Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 5:1	Budget Medium

Lorenzo Lamas as an evil undead bloodsucker? Well, I've seen worse.

The movie opens with bright white light and six girls all dressed in white chained to a doughnut-shaped couch. Rennie soon arrives with a paper bag that is dripping blood. He offers this to the girls but then notices that one seems to be missing. Roxy has lost her leg (and thus her manacle) and drives something sharp through his chest. The girls make a break for it but Mr. Jones manages to return in time to snag one of them. The girls have a plan that involves the Necronomicon, the winter solstice, a rave and turning into full vampires. Leslie's sister Ashlie manages to show up just in time for the big night. She is somewhat surprised to find out that her sister is now a half-vampire. As the big moment arrives, Mr. Jones puts in an appearance and upsets the apple cart. Turns out the whole thing was his plan all along to release Belial and control him. The girls manage to thwart him though doing so trims their number to two, but in the end it is Mr. Jones cut up in pieces and left waiting for the sun to rise.

Okay, so the first thing to talk about here is a vampire named Mr. Jones played by Lorenzo Lamas ("Mega Shark", "Unseen Evil 2"). I don't get it. Maybe it's a Canadian thing but it just doesn't work for me. The name Jones implies "everyman", the sort of character who sits in the background unnoticed. The guy you meet and forget. And yet here he is a vampire who makes bad jokes, kills people and eats hearts. Poor Lorenzo is not a great actor to start with and then to saddle the guy with an inconsistent character with a silly name is even worse. Normally you would expect a vampire to be a man of action, the kind of guy who knows what needs to be done and does it. I would not associate subtle with vampire. Spies, certain types of villains, detectives, and femme fatales are characters that have a history of being clever, sneaky, devious and outright liars. But vampires? Not so much. So when Mr. Jones concocts an odd plan to let the girls escape with the Necronomicon so that they can open a bar and have a party where they use a CD burner to capture psychic energy that Jones then replays while standing in the middle of the dance floor yelling "Give me more power", I am left a little confused. Wouldn't it make more sense to make the psychic recording at your leisure and then summon the demon in a carefully controlled environment where your thralls are actually slaves and not adversaries?

You'll notice that the movie gets a 1 for nudity. That's right, a vampire movie featuring several female half-vampires has virtually no nudity. In fact, the only bit of nudity is provided by an anonymous body double. As is often the case with stunt breasts, it is painfully obvious that a double is being used. The camera angles suddenly change from being careful not to show the girl's breast to being careful not to show the girl's face. At this point if I were directing the film I simply wouldn't put them in. The director has clearly gone out of his way to not include nudity so why start now? Well as it turns out so that he can have some kind of snake-like thing come out of the breasts and bite someone. I have heard of vagina dentata but mastodentata? It is really makes no sense at all and visually is not that well done. It ends up being another disjointed set piece that confuses the story rather than clarifies it or even moves the plot along. Perhaps the director was thinking along the lines of the old adage "dog bites man, not news. Man bites dog, that's news" and thought that "breast bites man" would be clever and funny.

The thing that keeps this from being a better movie is that it just would not make up its mind about what type of movie it wanted to be. It has elements of a chick flick, some coming of age notions, an unconvincing abusive father angle, slapstick comedy, bad one liners, some slightly gory violence, some sudden death and a wishy-washy vampire. I had a hard time getting a handle on the movie because there was not a strong theme running through it. There were lots of contradictions. The thralls (a word that means slave) seem pretty independent and openly act against their master. They piss and moan that they are not real vampires because they can't fly or make more vampires. But they are superhumanly strong and fast to say nothing of the mastodentata. They just drink enough blood to survive without killing the host. Apparently some guys like this better than sex, though there was a lot of screaming from the guy that got bit on the penis. Plus the story calls for the little sister to think that she is in danger from the thralls, so they are made more menacing for a little while and then later overly sweet and trusting. Way too much of what is happening on the screen plays to the moment instead of the movie.

There are a couple of visual references to other movies that are kind of funny. The Karate pose that could be from "Charlie's Angels" or possibly from "The Incredibles". The dancing on the bar scene that reminds us of "Coyote Ugly". I am not sure if this is a reference or not, but the buddies Jim and Doughboy remind me a little of Jack and Wang from "Big Trouble in Little China". This feeling is made stronger by the way Jim and Jack have similar troubles. They are both presented in hero mode but whenever the fighting starts they are unceremoniously knocked aside.

Visually the movie certainly has its moments. Every now and then you'll see a nicely set up scene and frequently the images have a great deal of depth and detail. Initially we see the girls in a bright white sterile room. When we see them in the room they set up for themselves, there is a lot of indirect lighting, wall coverings and muted earth tones that tend towards red. There are times when you can see the limitations in the sets, but the cinematographer gets a lot out of them.

Overall Blood Angels is worth watching but ultimately not very satisfying. It is not that there isn't a lot going on. There are tons of little asides and hints at backstory, but it does not all pull together well in the end. Ashlie and Leslie are good examples of this. Leslie seems to have left home because her dad was sexually abusing her. There is an indication that she felt guilty about leaving her little sister behind. Ashlie has scars from what we assume was an attempted suicide which may have been related to the same abuse her sister fled. We are treated to a clumsy voice over that tells us that dad was attempting to rape Ashlie when he had a heart attack and died. (Seriously this was the funniest bit in the movie. "Come here you little.... Argh! My heart!" Thump.) Nothing really explains why Ashlie stayed at home or why she cried when dad was buried. Again we have a lot of threads that never get woven into a cohesive tapestry. Still there are much worse movies out there. If you are the type of person that can go to a buffet and put Swedish meatballs, hot wings, crab cakes and chocolate pudding all on the same plate, you might well enjoy this move.

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