Yeah, this trumps my former "worst film I saw in a theatre": The Tree of Life. Where The Tree of Life doesn't make sense and completely isolates the audience by doing nothing but showing pretty imagery for what feels like years because that's its intent, Vampire Academy doesn't make sense because it just fails at basic storytelling. And yes, I just compared a Terrance Malick movie to Vampire Academy. Come at me bro.
Starting from the first 5 minutes, the pacing and dialogue are horrendous. We start with a dream of a car crash, which smashes into a conversation between our 2 lead characters, which smashes into a vampire bite, which smashes into the girls exploding two bikers trying to take the girls back to the Vampire Academy, which smashes into another character picking up the girls anyway, which smashes into a "bad" vampire attack, and this process of never having a quiet moment, of never letting tension build, never having a breather, just keeps going for 100 minutes.The whole movie is made of dialogue really, which wouldn't be terrible, but it's too quickly paced and too boring to sustain interest. Movies are a visual medium, that's the first thing a filmmaker should realize. So when your movie is made entirely of expository dialogue, and I mean this is entirely expository dialogue, you need to try adding some visual element, or at the very least slow it down so your audience doesn't get bored into remission and end up just not caring about what happens. Vampire Academy expects you to pay 100% attention and care about the characters from beginning to end, but that's an impossible expectation to meet because the movie never feels like it has to earn that attention from you.
The way different scenes randomly smash into each other and the way flaccid dialogue just keeps lagging forward uninterestingly really doesn't help the few and far between action scenes. Let's just say: When you don't know how to properly pace and write dialogue scenes, you don't know how to write tense, atmospheric action scenes. The dialogue will just smash into an action scene (surprise surprise) without any build up, and since I already don't care about the characters and there's nothing visually new about the action scenes, I really don't care now. And then, because there is no plot or building tension throughout the whole film, the climax is really just another action scene, except it's longer so you know it's the climax. Yes, the climax is related to the mystery that I guess was the main plot in the film, but even then, who really cares at this point?
And yet, I don't look at this movie hatefully despite how terrible it is. Because it's hilariously terrible at many times. Sure, the dialogue is mostly boring, but almost every little visual thing that happened made me laugh out loud. Like how at one part the ground randomly crumbles below our main character Rose and she breaks her ankle on this. Or how when the other main character gets kidnapped in the 3rd act, Rose goes to the love interest saying they need to go get her, but then her charmed necklace ends up getting them to have sex for an awkward one minute sex scene that's one minute longer than it needed to be to prove the point it needed to for the plot. Or how Sarah Hyland cannot play the peppy girl role or the murderous vampire role to save her life. Or how a girl with hypnosis powers tells a guy that she "believes he can fly" (direct quote) to hypnotize him to jump out a window and it works (which makes sense considering the power, but is still hilarious). So many little things but with what an inane snoozer this film is, the outlandish moments are appreciated.
Quality rating
1/5
entertainment rating
4/5
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