What is it? Theatrical release movie from 2014 (wow already four years ago) adapted from a popular series of YA vampire novels of which, I have been very specifically told, are totes not ripoffs of Twilight.
Where did it air? Rebroadcast on MTV2 in this case. Yes, MTV2. The Jedi Force Reboot of cable networks.
Who stars in it? Zack's girlfriend from those very last episodes of Suite Life on Deck, the main character from Geek Charming, and one of the mermaids from Mako Mermaids.
Why are we reviewing this? Please refer to trailer clip above.
I think it's pretty clear now that I'm a huge fan of YA, what with not only just reading a whole bunch of it but writing my own YA (both original fiction and fanfiction) and even dictating entire career decisions around it. And the whole YA TV show and movie angle (including Nick and Disney Channel) is a natural extension of that (or in my specific case, actually the other way around). That said...I'm not all that super-huge a fan of the paranormal YA genre, despite being a huge part of that demo, arguably the biggest and most popular for well over a decade now (even spilling into the "adult" world, uh, in more ways than one with...50 Shades of Grey. Yeah.) I've read a few but they're all...eeehhhhhh.
The biggest problems I've noticed is that they're all big into that whole telling, not showing thing that all your Creative 101 when you were a freshman in high school were warning you about. The first 50 pages or so (and indeed, the first 15 minutes or so of this movie, barring the actual opening which involves Lucy Fry and Zoey Deutch sucking each other...umm, it's not *quite* as sexual as I just made it out, followed by a big action fight scene) is all just a massive infodump, but for the rest of the book/movie it doesn't know what what to do with that infodump. I've never read the Twilight novels, despite coming across a few over the course of cheap or even free garage sale pickups (so yes I actually own some of the books though I don't think I have a complete set, or even the first one oddly enough) but I've read Divergent, as well as at least the first books of two other series that have yet to be made into movies (and the way things are going a good chance they never will): Legend (by Marie Wu who just launched another major dystopian series as of the time of this writing) and Scarlet/The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer (no relation to Twilight author Stephanie Meyer, although, well...you can make your own quality-related jokes here, they pretty much just write themselves just like the actual books). And all three of them are...meh-tastic. Again, infodumps on details that strangely enough come out as extremely broad and vague despite the pages and screen time dedicated to explaining them (and the worldbuilding from these infodumps tend to be very oddly uniform across all of these series), typical YA soft romance schlock and typical soft action schlock. Of all those sins, getting bogged down in the telling, not showing of obsessive yet oddly generic worldbuilding details that don't amount to diddly squat by the books' ends is by far the biggest, especially of The Lunar Chronicles series which, given their typical 500+ page length (the final entry, Winter, is 800 goddamn fucking pages long), is especially great to have in paperback so that they feel nice and soft when you beat yourself over the head with them.
This is why I tend to prefer contemporary YA, and yes, this is why the genre is failing or has failed at least on the big screen and needs a serious overhaul.
Anyway, there isn't really much to say about Vampire Academy itself that Metacritic already hasn't.
This thoroughly doesn't deserve a sequel. Deal with it.
Movie Grade: F. I haven't even finished watching the movie - yes I'm actually still watching the movie as I type this, although I'm near the very end where Lucy Fry is facing those...weird CGI dog thingies - but I'm pretty confidence I've already seen enough to make a judgement call on it. Is it bad enough to be good? Hell no, but it is bad enough to justify watching it for curiosity's sake just so you can witness that yes there's a movie this bad on this side of 1985 that isn't The Room that was produced and financed by a very major studio and assumed to be an automatic hit given its built-in fanbase.
I hear the final scene with Sarah Hyland is really bonkers but...yeah.
Movie MVP: Sarah Hyland because see trailer clip above.
Extra Thoughts:
- not that I'm going to "officially" give this movie an LVP award, but if I was it'd solidly go to...Zoey Deutsch,for reals. Her acting in this is just...awful. Around the same caliber and feel as Rowan Blanchard's incredibly bizarre acting direction in Invisible Sister, which I'm going to insist is pretty bad too. She spends the entire movie looking like she's constipated. For reals, man.
- oh and speaking of that, this blog has a standing, still unclaimed reward regarding the first person who can successfully explain to me and convince me as to why Invisible Sister isn't one of the worst DCOMs ever.
- And speaking of Disney Channel, yeah given the filming and release dates I guess my question of "why did Lucy Fry leave Mako Mermaids?" got answered.
- You know a movie that's strangely at the same time so bad it's good and yet so bad it's just plain old bad? The Room. The most redeeming feature about that movie isn't even anything in the movie itself, it's for giving us both the book (which I've read, it's excellent) and the movie The Disaster Artist. As for Vampire Academy...you'll recoil in horror all right, as to how bad this movie is. I mean it.
- So now I finished the movie (told you I was almost done) and...yeah, it's still a solid F.
I actually reviewed this movie a few years back and thought it was pretty meh. The expositon bogs it down so much and it tries too hard to start a franchise.
ReplyDeleteBut it does have some charm, and some decent snarky lines and mostly good acting. (I say mostly cuz of that one guy i ragged on perhaps a bit too much in my review).
I've never read the book but you can tell it likely had more meat to it with how rushed the film is.