A Ghoul Versus Vampire Academy (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1!

Rose leaves, bumping into Christian on the way out. He was coming to make sure Lissa is okay, but Rose tells him to stay away from her. He tells her Lissa likes him, and Rose replies with this line:

“Lissa used to like Hot Topic too, and then she turned twelve”.

Ahhh, there it is. This line made me curious enough about the books, so I actually downloaded the first book to see how loyal the movie was being to it. The book has ZERO references to Twilight or Hot Topic, which leads me to believe Daniel Waters wrote this entire movie as a middle finger to the entire genre. I mean the guy is in his fifties now, this entire supernatural teen genre has to be such nonsense to him. I could be totally wrong, after all this is the guy who wrote Hudson Hawk so I could be giving him WAY too much credit, but there is definitely a tone to this movie that makes me feel I'm right. Also, making fun of Hot Topic customers is MY gig Vampire Academy, OKAY?

Christian says he was only being concerned, Rose saying there's a fine line between concerned and stalker. Jesus Christ, what did he DO? It was clearly established Christian was going to the church long before Lissa was, if anything she's stalking HIM. Rose tells Christian to go away because it's what Lissa wants. Nice, 37 minutes into the movie and I DESPISE our “heroine” now. Well done movie!

He started off a little rough, but Christian has been a nice guy who has been helping Lissa through the bad time she's had since returning to the academy, as well as defending the honour of her AND Rose. Rose just comes off as a complete bitchy sociopath here.  The next morning Rose FINALLY reads the telegram Olga gave her after a couple of scenes teasing her opening it. Yeah, it's only been a few days why not? She meets Dimitri outside for more training and some monotonous line reading on his part, during which we learn Rose's mother is one of the most badass guardians in the world. Dimitri asks what the telegram said, and this ought to be good after all that build up!

“Glad you're alive. What you did was inexcusable. Mom.” Oh. Huh.

They talk for what seems to be forever, the only worthwhile information that Rose knows nothing of her Moroi father. Rose goes back inside the school, where she runs into Mia. Rose tells her the world beware doesn't have an “h” in it, Mia furrowing her brow at her like “WTF are you talking about?” Rose makes a note of this as she meets up with Natalie, who tells her Mia and Aaron are going on a field trip to a hemoglobin factory later that day.

WHAT?! The vampires take field trips? Does this actually mean the human world knows about their existence? Or do they just pretend they're a normal school? If so, how do they deal with state inspection drills? Also, what the hell is a hemoglobin factory? Is that a human thing or a Moroi thing? I googled it to no avail, so it must be a Moroi thing. Also, I am completely bored to tears by this movie so am trying to grab onto anything to stay interested.

Oh, we're only forty minutes in? Hmm. Natalie wants to raid Mia's room while she's at... the hemoglobin factory. A factory. To produce hemoglobin. Which is a substance in blood that carries oxygen throughout the body. Why would the Moroi even need to mass produce hemoglobin when they have a never ending supply of humans willing to volunteer their blood?

Lissa-Vision time! Rose watches as Lissa uses compulsion on all the Popular Kids to make them hang out with her. What a fine use of her powers. I'd ask why she's against using powers against the strigoi who want to brutally kill her when she has no problem using them against her fellow classmates, but I just really want to survive this review.

Christian walks by and Lissa tries to talk to him, but she tells her she doesn't have to pretend anymore and keeps walking. Nice one Rose, you're a champ. Back at Lissa's, the three women go through Mia's laptop while Natalie was easily able to steal. Lissa doesn't care about any of this, getting dressed up for a night out with the Popular Kids. Natalie sighs, wishing Lissa would compulse Ray into taking her virginity. They are taking this cliché WAY too far, Ray is a complete monster and no matter how good looking he is there's no way the kind hearted Natalie would still be into him.

Rose finds pictures of Lissa's brother Andre and Mia, who were secretly dating. Rose tells Natalie how Andre was a player who went through women like crazy, not caring about any of them. From these pictures, she concludes Mia fell in love with Andre and felt very betrayed that he didn't love her back. Since Rose is just making up bullshit, Natalie joins in by saying Mia now hates the entire Dragomir line.

