This may be the worst vampire film ever made. I know there are some bad ones out there, but at least they can succeed at including actual vampires. Blood Ties can barely be called a vampire movie: the "vampires" aren't hurt by sunlight, they don't sleep in coffins, they are not immortal, and there was not a pair of fangs in the whole movie. The movie is really about prejudice. A group of vampire hunters are... you guessed it, hunting vampires. This may as well be a story about the KKK lynching black people or the gestapo hunting jews. Even outside of this being a terrible vampire movie, it is generally unwatchable. The dialog is bad, the editing is jumpy, the acting is hit or miss, the synth score is embarrassing, and the plot is convoluted. Overall, just a failure. Going into more detail, this feels like a pilot for a bad courtroom sitcom, and not a feature film. The tone is so strange here, because it is not a horror movie - at all - however it tries to be funny in places, yet fails, so it's not a comedy, not really a drama. It just feels like a television show that wants to be every genre at once. Maybe that can work when you have a series to flesh out the idea, but it's a bad tactic for a feature, especially when the director clearly doesn't know what he is doing. So, the movie is really two stories crammed together, and it doesn't work. One part is this Romeo and Juliet love story between a vampire, and a human - the scandal. The other part is a revenge story about a boy whose parents were killed by vampire hunters. The ideas needed to be combined or have the romance cut out completely. Having both did not work. What might be the worst part here - and trust me, that's saying something - is the motorcycle gang of generation-X vampires. The stink of how badly the filmmakers wanted them to be The Lost Boys (1987) was overwhelming. And the way they acted... what were they thinking? Their delivery was so over-the-top that I thought a scene was going to turn into musical theater. You know? There is a level of overacting unique to musicals and I never thought I'd see it in a vampire movie. I would recommend this to no one. Truly awful.
Review by BronsonBlockedParent2024-04-14T14:09:02Z
This may be the worst vampire film ever made. I know there are some bad ones out there, but at least they can succeed at including actual vampires. Blood Ties can barely be called a vampire movie: the "vampires" aren't hurt by sunlight, they don't sleep in coffins, they are not immortal, and there was not a pair of fangs in the whole movie.
The movie is really about prejudice. A group of vampire hunters are... you guessed it, hunting vampires. This may as well be a story about the KKK lynching black people or the gestapo hunting jews.
Even outside of this being a terrible vampire movie, it is generally unwatchable. The dialog is bad, the editing is jumpy, the acting is hit or miss, the synth score is embarrassing, and the plot is convoluted. Overall, just a failure.
Going into more detail, this feels like a pilot for a bad courtroom sitcom, and not a feature film. The tone is so strange here, because it is not a horror movie - at all - however it tries to be funny in places, yet fails, so it's not a comedy, not really a drama. It just feels like a television show that wants to be every genre at once. Maybe that can work when you have a series to flesh out the idea, but it's a bad tactic for a feature, especially when the director clearly doesn't know what he is doing.
So, the movie is really two stories crammed together, and it doesn't work. One part is this Romeo and Juliet love story between a vampire, and a human - the scandal. The other part is a revenge story about a boy whose parents were killed by vampire hunters. The ideas needed to be combined or have the romance cut out completely. Having both did not work.
What might be the worst part here - and trust me, that's saying something - is the motorcycle gang of generation-X vampires. The stink of how badly the filmmakers wanted them to be The Lost Boys (1987) was overwhelming. And the way they acted... what were they thinking? Their delivery was so over-the-top that I thought a scene was going to turn into musical theater. You know? There is a level of overacting unique to musicals and I never thought I'd see it in a vampire movie.
I would recommend this to no one. Truly awful.