In short: Family Blood (2018)

Ellie (Vinessa Shaw), a recovering pill addict, has apparently only just gotten back the custody rights for her kids Kyle (Colin Ford) and Amy (Eloise Lushina). The family has moved to a new city, Ellie has a new job, but relations between her and the kids are strained – Kyle’s going the whole teenage rebellion route and Amy is growing up too quickly – and her struggle with her addiction is on less than stable footing.

One night, when she’s falling off the wagon right after an Addicts Anonymous session, another AA member, Christopher (James Ransone), assaults her and turns her into a vampire for vague and messed up reasons all of his own. Turns out, people who already can’t cope with more typical addictions are badly prepared for vampirism, so the family relations are going to become even more strained than before.

By now, films about vampirism as addiction or addiction metaphor have become their own subgenre. I suspect, right this moment more of them are being made than ones about romantic bloodsuckers. The thing is, once a sub-genre reaches this kind of saturation point, a perfectly innocent and decent little addict vampire flick like Sonny Mallhi’s Family Blood isn’t just a scrappy little underdog of a movie anymore, but goes to bat against films that are genre-defining or just plain great. Watching something like it, I can’t help but ask myself questions like “what does this add to the idea of vampirism as addiction?”, or “how different is anything in it compared with the last half dozen movies in the subgenre I have seen?”. Family Blood’s main problem is that the answers to these questions are “not much” and “it’s less well realized”, leaving me with a film working in a genre with rather tight borders – there’s really only so much you can do with the theme – that does little to actually stand out.

It’s a bit disappointing, really, for the acting is rather alright, the film looks pretty (there are indeed some outright beautiful shots), and up until the final act, it does very little that’s actually wrong. Rather, there’s nothing about anything going on in it that goes beyond the tropes and plot beats you’d expect from it, the usual concerns about family and vampirism playing out pretty much as is traditional.


The final act, though, isn’t just not good enough: it is a total mess where characters change their motivations randomly, a hilariously staged death of a barely characterized side figure is supposed to evoke a heavy emotional reaction in the audience that isn’t laughter, and all ideas the film might end up saying anything worthwhile at all about addiction and its impact on families go out the window. Worse still, the film seldom manages to work as a horror film despite being about something downright traumatic. It never really digs into the inner lives of its characters, only ever skimming the surface level.

In short: Sinister 2 (2015)

I’m not exactly surprised the sequel to one of the good mainstream horror films of the last few years isn’t any good itself, though I am still somewhat disappointed by it. Why, you might think not every narrative lends itself to become a franchise, and some stories are better told in a single film and don’t actually ask for a sequel!

What I didn’t expect, given that the sequel was again written by director of the first film Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, is quite how mechanical and lifeless the thing would be going to feel, with so many inserts of “creepy home videos” they absolutely stop being creepy, character beats the film fails to exploit thematically even when the connection should be obvious and would make the film so much more resonant. There is an overall feel of the writers going through a checklist of parts from the first film they need to repeat, but in a less effective way, instead of writing an actual movie. Despite a decent cast, the characters aren’t actual characters either, but walking, talking plot functions whose destinies never become much interesting or relevant because there’s so little substance to them, as much as James Ransone tries to pretend he’s awkward yet quietly heroic and Shannyn Sossamon raises her chin.

Director Ciarán Foy goes through the whole rigmarole with basic competence (he’s not going to nail the camera down or forget how to prepare functional blocking and so on) but with little flair or style. In fact, I found myself giggling through too many of the film’s (many, many, many, many) jump scares and most of its ghostly and demonic apparitions, thanks to the often unconvincing way they are staged and Foy’s emphasis on their mechanics. It’s all very much a professional looking 2015 mainstream horror film, but there’s such a lack of vision, heart or even just a little bit of passion here, I’d rather prefer a technically incompetent one that wants to say something or does make an honest attempt at making me uncomfortable instead of just going through the motions. Sinister 2 might as well just not exist for all the movie itself seems to care.