We go to a montage of Lissa taking away all of Mia's friends as Rose narrates this is turning Lissa into someone she's not. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the reboot of Mean Girls! Lissa is Cady and Mia is Regina, and Lissa is using compulsion to turn the Plastics against Mia instead of lies and nutrition bars.

We fast forward ahead some as Rose is now starting to kick ass in training. After one session, Mason tells her how he saw Jesse and Ray with bandages over their wrists while they were getting dressed in the locker room. As they ponder what this could mean, they see Mia walking by with her wrists covered up too. They follow her as she meets with Olga in a secretive looking fashion.  This motivates Rose to break into Olga's office, and you want a perfect example of how the scenes in this movie end? Here you go:

Rose: There's a file in there that could be the key to my past, my present, and my future.

Mason: That's it? Sounds cool.

End scene.

Or how about the next scene? Rose and Dimitri are training AGAIN, and Dimitri ends up lying on top of her. Rose makes a sexually suggestive comment and he pulls her to her feet.

End scene. Hell she barely even gets on her feet before it cuts away.

Now Rose is breaking into Olga's office, although I wouldn't say breaking as much as she just walks in and takes Karp's file. Now Rose is back in her room, finding a DVD in Karp's file and watching it on her computer. The video is of Karp rambling about her powers, but before it gets interesting a screen says the rest of footage is on another disc the file doesn't contain.

Now Rose is in church, sitting by Christian. He tells him about what she did, asking for his help with Lissa but he's rightfully pissed at her and leaves. Now Rose is at a school wide party, but gets sick of Lissa's attitude and leaves. Lissa follows her, Rose trying to tell her about Christian but Lissa doesn't care. Natalie pops up, saying something is following her. We hear a howling, Rose saying it's a psi-hound and tells everyone to run. Natalie asks what a psi-hound is, but no one feels like answering.

They run to the courtyard, where Lissa sees her backpack lying in the center of the area. Rose notices small cameras are mounted everywhere, but before she can investigate them Lissa grabs her backpack and opens it. She finds her cat dead inside, trying to resurrect it but the strain makes her pass out. A series of slashes suddenly appear on her arm. Animals being hurt, threats written on walls... does this remind you of anything? Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets much?

This prompts another Karp flashback as we learn Karp used compulsion to make Rose and Lissa flee the academy because of a great danger inside the school. You know, this movie is juggling a LOT of subplots right now. What are the odds it's able to reconcile all of them?  We get our millionth cut of the last ten minutes as Rose is telling Olga and the school board about what Karp said. Dimitri tells Olga it's time they tell Rose about Karp, to which Olga agrees with because the only thing consistent about her character is being inconsistent. Remember seven million hours ago when she tried to molest Rose? WTF was THAT?

A couple of months after Rose and Lissa left, Karp suffered a complete mental breakdown. She became a strigoi to make the pain away, because strigoi don't feel pain or suffering or anything. Karp killed her doctor and escaped the academy, and hasn't been seen since.

Rose heads to the church to research stuff where she runs into Christian, who agrees to help her. They learn St. Vladimir had a rare magical ability called “spirit”, which sounds like what Lissa has. This is pretty much their exact words, they don't tell us what it actually is. Rose wonders what the “bad guys” want from Lissa, Christian suggesting Tatiana, Olga, and Mia could all be working together to drive her crazy. Characters just LOVE to make up shit in this movie, don't they? It's an okay theory I suppose, but Rose immediately takes it as fact.

Rose brings up the cuts on Lissa's skin, which horrifies Christian. Rose then delivers the absolute lowest point of the movie, and CEMENTS her status as THE most vile character in supernatural teen history:

“Christian, she really could have used your support these past few weeks.”

