Your Daily Dracula – Sean Maguire as Thorn, V for Vengeance (2022)

Your Daily Dracula – Sean Maguire as Thorn, V for Vengeance (2022)

Your basic low-budget action/vampire/road movie – relatively slick and professional, but not exactly memorable.  Vampire Emma (Jocelyn Hudon) hunts pervs and predators on the road, luring them into making a move then biting their throats out like an old-fashioned gunslinger who needs the black hat to draw first before taking lethal action.  She’s estranged from her sister Scarlett (Grace Van Dien), more on fashion lines (Scarlett is dressier and more urban) than from any difference of ethics.

Both have quit a coven run by effete, elder vampire Thorn (Sean Maguire) – Thorn is an alias of Dracula in Fred Saberhagen’s novels, which writers Steven Paul or Peter Moore Smith might or might not know, though their Thorn is plainly a Dracula knock-off, albeit with a British accent.  Thorn sits in his lair with an entourage, being evil.  Long ago, Thorn’s hit-people massacred the sisters’ adoptive parents – Emma and Scarlett share a rare blood type – but missed killing a third sister Kate (Pauline Dyer), who is now the sort of teenage blood specialist who wears midriff-baring outfits around the lab and is working on one of those serums which could either cure vampirism or make one particular vampire super-powerful. The sisters get past their (quite funny) squabbles and team up with veteran slayer Bullseye (Graham Greene), a rogue badass not affiliated with the fairly inept Federal Vampire Control Agency.  The good suckers have to rescue the sister from the bad fangers, and that’s about as complicated as it gets.  Clearly, Blade and Buffy have had a lasting influence on this level of picture, with a bit of Underworld thrown in – though at least the road movie element gives it a different, more rural feel.  Kelly Halihan directs action in a pretty scrappy fashion, but the film has Hudon – from The Strain and The Order – and Van Dien – daughter of Casper, grand-daughter of Robert Mitchum and Sharon Tate in Charlie Says – going for it.  Both are fresh, funny, bright and have some reasonable action chops.  Maguire really isn’t a strong enough villain for this, but a decision seems to have been made to cast soap opera style handsome planks and sultry fashionplates in supporting roles – Alix Villaret is Tatiana, the mean girl vampire.