Almost Perfect Feature

The vampire film has always held a special place in my heart. I watch even the bad ones trying to find the diamonds that I know are out there. Needless to say, there haven’t been many good vampire films gracing the screens over the last ten years or so. With that said, Glenn Standring’s Perfect Creature was a welcome surprise.

The film is set in an alternate version of New Zealand called Nuovo Zelandia, a world that is being ravaged by influenza, has huge zeppelins flying over the city, and vampires and humans coexist. The vampires watching over the humans are members of the Brotherhood, a religious group reminiscent of the Catholics of the modern day. The two species enjoy a peaceful coexistence until one of the Brotherhood decides that feeding on humans is much more fun than protecting them. Silus a vampire in the Brotherhood (Dougray Scott) partners with Lilly (Saffron Burrows) a cop who lost her family to influenza, in order to find the rogue vampire, Silus’s half brother Edgar (Leo Gregory). Almost immediately Silus falls in love with Lilly, and who can blame him she’s smoking hot and influenza free. Only once Edgar finds out how Silus feels about Lilly she becomes a walking target.

I wasn’t expecting much from this film, but after watching it twice in two days time I feel like Perfect Creature has surpassed the modern idea of what a vampire movie is supposed to be, and instead risen into the ranks of films that create genre conventions. This could have been another vampire movie complete with lots of wooden stakes, garlic, lesbians and at least one cast member that eats bugs. Thankfully this movie had none of those things, but what it did have was a fresh perspective on a much loved horror legend.

I’m sure some people are not going to enjoy the fact that action is kept to a minimum and the vampires weren’t dressed in leather with long black capes. Not that there was no action in this flick, because there was just enough. There’s an escape scene at the beginning of the flick that merits a few clicks of the rewind button and even though the action never returned to that level it was a welcome change after all the explosions and excessive Hollywood banter that was thrown across screens this summer. The beautiful photography and top-notch acting combined with a really unique story made for an enjoyable experience in front of the boob tube. I can’t wait to see what Standring is going to do next.

Perfect Creature is an elegant film that turns the vampire genre on its head and reinvents the modern-day bloodsucker. So if its playing at a theater near you go and check it out, or put it at the top of your Netflix queue because Perfect Creature is a killer film.