Kicking Blood

Vampire movies often feel played out.  It’s difficult to do something novel with a concept that’s been around for two-hundred years.   We’ve had monster vampires, dapper vampires, erotic vampires, vampires that glitter, vampires that rock, and Tom Cruise.

More recently, movies tend to explore the vampire’s side of the story, most notably the burdens of immortality.  Anna (Alanna Bale) wants out of the lifelessness and back into the light.  She wants to stop murdering people and feel the warmth of the sun on her face without scorching to a crisp.  An old soul, she empathizes with the elderly, particularly her coworker, Bernice (Rosemary Dunmore), who can’t escape her daily routine of pills to keep surviving day by day.

She meets struggling alcoholic Robbie (Luke Bilyk) in an alley on her way home from her job at the library. Because he’s already at rock-bottom waiting to die, she gives him a place to stay while he gets clean.  They share the same desperation—time is a flat circle from one drink to the next, be it an insatiable thirst for alcohol or blood.  She romanticizes blood the way some recovering alcoholics reminisce, “Different blood has different qualities.  Taste. Kick.  Trying to guess what yours is like.”

Devoid of humanity, Anna’s circle of fellow vampires—two, to be exact–are, as they tell the unwittingly-captive, hapless beard-bro Ben (Josh Bainbridge), hunting pals.  You know the director hates hipsters when the victim compliments a “great quote” by Aleister Crowley but draws a blank stare when Boris (Benjamin Sutherland) replies, “Some people say he was dark, worshiped Satan. Nicest guy I ever met.”

A tantalizing concept hobbled by paper-thin characters and stilted dialogue a good two or three rungs down the festival ladder from Toronto (though the industry’s reticence toward digital premieres has left the selection as gaunt as Anna when she’s gone several days without fresh blood), the movie ambles toward a weirdly incongruous climax involving people we don’t know enough to care about, purely to drag the story past the finish line.

Written and directed by Blaine Thurier, KICKING BLOOD leaves us with too many questions.  Who is Robbie’s enabler and what’s her motivation for sabotaging him?  Why do Anna, Boris and Nina (Ella Jonas Farlinger) need to go around, as Anna puts it, “Looting the dead?”  It’s well-established that these vampires are, as is common in the genre, immortal.  Couldn’t they just have opened up a savings account 800 years ago?  Do blood banks pay compound interest?