Bella Swan, turn in your crown to Rose Hathaway immediately.  Instead of responding with “Hey, I would have been happy to be there if YOU HADN'T SABOTAGED US YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCH!”, Christian says it's LISSA'S fault they haven't been together. OH MY GOD this fucking movie... this HAS to be a stealth parody of how stupid characters act in the genre, I will accept no other answer at this point.

Rose says it is never the girl's fault, even when it is the girl's fault. So she's AGREEING with Christian now?! It is ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PERCENT your fault Rose! She escapes this entire episode blame free? Utterly amazing. Christian jokes is she wasn't so psychotic, she'd be fun to hang out with.

We see them leave the library a bit later, hugging and all laughs now. As Christian walks away Lissa pops out and angrily confronts him, demanding to know what he was doing with Rose. He replies they were just reading, telling her what they learned about spirit magic. He says they want to help her, but Lissa says she doesn't need any help and begins to rant. He cuts her off by kissing her, but she pushes him off, tells him she hates him, and runs away. Wow.

Rose, who watched this whole scene on Lissa-Vision, runs after her trying to explain. As they power walk, a hole opens up in the ground that Rose steps into and breaks her ankle in what is a VERY vicious looking break that actually made me cringe. I have to give that one to the movie, but that is nowhere near enough to redeem it after what we just saw.

Rose wakes up in the hospital, where she learns Lissa healed her leg. The princess tells her she's “back to normal now”, getting the Mean Girls out of her system when she saw Rose's ankle break. Oh... kay? Olga arrives to tell them advisers from Romania are now on the way to deal with all this bullshit and the two women are to be sequestered, so they're going to miss the big dance tonight.

Geez, this movie shifts gears more than a drag race. Victor shows up and announces they ARE going to go. Lissa tells him they haven't a thing to wear, but he replies he's “engineered a shopping expedition”. The movie misses a MAJOR opportunity here for him to pull out a handful of credits cards accompanied by a “CHA-CHING!” sound effect, which is the only thing that could have saved this film. I swear to the high heavens, if we get a “trying on dresses to a pop song while the girls shake their heads until they finally give a thumbs up on the perfect one” montage, I am ending this fucking review.

They head to the mall, taking a back entrance guarded by a guardian. For some reason he gives Rose a UV light that'll help her blind strigoi, which really makes me look forward to a mall brawl. That's something you don't see much in movies anymore.

As they pick out clothes, Rose's eyes fall on a beautiful necklace that is way too expensive for her. They pick out their dresses and return to Lissa's to get glammed up, cheating us out of a mall brawl. Why did the guy give Rose a weapon then? They notice Lissa's laptop now has a screen saver on it that says tonight will be here last dance. Wow, these are the LAMEST threats I've ever seen since a video game called Alone in the Dark: Inferno, which featured a villain who sent you threatening text messages. Congratulations Alone in the Dark, you're as scary as my ex-girlfriend!

Natalie gives Rose a gift from her father, which turns out to be the necklace she was looking at at the mall. Boy, that Victor sure is a nice guy! The three head to the dance, where they enter in a slow motion shot.

Lissa starts dancing with Christian, who apologizes for kissing her. She responds by kissing him. Mason shows up with Jesse and Ray, making them apologize to rose. Ray says Mia let them have sex with her if they played all the pranks on Lissa. Like, at the same time?! Sure enough, the answer is yes as we get a flashback of them, post-sex, writing on Lissa's walls with their cut open wrists. Natalie, you get an AIDS test STAT!

That is so fucked up that I LOVE it. This is exactly what the whole movie should have been like tone-wise, just bizarre imagery that makes your stomach turn. This is almost enough to make up for the Rose/Christian scene earlier, although it does make the Rose/Mia confrontation earlier a bit confusing now as the movie really made it seem like Mia had no idea what Rose was talking about. I mean, I guess Mia is that good at deception since she's just a one-note bitch, but I don't know... seemed like otherwise.

