Bloodwine
Directed By: Patrick Keith
Written by: Patrick & Vicky Morgan- Keith
featuring: Melissa Johnson, Lora Meins, Vanessa Leinani, Heather Whitsell, Christina DeYoung, Michael Lunday, Zalika Thomas
2008, www.doombunnyfilms.com

Brandy arrives at her new college to be greeted by a surprise – her old friend from high school is her new dorm mate! But Andrea, once clean-cut and normal-looking, is now gothed-out. Nicole and Mercedes, real bitches who live on their floor, call her “Bride of Dracula” and generally make life hard for her. But whatever – this is college and we’re adults now. Brandy and Andrea rekindle their friendship quickly, and soon “Andy” wants to buy “B” a cool birthday present. Being a wine connoisseur (snob), she gets a really old bottle of brandy from the Romanian winery of Carmilla from a local shop. Brandy drinks it. Vampire mayhem ensues…

Starting off with a shot of a distant castle green screen effect that is pulled off well, Bloodwine is immediately impressive., It further impresses when the scene changes to a musty interior of the castle, wherein some kind of wine cellar a battle between a gothic vamp heroine and a vampire (lady Carmilla herself) takes place amid smoke, props, and impeccable lighting. Surprisingly subtle and effective use of digital and practical effects can be found throughout Bloodwine, but it in this opening sequence that they are most remarkable. Green screen, smoke, and lighting enhance the creep factor gorgeously.

Cut to college, where Brandy and Andrea have become fast friends and the story becomes something like The Craft mixed with a made-for-TV movie about vampires starring Alyssa Milano. Strikingly apparent from the first scene she appears in is actress Lori Meins’s naturalness as Brandy. A bit like a young Gillian Anderson, Meins makes the often absurd situations believable, when they would be laughable in the hands of a less experienced actress. Between her and the less-effective Melissa Johnson as Andrea, there’s a rather large amount of character development. In fact, there is a full half-hour of it before Andrea even gets to the wine shop where she buys Brandy’s cursed bottle-of-wine-birthday-present, and its 53 minutes before you get your first vampire death. The death scenes, long time coming, are disappointingly swift, but bloody.

While no small detail in this film seems to have been overlooked (yes, there is art direction involving pictures, personal affects, and clothes which is so refreshingly nice for an indie horror movie), there is one thing I can’t get over. Well, two, actually. One: the filmmakers chose to adorn the character of Lady Camilla (played by Vanessa Leinani) in a fairly obvious and slightly ridiculous wig. The second thing is that the filmmaker’s mascot, the Doom Bunny (a rough-looking bunny rabbit stuffed animal carrying an ax) appears more times than is cute in the background, in the arms of characters, on beds, etc. Inside jokes are fun, but this one may have been taken a bit too far. Bloodwine color choices also bear some pondering. When Andrea is alone in a scene, her sadness and morose gothicity is highlighted by an apparent dulling of the lighting and picture color. Sometimes it leans on the blue or gray side when she’s around. Was this a matter of artistic choice, or someone’s incompetence with color correction? Hard call, but it works nonetheless.

Your roommate, is like, a total weirdo

The key to Bloodwine is the strong relationship between Andrea and Brandy, a love that borders on passion without any hint of lesbiana. However, like its predecessors The Craft, Ginger Snaps and the more recent Tamara, Bloodwine is one of those movies that allows the newly-vampired (or werewolved or bewitched) woman to become a stronger, sexier version of herself. It’s as if negative power is always associated with a heightening of female sexuality. Unlike the women in these movies, however, Bloodwine’s Brandy does not act out sexually. She channels her love and her distress into her friendship with Andrea, and she seeks to destroy the people that traditionally get in the way of female friendships (cliques, mean dorm mates, evil professors that assign papers so there isn’t enough “girl time” for margaritas). For this Bloodwine is unique and unpredictable. It also does a great deal to redeem the state of real female friendships in the horror genre.

Sexy Vampire

What’s in the wine, and how does it work? We’ll never know. Fortunately, the movie is about so much more than that that you won’t even care by the time you reach the end. You will be thinking, however, “I wish I had a rich uncle who bought me plane tickets to Romania.”