Hello! My children of the night and welcome to the first installment of what I hope is the first of many vampire movie reviews to come. My mission is to review any and all vampire movies that I possess, until eternity passes me by.
I want to talk to you today about obsessions, what effect do they have on a person and I suppose a more pertinent question would be where and how do they begin. For me, my obsession with vampire movies began all at the tender age of nine when young impressionable me was taken to the local Odeon cinema to see the cinematic adaption of Angela Sommer Bodenburg's Little Vampire series.
The series was initially published under the German title Der Kleine Vampir, beginning circulation in the early 1980's and eventually spawned a television series in the year 1985 that starred Micheal Gough and Gert Frobe.
A second televison series appeared in 1993, but the 2000 movie was the first to the adapt the material for the big silvery screen.
The movie was produced by Richard Curtis and starred the cream of the British crop, Richard E. Grant, John Wood, Jim Carter and Alice Kridge.
The Movie begins with little Tony Thompson a recent American immigrant to Scotland, here the plot embarks on a typical fish out of water story. Tony finds it hard fitting in partially due to the fact that he is completely obsessed with vampires. He ultimatley comes to befriend a vampire when one flies in his window one night. The young vampire also has a family and they establish themselves as the main character focus of the film alongside Tony.
From here the greatest and widest deviations from the novel series becomes evident, in the original stories the vampires enjoyed being vampires and were all delightfully quirky characters each possesing individual personalities. But in the film they long to become human and despise being vampires and all search for a mystical stone to guarantee their humanity. Now whilst it is true that each story in the books was rather episodic and the story was relatively self contained and I suppose the film did require some sembleance of a plot, but I hate these changes they make the characters completely quirk-less they're bland and rather one dimensional, the only characters who seem genuinly likeable is Anna, portrayed by Anna Popplewell, who is in love with Tony and possess a cheerful yet morbid disposition.
And of course the vampire hunter Rookery, now usually vampire movies cheer on the vampire hunter and hope he defeats the villianous vampire, but here their is a complete role reversal the vampire hunter is the villian and the vampires are the heroes. Jim Carter plays the delicously foul Rookery, a man with poor personal hygeine and an equally poor sense of morality (if any at all), whilst the vampires just look like rejects from an Anne Rice novel.
Overall the film is enjoyable as a functional children's film, it is charming and whilst the performances are rather poor they come across as easy for any child to sink their teeth into, straightforward and simple. I also enjoy how the film utillizes traditional vampire imagery such as stakes, garlic and crosses and if you were me then these were the first vampires you ever saw and rightly so, just goes to show that sometimes traditional is the right way to go.
The film holds a special place in my heart as it was the first vampire movie I ever saw, so I suppose the film is a guilty pleasure, it's not particularly memorable and not in the least bit faithful to the novels but fun all the same. With a little hope it will continue to inspire obsession within all future vamp crazed fanatics.
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