Holly is doing a low-budget documentary about the Goth scene in London, UK, and in particular about faux vampires. She meets Vicki, who claims to be a supernatural being, a 'real' vampire.On that note, is Vicki just another Goth cosplay enthusiast? If so, this looks like a psychological drama, not horror. If not, then how much of reality are we expected to ignore to embrace the film?Someone (who else...) kills Eddie early on. Holly and Vicki record the reactions to his death by substantial exsanguination.Holly and Vicki start their lesbian relationship, which is, not surprisingly, neither believable nor interesting nor titillating. It is, however, out of focus, out of frame, low on contrast, low on color saturation. It is rather emblematic of the film as a whole: dreary and non-engaging.Brad disappears from the Goth scene; some weak indicators point to Vicki. Vicki shows Holly a tape of her killing Brad. Holly helps Vicki with the problem.The discussion of what 'real' vampires are like was boring, over long, and not believable.Holly tries to find a way for Vicki to survive without killing people. Surprise. This fails.Vicki came to Holly already pregnant by a male vampire. The gestation and the police investigation consume the rest of the film.------Scores------Cinematography: 0/10 Hand-held badness in the style of Blair Witch. Almost everything that can be done wrong with a video camera was done in this film. The dueling feeds from two different very-low-quality hand-held cameras (Holly's and Vicki's) was amusing for a good 8 or 9 seconds. After that, it was just one more constant nuisance in this train wreck.Sound: 4/10 Mixed bag. Sometimes in sync with visuals, other times not. Horrid incidental music.Acting: 4/10 Not too bad on the face of it. Actors hit their marks and read their lines. Still, nothing is memorable about it because no actors were engaging. This is more about delusional idiots posturing for one another, not about character motivation, or exposition of why certain events happened.Screenplay: 2/10 Twenty minutes of plot stretched out to 89 minutes. This film has the indie look of keeping whatever footage is recorded, then putting it together in post. A lot of the footage (particularly at club scenes and some party scenes) does nothing to advance the narrative and does nothing toward explaining character actions.

This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. First of all It' as about a lesbian vampire. That alone turns me off to watching it. I haven't even seen the entire thing but I can tell you that it's in documentary real video form. This vampire gets pregnant because she gets raped. First of all Vampires are supposed to be non living beings...they aren't supposed to be able to conceive. The acting is terrible and the actresses are so ugly I can barely stand to look at them. Any person who calls this film "brilliant" has issues. Don't waste your time. You will be terribly disappointed. I truly feel sorry for anyone who has had the misfortune to have watched this movie.

This is a decent piece of entertainment that manages to overcome moral idiocy and painfully clichéd "real video" film-making through brevity, hot sex scenes and creative implied violence.Holly (Morven Macbeth) is a young woman making a documentary about the so-called "weekend vampire" subculture in England. Her work consists of taking a single camera and following 4 goth friends around as they dress up and play at being technomusic bloodsuckers. The story sets up these 4 friends as important but then almost completely disregards them as Holly meets a mysterious young woman named Vicki (Anne Walton). Vicky has her own video camera and films Holly just as Holly films everyone else. Holly lets this attractive stranger stay at her apartment when she has no where else to go and the two of them end up in some spicy girl-on-girl action. Their attraction turns out to be more than physical and Holly starts to worry about where Vicki goes when she leaves the apartment in the middle of the night. It turns out Holly is worried about the wrong person getting hurt, because Vicky is a real vampire. She doesn't turn into a bat and isn't afraid of garlic or sunlight, but Vicki does need blood to survive. Holly helps her get that blood, even after she finds out that Vicki had killed two of the goth friends from the start of the film. But when Vicki announces she's pregnant with a vampire baby and her bloodlust is increasing because of it, our lovers are forced into more and more extreme acts.Let me start off with the significant negatives of Vampire Diary. This movie is done "real video" style with everything being either by Holly's camera or Vicki's camera and it gets annoying in very short order. Beyond the fact that "real video" pseudodocumentaries have been done to death, this movie doesn't even use the technique for any particular purpose. The pretenses of the documentary are abandoned early on and it just becomes two young women who film each other for no reasonable purpose. But after it stops being a documentary, the movie throws in a bunch of stuff like news reports, montages and even flashbacks that make no sense if it's just two people with cameras recording themselves. And then at the end of the film they just throw all the "real video" rules out the window and the camera starts zooming in when no one's operating it and other impossible things. Vampire Diary would have been much better if it had just been shot like a normal movie. These filmmakers clearly have the talent and skill to do that and it would have spared the audience all of the contrived crap.The other problem with Vampire Diary is that it never seems to quite understand why killing people is bad. There are a few moments when Holly feebly objects to Vicki's slaughter, but there are no lasting emotional or moral consequences to the murders. By downplaying that, though, the film undercuts all the tension and suspense that's supposed to be generated by the killing. Instead of it being a case where Holly's resistance to Vicki's nature is gradually broken down over time, she just switches from being bothered by murder to being okay with murder whenever it suits the Almighty Plot Hammer.Most films with two such flaws would suck fairly hard. Vampire Diary manages to still be watchable thanks to three main factors. It's very fast paced, Anne Walton and Morven Macbeth are good actresses who look really good naked and filmmakers Mark Jones and Phil O'Shea have some genuine talent. Once you get past the "real video" contrivances, they come up with some nice imagery and scenes that are well staged and well paced.If Vampire Diary had dispensed with the "real video" nonsense and included some sort of moral center, it would be a very good film. As it is, Vampire Diary is a problematic film that's several steps above most low budget cinema. If you're a vampire fan, particularly a fan of lesbian bloodsuckers, you'll probably like it. If that's not your cup of tea, you might still enjoy it as a promising bit of film-making.

The words "lesbian vampire" bring to mind either the incoherently stylish Jess Franco/Jean Rollin 70's stuff or the modern softcore associated with Misty Mundae, Darian Caine, et al. But it would be unfair to categorize "Vampire Diary" as either, because the sexual orientation of the leads is not the main point of the film, but the intense passion that develops between them, and the lengths a person will go to in order to protect a loved one. Sure, it's not a perfect film (even at eighty-something minutes it drags at some points), but much to my surprise, "Vampire Diary" turned out to be a thoughtful, well-acted drama with supernatural overtones that might go the usual "vampirism as addiction" route we've seen before, but does it with a raw and sincere emotion, intensified by the DIY photography (videography?), that will undoubtedly be compared with the recent wave of mockumentary shot-on-video horror films (from the awesome "Cloverfield" to the genuinely terrifying Spanish flick "REC"). Granted, this pseudo-verité style is not for all tastes, but for those tired of the same direct-to-DVD zombie drivel, "Vampire Diary" will be a welcome relief and a cool breath of fresh air for the genre. I'm an avid fan of direct-to-DVD horror films (for better or for worse), and this is exactly the kind of film that feels like a reward after plowing through release after release of mercenary independent films done without passion or vision, just scraping for some loose change associated with the latest film trend. So, believe me when I tell you that there are _lots_ of worse movies in which you could invest an hour and a half, and not find even a fraction of the artistry, drama or just plain coolness of "Vampire Diary". And, goes without saying, the movie will be especially relevant to those "Goth" kids that take the role playing game "Vampire - The Masquerade" way too seriously.