Vampire Resurrection (2003) by Denice Duff

Director: Denice Duff

Year: 2003

Country: USA

Alternate Titles: Song of the Vampire

Genre: Vampire

Plot:

Wanting to find his true love, a man sells his soul to become a vampire and awakens a century later to target and torment a woman who he feels was taken from him years ago, sending him out to find her in the middle of a battle with her abusive ex-husband and bringing them together.

Review:

This was a solid enough romantic-themed vampire effort. Among the better features here is an intriguing and rather impactful storyline that manages to provide a fun time overall. The initial setup of the vampire looking to sell his soul to ensure he can return to find the woman he loved who’s now reincarnated as a random woman in modern times who’s starting to become overwhelmed by a series of dreams and hallucinations depicting both her past abusive relationships and the life she had with the vampire works incredibly well. This creates a great impetus for why he would want to track her down and reunite based on his belief in their past while also giving a reason why she becomes receptive to his charms once the rampage brings them together. None of it stands out beyond doing a necessary job of explaining why they come together as they do since the later scenes involving the couple reuniting again have the build-up required to be quite somewhat enjoyable. With a strong setup allowing for some decent stalking scenes with some decent enough gore involved, this gets some decent enough positives.

There are some issues to be had with this one. The main drawback here is the agonizingly slow pace and tempo that comes about trying to make for an epic look and feel only to drag the running time out needlessly. So many scenes here, whether it’s the genuinely slow nature of how the conversations are carried out or the inclusion of actual slow-motion sequences into the setup which are awkwardly injected into the film and don’t mean much and do nothing but carry out the running time far more than needed. This could’ve been trimmed out so it’s not as irritating as how long it takes to get going with these factors, keeping the running time too long for its own good. As well, there’s also the lowered intimidation of the vampire that causes this to fall as there’s not much threatening action in the middle section of this one due to taking up the romantic angle with him trying to seduce her and make her see how she’s the reanimated lover in his former life which drains the fear completely out of this one. With the low-budget nature of this one creeping in as well, these all come together to hold this one down.

Overview: **.5/5

A generally watchable if problematic vampire effort, there’s a lot to like here even though it does have some drawbacks that hold it down in the end. Really only give this a shot if you’re a fan of this kind of genre fare or the creative crew while most others out there turned off by its issues should heed caution.