Review of Vampire Academy (2014) by John M — 11 May 2014

This may not be geared towards me, but this just feels like second-rate fan fiction. So there are three breeds of vampire: the half-human, half-vampire protectors, which, for this story's purpose are just humans with a couple of extra abilities.

There are also peaceful vampires that have additional magical powers and feral, violent vampires that nobody likes, and no, I don't remember the names that are given to them in the story. You have a female half-vampire and a female peaceful vampire teaming up to deal with your standard high school drama, as well as with a couple of nefarious schemes.

Abbreviated, this is Twilight set in the Clueless universe, which isn't a description that would have sold me going in. I do think it is the right choice to set up your own mythology like they do here, but where they run into problems is that it tries way too hard to be meta.

This is a movie that is aware of the existence Twilight, and there is nothing inherently wrong about being self-aware and self-referential in your movie, but if you're going to do that, you have to be smart about it, and this script quite frankly isn't well-written enough to go this route.

This leads to vampire puns galore, and they're never creative or clever enough to merit laughter. I'm also not sure what demographic this is for; my initial guess was that this is for sassy teenage girls, but then there are lots of sexual innuendos that feel extremely out of place for a PG-13 movie.

I'll be the first to admit that this wasn't made for me, and while I do recognize that there is an audience out there for this, I think you can do better than this.