yarow12 Vampire Diary is a great movie considering what it is--the story of a group of 'weekend vampires' and a woman with a habit of recording everything who meet a female vampire by pure chance. Prepare for an unexpected love quadrangle, some interesting lore on vampires, and great use of found footage.My only complaint lies in a scene towards the end during which one of the weekend vampires' lines were corny (writing) and poorly delivered (acting, directing).One thing I especially like about Vampire Diary is that the first thirty minutes make a wonderful short story. I almost wished it ended at the water scene simply because of how great the movie was by that point. So, there you go. Give the first thirty minutes a shot. If you find yourself caring about the characters or interested in seeing what happens next, continue on for the remaining hour.

MBunge This is a decent piece of entertainment that manages to overcome moral idiocy and painfully clichéd "real video" film-making through brevity, hot sex scenes and creative implied violence.Holly (Morven Macbeth) is a young woman making a documentary about the so-called "weekend vampire" subculture in England. Her work consists of taking a single camera and following 4 goth friends around as they dress up and play at being technomusic bloodsuckers. The story sets up these 4 friends as important but then almost completely disregards them as Holly meets a mysterious young woman named Vicki (Anne Walton). Vicky has her own video camera and films Holly just as Holly films everyone else. Holly lets this attractive stranger stay at her apartment when she has no where else to go and the two of them end up in some spicy girl-on-girl action. Their attraction turns out to be more than physical and Holly starts to worry about where Vicki goes when she leaves the apartment in the middle of the night. It turns out Holly is worried about the wrong person getting hurt, because Vicky is a real vampire. She doesn't turn into a bat and isn't afraid of garlic or sunlight, but Vicki does need blood to survive. Holly helps her get that blood, even after she finds out that Vicki had killed two of the goth friends from the start of the film. But when Vicki announces she's pregnant with a vampire baby and her bloodlust is increasing because of it, our lovers are forced into more and more extreme acts.Let me start off with the significant negatives of Vampire Diary. This movie is done "real video" style with everything being either by Holly's camera or Vicki's camera and it gets annoying in very short order. Beyond the fact that "real video" pseudodocumentaries have been done to death, this movie doesn't even use the technique for any particular purpose. The pretenses of the documentary are abandoned early on and it just becomes two young women who film each other for no reasonable purpose. But after it stops being a documentary, the movie throws in a bunch of stuff like news reports, montages and even flashbacks that make no sense if it's just two people with cameras recording themselves. And then at the end of the film they just throw all the "real video" rules out the window and the camera starts zooming in when no one's operating it and other impossible things. Vampire Diary would have been much better if it had just been shot like a normal movie. These filmmakers clearly have the talent and skill to do that and it would have spared the audience all of the contrived crap.The other problem with Vampire Diary is that it never seems to quite understand why killing people is bad. There are a few moments when Holly feebly objects to Vicki's slaughter, but there are no lasting emotional or moral consequences to the murders. By downplaying that, though, the film undercuts all the tension and suspense that's supposed to be generated by the killing. Instead of it being a case where Holly's resistance to Vicki's nature is gradually broken down over time, she just switches from being bothered by murder to being okay with murder whenever it suits the Almighty Plot Hammer.Most films with two such flaws would suck fairly hard. Vampire Diary manages to still be watchable thanks to three main factors. It's very fast paced, Anne Walton and Morven Macbeth are good actresses who look really good naked and filmmakers Mark Jones and Phil O'Shea have some genuine talent. Once you get past the "real video" contrivances, they come up with some nice imagery and scenes that are well staged and well paced.If Vampire Diary had dispensed with the "real video" nonsense and included some sort of moral center, it would be a very good film. As it is, Vampire Diary is a problematic film that's several steps above most low budget cinema. If you're a vampire fan, particularly a fan of lesbian bloodsuckers, you'll probably like it. If that's not your cup of tea, you might still enjoy it as a promising bit of film-making.

Pablo-60 The words "lesbian vampire" bring to mind either the incoherently stylish Jess Franco/Jean Rollin 70's stuff or the modern softcore associated with Misty Mundae, Darian Caine, et al. But it would be unfair to categorize "Vampire Diary" as either, because the sexual orientation of the leads is not the main point of the film, but the intense passion that develops between them, and the lengths a person will go to in order to protect a loved one. Sure, it's not a perfect film (even at eighty-something minutes it drags at some points), but much to my surprise, "Vampire Diary" turned out to be a thoughtful, well-acted drama with supernatural overtones that might go the usual "vampirism as addiction" route we've seen before, but does it with a raw and sincere emotion, intensified by the DIY photography (videography?), that will undoubtedly be compared with the recent wave of mockumentary shot-on-video horror films (from the awesome "Cloverfield" to the genuinely terrifying Spanish flick "REC"). Granted, this pseudo-verité style is not for all tastes, but for those tired of the same direct-to-DVD zombie drivel, "Vampire Diary" will be a welcome relief and a cool breath of fresh air for the genre. I'm an avid fan of direct-to-DVD horror films (for better or for worse), and this is exactly the kind of film that feels like a reward after plowing through release after release of mercenary independent films done without passion or vision, just scraping for some loose change associated with the latest film trend. So, believe me when I tell you that there are _lots_ of worse movies in which you could invest an hour and a half, and not find even a fraction of the artistry, drama or just plain coolness of "Vampire Diary". And, goes without saying, the movie will be especially relevant to those "Goth" kids that take the role playing game "Vampire - The Masquerade" way too seriously.

Marion88 I saw this movie at the NFT in London. It was packed. It is set among the young people of the neo vampire Goth scene of London. They listen to Fields of the Nephilim, wear fangs and heavy make up, it's all deliciously decadent and trendy. Some of them exchange blood. It's all good except that among the crowd, lives a real vampire. She seduces a girl of the gang and uses her blood to feed the baby vampire she is expecting. Rosemary's baby is a vampire... But the vampire's fresh blood needs exceed what her poor exhausted human Goth lover can provide... The vampire has to go out on the streets hunting for human preys. She uses a butcher gun to slaughter her victims and soon becomes the most sought after serial killer in the UK... The film introduces a modern day Vampirella, in hiding among the humans, where no one can spot her: within the Goth crowd. A clever concept, a solid story, well shot. Pretty girls, lots of blood. Instant cult.