dir. Chris Sanders
Nest of Vampires follows Kit Valentine, an MI5 agent pursuing a human trafficking ring which has kidnapped his daughter. Said human trafficking ring thrives on selling young girls to Satanic cult members for some generic ritualistic butchering, for which there is apparently a large market yet barely any police investigation into beyond our dogged hero’s crusade. Also, some of the human traffickers are vampires. But some of the good guys are vampires, too. One man – who spends the entire film snarling and sniggering and pronouncing everything in an absurdly thick accent that is supposed to be authentic Italian but comes across more as a drunk Mario pantomime – turns out to not be a vampire and instead an allegedly normal human man. This man’s absolutely terrible acting is arguably some of the best in the film, with precisely no one able to put in an even halfway decent performance. Technically speaking, the movie is put together with the finesse of a clueless toddler: the camera sways back and forth pretty much all the time, weird lurid lighting in stark reds and greens adds nothing to proceedings except immense confusion, plus the paint-by-numbers spooky soundtrack refuses to ever shut up for more than about ten seconds. In one perplexing scene, two characters sitting on a park bench have breath vapour emanating from their mouths when they speak, because it’s cold. Fine, except it’s interspersed with shots where the breath vapour is very obviously digitally added in. So much thought and effort poured in, with such a useless result. This is the film in a microcosm. Nest of Vampires has no idea what the hell it’s doing, but it commits to everything with an almost frightening level of loving conviction.
BMDb 