Recentish adventures in gay vampire movies:
THE VAMPIRE NEXT DOOR (2024): More properly a bisexual vampire movie (eventually, if you're patient), this is a dumb low-budget comedy about a 20-something dweeb, Cameron (Alex Matthews), who's persuaded to act as chauffeur/getaway driver for his hot new next-door neighbor Victoria (Jessica Ferguson) while she does some vampire murders around town. Meanwhile, Cameron is secretly in love with his hot blond bestie Diane (Bella Chadwick), for whom hot himbo Martin (Andrew Larkin) wants Cameron to do the Cyrano de Bergerac thing. An underwhelming throwback to the dopey (PG-rated) teen sex comedies of the '80s (with ONCE BITTEN an obvious comparison), the movie spends so much energy on the romcom stuff that it takes forever for the vampire stuff to come into focus, and, as in many bad '80s comedies, an awful lot of the plot hinges on Cameron being an "innocent" Peeping Tom. Sort of amiable despite having no real redeeming virtues, but it's weighed down by Alex Matthews, whose character is unsympathetic and whose head-lolling performance suggests that he's recently been hit with a tranquilizer dart.
BIT (2020): MEAN GIRLS meets THE LOST BOYS, featuring a teenage trans girl from Oregon, Laurel (Nicole Maines), who comes to L.A. to spend the summer with her brother (James Paxton) and falls in with a clique of gay vampire girls led by the sardonic Duke (Diana Hopper). Funny and stylish, it suffers from trying to cram at least five hours' worth of plot into 90-ish minutes of screen time. Many of the component pieces are interesting and fun, but as a whole, the movie feels jumbled and unresolved: Various subplots and secondary characters go nowhere; the other vampires (Zolee Griggs, Char Diaz, and Friday Chamberlain) get hardly any character development — Griggs' character Izzy is there mostly as Laurel's love interest, and Diaz and Chamberlain barely have any lines; and Laurel remains curiously underdeveloped, reducing her to a fairly generic teen movie protagonist. Maines is an appealing screen presence, but she can't compete with Diana Hopper, whose commandingly bitchy performance as Duke is the centerpiece of the movie. There's a lot to like about BIT, but it might have worked better as a TV series, giving the characters and story more room to breathe.
THERESA & ALLISON (2019): Extremely low-budget cinema verité horror comedy-drama about gay college girl Theresa (Arielle Hope), transformed into a vampire after a disastrous one-night stand, as she struggles to navigate her new vampiric existence while nursing a crush on a somewhat older vampire, Allison (Sarah Schoofs) — who is totally, definitely (not) broken up with her obnoxious boyfriend Tony (Charles D. Lincoln, who also wrote the script), who now won't leave Theresa alone. The production values are modest and the acting is uneven, but this is a much more cohesive movie than the other two, with far and away the most intelligent script and many inventive ideas (like the fact that New York City has social services for vampires, although like most urban social services, they're underfunded and totally inadequate). Its biggest strength is the way the story builds its vampire-related elements around familiar real-world gay girl travails, which is sometimes very funny as well as horrifying. The caveat is that this is still definitely a horror movie, and goes some quite dark places (requiring CWs for suicide and sexual violence, beyond the usual for vampire stories), with an ambiguous but rather harrowing ending.
