they spent pretty much 90% of the film flying into peoples bullets.

Although you don't see a lot of the action, I suppose due to budget reasons, Todor Chapkanov is a strong and clever enough director to stage it in such a way to seem like he is doing that out of a deliberate choice. Fooling the audience quite convincingly that action is being replaced with style and atmosphere, not just being skimped down due to budget limitations. This creates some surprisingly effective and impressively badass moments that don't get undermined by awful special effects in quite the extreme fashion they did in say Dragon Wasps.

The acting is of course terrible though. The actors feel uncomfortable which affects their line delivery, then again I might have just been distracted by how horribly miscast Andrew Lee Potts was, coupled with his awful attempt at an American accent. However for once the dialogue is actually pretty well written and there is certainly a greater sense of chemistry between the cast. The characters are pretty awesome as well, lead vampire Nikolai may not have one original bone in his corpse but that didn't stop him being as cool as he was badass.

So do I recommend it? True Bloodthirst is one of those odd dichotomies. You see on the one hand, True Bloodthirst is a really great SyFy effort, it works largely because it seems to only really care about being cool and manages to stay on the right side of the line, so it doesn't t feel forced or insincere. There is also some good dialogue, good direction and some good action scenes, it's quite easily the best of the three I've reviewed on this blog so far. However and a huge however, there is nothing original about this film in the slightest and True Bloodthirst doesn't even try to be anything more than a cheap knock off and with most of the films and television shows it's ripping off being as great as they are, it really leaves you with little reason to watch this and little for me to give as evidence to recommend it. But just know I enjoyed it and I guess that should be enough in itself.

Locke's Final Reaction:

Think About It!

-Locke, the world's worst film snob.