Director: Nicki Harris
Release date: 2016
Contains spoilers
This one passed me by, and its identity as a vampire film nearly passed me by as I watched it, because the vampire aspect, that horror core, is almost non-existent. Yet vampire film it is. On the surface this comes across more as a teen high school drama (with a very lower-case d) and they missed a trick by not turning it on its head when the vampirism was revealed.
So, we are in small town USA and the opening is narrated by Hilary (Connie Shi) who explains that it is a small town, where nothing really happens, where everyone knows everyone and where everyone has roots in the town (her own family can trace back 200 years). Hillary lives with her dad (Andrew Start), goes to school and would do anything for a little variety.
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| Andrew Start as the dad |
That variety pitches up in the form of the Morris family that rents the house next door (and for which her dad is a caretaker). They happen to be watching them arrive and the first is Kadin (Garrett Richmond), getting off his motorbike. If one boy next door was bad enough, out of the following vehicle comes Brian (Nathan Ross Murphy), Jeremy (Will Thames), and twins Matthew (Jason Parks) and Kyle (Justin Parks). Hillary’s dad is all for never letting her out of the house again when mom, Louisa (Suzanne Jaehne), gets out the vehicle. He rushes out to greet them.
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| the boys arrive |
So there are two weeks of school left but they still sign up and then we get a 'new boys walking the corridor scene' with the girls drooling. In reality, they may all be good looking but they were not the unearthly beauties the film wanted to infer. They also seemed oddly close in age. Nevertheless, Kadin and Hilary hit it off and there are some moments of high school mean girl-ness, which essentially stems from Hilary’s mom having had an affair with her (now ex-)friend’s dad before killing herself.
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| Connie Shi as Hillary |
Things sit off key with the newcomers – but for the viewer, not the characters. We see that Louisa is oddly dominating and sends the boys out of the area to steal goods (we don’t see the raid, just the aftermath). Kadin cuts his hand but won’t let Hailey see or help – because his blood is black. However, she washes the black blood off the knife he was cut by, without even noticing the odd colour.
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| blood at mouth |
Louisa is the vampire, presumably the Queen, given the honeybee title, and they are the worker bees. They go to a town, enrol in high school, pick five victims and she feeds on them. Kadin is fairly new, however, and seems to have both a conscience and has really fallen for Hilary. The boys' life and longevity (there is a newspaper clipping with the twins from 1929) is dependent on her – if she dies, they die. A vampire hunter (Pokey Spears) turns up and he turns out to be a worker bee who left (replaced by Kadin) and so has aged. He makes the “wise” choice of checking out the school and luckily only sees Kadin – because, of course, the others would recognise him.
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| finding a victim |
When we get to the vampirism (which starts with picking up a guy in a bar, whose age means that she will only get a week of use from him but that makes it sound that she is youth or life stealing) we see very little – a sort of a kiss bite at a distance, leaving a torn up mouth. This is where this really falls flat. The acting is ok but they have little to work with, the filmmakers could have made a lot of thriller or horror tension – we could have followed the raid, we could see the kills properly and gore could have been added – but they failed to do this. Yet, as a high school drama, it is drama light and as a vampire-high school romance it is lighter still. 3 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
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