Vampire Academy (Quick Review)

Never have I been so close to clubbing myself over the head with the TV remote!

“Watch Vampire Academy” my fiancée said, “You’ll like it, it’s like Harry Potter” she said.  Well let me tell you it’s NOT like the Harry Potter series; even bad fan fiction of Harry Potter stands a better chance of bringing me enjoyment than Vampire Academy ever could!  For starters I, throughout the entire film, had no clue what was happening...I STILL don’t fully comprehend, and I looked up the entire plot summary.  Never have I been so lost trying to follow a film’s plot than I was here; which is probably a result of it cramming a small novel’s worth of information in the first 15 minutes or so.  The film explains all the ins and outs of their universe (that will be important to remember for the majority of later scenes) so fast that I barely had time to comprehend a single sentence before it quickly moved on to the next aspect of their bizarre (yet strangely boring) world.  Not to mention everything is explained through exposition to people who should already know the information, such as: “As you already know, you’re a princess who’s in line of the royal throne”; which is such a cheap way of giving plot exposition to the audience (occasionally it does the exact opposite and doesn't explain anything about an important feature, leaving me ever more baffled).

It’s such an ugly film also; nearly every character’s either incredibly annoying, pretentious, unnecessarily cruel, evil, or as the characters say, a “bitch”…and that’s including our main characters.  The special powers they have are lame, the mystical creatures incredibly unimaginative, and the CGI used to create them quite low budgeted.  Vampire Academy also has a habit of mocking other bad teen stories (which to avoid controversy I won’t mention here..........Twilight) while simultaneously committing similar or equally stupid mistakes.  Yet the absolute worse part about Vampire Academy is that it just…keeps…on…going!  I honestly felt that the movie had been going for 2 hours, checked the info panel to see if it was wrapping up, and found that only 50 minutes had passed!  The film’s less than two hours long yet feels twice as long as any of the Harry Potter films (some of which span close to three hours).  The film continuously kept psyching me out into thinking: “Oh thank god the movie’s finally ove…what!? There’s still 20 more minutes!  And now his daugther's the main villain!?”  To be fair however, my fiancée's only read the books before recommending, and there’s a VERY likely chance that they’re better.  That doesn't excuse the Vampire Academy film however, which is an awful, awful piece of work and should not be viewed by anyone, even those who enjoy watching bad vampire films (mostly because the boredom is far worse than the stupidity).