Tormented vampire Zackary (David Gunn) hunts Ash (Jonathon Morris), a powerful vampire lord who rules a city and surrounds himself with minions. However, the hunt is confused by the appearance of Sofia (Kirsten Cerre), a concert pianist that both desire.
Ah, it is so difficult to be a vampire. Mainly, it is all the time that must be spent in whining. After you’re done moaning about never seeing the sun and being cursed, there’s so little time left in the night to do anything. That explains why practically nothing happens in Vampire Journals. Zackary has a lot of whining to do, and not much time to do it. With lines like, “In my heart I knew her fate was sealed, as mine had been sealed an eternity ago, a fate of endless nighttime,” can he be faulted for being too busy to engage in a plot?
Set in the same world as the Subspecies films, Vampire Journals drops the characters I barely knew and didn’t care about from the previous three films, and offers up a new set of characters I didn’t get to know and don’t care about. As previously mentioned, Zachary’s primary characteristic is whining. He also likes doing imitations of the creepy lab assistant from almost any Frankenstein film. Ash is a pasty-faced vamp who loves music because the narration says so (now that’s character development). He is vastly powerful, except sometimes when he’s a total wimp. And Sofia…she’s…she’s…she’s the girl who keeps her top on.
OK, so the characters are a wash and the plot is non-existent (and climaxes in a chase/fight that has all the excitement I’ve come to expect of a Merchant-Ivory film), plus there is an overblown narration, but that makes the flick sound worse than it is. For its low budget, the camera work isn’t bad, and the Romanian locations have more atmosphere than anything Hollywood could build. The buildings are opulent, old, slightly worn, and foreign. And in those settings, Vampire Journals repeatedly finds a tableau worth examining. These moments are more like paintings than parts of a film, and are best viewed as such. Most involve a vampire overcome by bloodlust and one or more bare-breasted beauties. As long as you have no problem saying that a blood-covered scene can be attractive, you’ll see something that will entertain, if only momentarily, and if you are a fan of the gothic, you’ll find these shots sublime.
Several of the characters popped up in Bloodstorm: Subspecies IV a year later.