Dampyr

 First impressions for Italian dark fantasy vampire extravaganza Dampyr couldn't be any less promising. No, I don't just mean the Sony Pictures logo at the beginning (though this movie does end up confirming that they have the worst quality control department when it comes to scripts).

 The whole prelude, which involves three old witches who are also hot young women helping another woman give birth while issuing a magical restraining order to the vampire father, is chock-full of ugly CGI and cheesy shots. It all feels like a deeply shit comic book movie... and sure enough, it turns out it's an adaptation of a long-running Italian comic and an attempt to jump start yet another cinematic universe.

 The baby grows up to be Harlan (Wade Briggs), a sullen-looking pretty boy who wanders Yugoslavia during the height of the Balkan war using his half-human, half-vampire birth to milk credulous villagers of their belongings by running fake exorcisms with the aid of his agent/hype man Yuri (Sebastian Croft, terrible).

 That lineage, which also gives him a reputation as a vampire killer, bites him in the ass when a group of soldiers decide he's the only one who can help when they take over an abandoned village and are attacked by the undead.

 Harlan soon discovers, to his astonishment, that his blood is acid to vampires. Also, that most vampires look like punks from a bad '80s videogame for some reason. So he joins up with one of the soldiers (Stuart Martin) and a cute vampire love interest (Frida Gustavsson) to take the fight to the "Master of the Night" Gorka (David Morrisey in Severus Snape drag).

 This is categorically not a good movie - the script (by Mauro Boselli, Giovanni Masi, Alberto Ostini and Mauro Uzzeo) is dumb as all hell, its mythology and plot deeply uninteresting. Acting's often atrocious, and the action is severely lacking. But the war-torn setting - which soon moves from the abandoned town to a shell-shocked city - is interesting, and director Riccardo Chemello and cinematographer Vittorio Omodei Zorini pepper the runtime with some dramatically lit, very atmospheric shots.

Hey, is that a reference to Low's Double Negative there in the foreground?

 The effects are mostly decent for a relatively low-budget movie like this - it's all very fake-looking, but I liked the various ways vampires crumble into dust; They fare a lot worse when trying to do more overt fantastical stuff, but there's not a too much of that. The makeup effects and (light) gore are pretty well made, too. Needle drops consist of era-appropriate An Emotional Fish (remember them?) and Lou Reed's Take a Walk on the Wild Side, both diegetic; Lorenzo Tomio's soundtrack is not memorable, but accompanies the action well.

 Befitting its vampire subjects, this is a movie that mostly cares about looking cool, and after adjusting expectations downwards after the introduction I was mostly fine with that. Just don't expect me to give the tiniest fraction of a fuck about any of the dumbass characters or the laughably portentous setup for a sequel.