Vampiress Review: Vampire Academy

The Gist:  A Dhampir must protect a member of vampire royalty who happens to be her best friend from a plan to take advantage of her newly aquired magic abilities.

Clarification:  This film is the answer to what would happen if you combined Underworld with Harry Potter and Mean Girls.  By that I mean if you combine the actual scripts of those films you would make this movie.  That makes it part action movie, part coming of age teen drama, part fantasy and completely unoriginal.  Unfortunately for its box office numbers none of those genre's are what women look for in their vampire movies.  Via the folklore of the film vampires a split into two groups.  You have your Moroi which is what Lissa is which are basically your good posh sophisticated group.  Then you have your Strigoi which are basically your run of the mill horror movie vampires.

Selling Point:  Girly enough for teenage girls but enough eye candy to be guy friendly enough to somewhat be worth watching.

Female Vampire Factor:  It's a vampire high school.

 Now with that being said only a hand full of characters do fang out and the only vampiric portions of the film are the portions which takes place in the school related scenes.  Probably my biggest complaint is that the main character of the film Rose has nothing vampiric about her despite traditionally a Dampir having at least some vampire like traits (see Bloodrayne). As for everyone else, you basically just go down your list of teen high school movie stereotypes.

Stereotype #1 - Lissa "The skinny blonde spoiled princess."  (Lucy Fry)

 

Her best friend/bodygaurd is pretty much her caretaker as well.  The above screen cap is from the movies beginning after her buddy Rose lets her feed from her. That's as "vampirey" as you're going to get from her.

Stereotype #2 - really sexy and kind of evil school headmistress.  (Olga Kurylenko)

Seductive and as mentioned kind of evil.  She fully deserves her own movie. 

Stereotype #3 - Mia a female bully who has to talk about and put down others due to her own low self esteem. (Sami Gayle)

She'd probably have higher self esteem if she didn't look like a young Justin Bieber. (She actually gets knocked unconscious a split second after the above screen cap.)  At least the girls who played this part in Mean Girls were hot and slutty.  

 Stereotype #4 -(!!!!!!!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!)  Natalie, the dorky virgin no one pays attention to who looses the glasses and mom hair and becomes a pretty sexy evil vampire. (Sarah Hyland)

 

You know what?  I take it back, this was the selling point of the film.   It was only a few minutes of the film toward the end but got to say it was pretty kick ass what happens to the mousy little nerd girl.

 So there you have it.  If I had to manage a guess on how much vampiric stuff actually happens in the film I'd say about 10 minutes.  For that I give the film a Vampire Beauty Rating of 3 out of 5.  If there is a sequel it would theoretically have more as the film leaves off with a large group of strigoi planning an attack but that is a huge if.