Vampiress Review: "Forever 16"

The Gist:  A 91 year old vampire who was turned at the age of 16 is recruited by authorities to go undercover at a high school to solve the case of the suspicious death of two teenagers.

Clarification:  If you love movie cliche's you will absolutely love this film.  Originally created as a pilot for a television show about a vampire teen detective it aired as a stand alone film on the Lifetime network and has been on constant rotation on the Lifetime movie network since 2013.

Best described as "Forever Knight" for teenagers it's pretty cheesy even by that shows standards and nowhere near as dark.  Obviously if she's going undercover as a school girl (literally with plaid skirt and all) the whole "vampires can't be out in the daytime" rule is completely thrown out the window in this film. The unoriginality doesn't stop with the Forever Knight detective premise. The school she attends in this film looks straight out of Twilight and like Twilight this film also includes a vampire falling in love with a student sub-plot. On top of that all her main powers are swiped from the NBC TV show "Ed" down to being able to get information from people just by touching them.   You also get a random subplot about the woman who recruited the vampires family being murdered but as stated before this was to be a regular TV series so there is a good chance had it been picked up that would have been addressed further along with many of the various plot holes left over after the films end.

Selling Point:  If you miss Forever Knight but wish Nick was a Teenage girl you'll love this.

Female Vampire Factor:  The vamp in this film whose name is Raven and is also followed by a raven wherever she goes (for reasons never explained) is played by Canadian Actress Tiera Skovbye.

 The film falls more into the action cop drama category than anything in horror.  There's pretty much only one scene in the film where she goes to bite someone and that is in the films start where they go into the cliche "damsel in distress turns out to be a monster who can easily defend herself" scene.

As seen above when she does fang out no matter where the situation is (indoor, outdoor) a strong gust of wind complete with lighting effect shows up.  She mostly fangs out when she's angry which is during fighting scenes more often than not.  As far as feeding goes she drinks out of blood bags.  While the films stereotypically angry male police captain brings up the "what if she looses control" factor and the film poorly hints that she could, it doesn't even come close to happening with the exception of one scene where she kisses her future love interest and (you've already probably figured it out) accidentally bites his lip leading him to bleed and her to storm off afraid of possibly hurting him.  This means fang flashes are there but very few and far between.

 This is one of those films that tries to be too much but is above average by Lifetime movie standards.  As a stand alone movie it isn't that satisfying as there are a ton of plot holes that would have been addressed with a regular series and Raven's struggle as a vampire probably would result in some very good flashback scenes down the line of her loosing control since it's mentioned several times that a woman named "Gran" took care of her and taught her how to live normally and provided blood for her when she was turned meaning she had no control at first. Sadly (or not) it never got picked up and this is pretty much all we get.  I give it a Vampire Beauty rating of 3 out of 5.