Vampire Academy (2014)
Directed by Mark Waters
Rose, a rebellious half-vampire/half-human guardian-in-training and her best friend, Lissa -- a mortal, royal vampire Princess - have been on the run when they are captured and returned to St. Vladamirs Academy, the very place where they believe their lives may be in most jeopardy. Rose will sacrifice everything to protect Lissa from those who intend to exploit her from within the Academy walls and the Strigoi (immortal, evil vampires) who hunt her kind from outside its sanctuary.
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There is not a single original moment in the film, which borrows most of its ideas from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter.
It’s a self-aware horror/action comedy, first in a possible franchise (sigh) based on Richelle Mead’s books, that sits somewhere on the border between “Twilight”, “Harry Potter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Based on Richelle Mead’s young adult supernatural novels, the Vampire Academy movie plays out as a blend of Harry Potter-style fantasy world building and Buffy the Vampire Slayer-inspired use of supernatural tropes as (very) thinly-veiled subtext for the modern high school experience.
The family line for the teenage flick “Vampire Academy” may trace back to “Dracula,” but the recycling policy is strictly from “Frankenstein.” Directed by Mark Waters and written by Daniel Waters, his brother, this genre rehash takes a helping of “Harry Potter,” a measure of “Mean Girls” and elements from various teenage adventures, monster movies and queen-bee stories and recombines the borrowed parts into an unsurprisingly familiar tale.
Vampire Academy is director Mark Waters taking the bad parts of Harry Potter and all the worst parts of Twilight, and mashing them together to create a spiritual successor to his claim to fame: Mean Girls.
It’s also a rip-off of “X-Men” and “Mean Girls.”
One can glimpse what Waters was aiming for here—a combination of the dark high-school humor his brother Daniel, who shares script credit with Mead, brought to “Heathers” (and Mark himself did to “Mean Girls”) with the elements of a supernatural action-thriller.
From the director of "Mean Girls" and the writer of "Heathers" (as the posters are quick to remind moviegoers) this latest young adult book series to come to the screen has a ludicrous mythology and complex, chatter-heavy plotline, but it is redeemed, mostly, by a zing-heavy script and a breakout lead performance from Ellen Page-esque newcomer Zoey Deutch.
Alas, their "best" is weak (at best) and the attempts of melding that, a certain "Mean Girls" vibe and all of the revamped vampire material completely falls flat on its face when not being unintentionally goofy.
Adapted by Daniel Waters, who most notably wrote Heathers (a direct ancestor of the other Waters’s Mean Girls), the film does show flashes of biting brilliance that echo the 1988 classic, but it’s simply not as clever or jawdropping.
One can glimpse what Waters was aiming for here—a combination of the dark high-school humor his brother Daniel, who shares script credit with Mead, brought to “Heathers” (and Mark himself did to “Mean Girls”) with the elements of a supernatural action-thriller.
From the director of "Mean Girls" and the writer of "Heathers" (as the posters are quick to remind moviegoers) this latest young adult book series to come to the screen has a ludicrous mythology and complex, chatter-heavy plotline, but it is redeemed, mostly, by a zing-heavy script and a breakout lead performance from Ellen Page-esque newcomer Zoey Deutch.
Brothers Daniel and Mark Waters gave us the 1988 cult classic “Heathers,” with its contagiously quotable lines — “What’s your damage?” — but you won’t find anything so memorable here.
To be fair, nobody may be more entitled to swipe from “Mean Girls” than “Vampire Academy” director Mark Waters, who directed “Mean Girls,” and co-writer Daniel Waters, who wrote “Heathers,” to which “Mean Girls” owes a big debt.
Because it was directed by Mark Waters, who did the terrific Mean Girls , and written by his brother Daniel Waters, who did the script for the classic Heathers.
Neither as polished as the Twilight franchise, nor as explicitly carnal as earlier, better forays into what is now a well-established subgenre of toothy adolescent females with exsanguination issues (John Fawcett’s 2000 film Ginger Snaps – a wicked-smart and thoroughly unnerving depiction of budding female sexuality – comes to mind), Vampire Academy instead plays like the flip side of the Buffy mythos twinned with Percy Jackson and the Olympians by way of Mean Girls, with a side of (what else?) Harry Potter.
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That’s exactly what “Mean Girls” director Mark Waters has attempted with “Vampire Academy” (not to be mistaken for “Monsters University”), which derives its humor from timely references like Gandhi, Hot Topic and “Austin Powers.”
Looking like the missing link between Ellen Page and Rose Byrne, lead Zoey Deutch (the daughter of Lea Thompson, the mom from the Back to the Future movies) does her best to get her sass on, but it comes across like a decade-too-late audition for a Buffy spin-off.
Luckily for us, Rose, played in her first starring role by Deutch is engaging, channeling a bit of Emma Stone in Easy A.
She also engages in a flirtation with her mentor Dimitri, played by an actor (Danila Kozlovsky) who seems to have watched Tommy Wiseau in “The Room” and said, “Now that’s acting!”
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Our two heroines try to decide which cute boy they like best a la “Twilight,” while dissing rivals and dealing with ominous signs of conspiracy afoot a la “Potter.”
For anyone else, Vampire Academy is exasperating, spook show soap opera stupidity filtered through Twilight‘s tepid reinterpretation of horror.
Written by Waters' brother, Daniel Waters, from Richelle Mead's 2007 novel, "Vampire Academy" arrives in theaters when even "Twilight" fans seem tired of "Twilight."
The chance of that happening is about as great as a follow-up to “Heaven’s Gate.”