Ray says they didn't do the fox or the cat though. Rose makes him go dance with Natalie, which just further proves she's a horrible, horrible person. Sabotaging Lissa and Christian and then blaming it all on him, and now trying to hook her friend up with a walking STD-bag. Lovely.  Rose and Mia get in a fight, Rose punching her out. The guardians take Rose away and lock her in a room, Rose tuning into Lissa-Vision to see what her best friend is up to. She's in the church making out with Christian, but strangers knock him out and kidnap Lissa.

Olga shows up with a syringe, not listening as Rose tries to tell her about Lissa. Rose turns the tables on the headmistress and injects her in the ass, Olga making a lame joke before she passes out. Damn, Olga has the worst luck with syringes in my reviews!

Rose sprints to Dimitri's room, telling him about Lissa. However, midway through she's like “fuck it!” and starts kissing him. What the-?! He responds back as they start undressing each other, and the camera immediately explains what's going on by constantly cutting to Rose's necklace. So yeah, Victor's the bad guy and did something to the necklace. Dimitri realizes this and tears it off, both guardians coming out of their little sex trance. Rose immediately returns to “we need to save Lissa!”

They check with the guardian watching the front gate, but she says no one has left the ground. The three get in Dimitri's SUV to drive... somewhere? Where are they going? Why wouldn't they go search where Lissa was taken first for clues? Rose sees Christian is hiding in the backseat, but doesn't tell the other guardians. I love when a movie starts throwing any logic out the window so we can have our Big Dumb Ending. How in the world would Christian know to hide in Dimitri's SUV? A scene of him waking up and trying to find Rose would have been helpful, but I guess the movie figured it was much more important having our leads stripping.

Rose NOW uses Lissa-Vision to find Lissa, and hey look, she's tied to a chair in front of Victor. What a shock. He refuses to make eye contact with her as that's the only way to avoid compulsion. I bet you've already guessed his entire plan because at this point the film is just on autopilot.

He was behind the dead animals, as they were a way to test Lissa's healing abilities. Which makes no sense as she wasn't able to heal either, so wouldn't that mean her powers weren't strong enough to heal his disease? He makes more sense when he reveals he used his earth magic to break Rose's ankle to see if Rose could heal that, although I fail to see how healing a bone would mean she could heal whatever the hell Sandovsky's Syndrome is.

Lissa says Rose will find her thanks to their bond, but he says his enchanted necklace will keep her a bit preoccupied.  She asks why didn't he just ask her to heal him, which is a great question. He answers because it'll take multiple sessions to fully heal him, which will ultimately kill her. He says the Moroi need a strong leader, which he can't be because of his disease. Lissa won't help him, so he brings in an air magic Moroi to torture her. The Moroi is blind, so he'll be immune to her compulsion.

Ooh, magic torture! This should be interesting! I wonder how he's going to do it? Violently suck the breath in and out of her body? Blast her eyes with small torrents of air? Use the wind to slowly pull out her finger nails? Oh, lightly blowing on her face? Y-yeah... I guess that works too...

The fuck?  This is supposed to be dramatic and tension filled and it's a guy freaking BLOWING ON HER FACE!  This causes Lissa so much pain she relents and heals Victor, passing out in the process. I really wish I could have seen this in theaters now, there is NO WAY the audience didn't burst into laughter during this scene.  The SUV arrives outside Victor's house, Dimitri and the female guardian going inside to beat everyone up. Rose, who he stupidly believed would stay in the car, takes Christian and sneaks inside to find Lissa.

The princess is doing just fine on her own though, as she uses compulsion to escape the house because for some reason no one thought it'd be a good idea to blindfold her. Hmm. When they kidnapped her they blindfolded her, but no... let's just leave her alone in a room with a single guard and hope she plays fair.  Outside, Lissa runs into two psi-hounds which are giant menacing dogs with evil eyes. Victor watches this from a video feed, telling his sidekick they won't attack her unless he says so. Lissa runs, but her way is blocked by a helicopter that lands in front of her. Sure, why not?

Rose arrives and beats up the pilot, but then Victor arrives and shoots Christian in the stomach. Before he can shoot Rose, Dimitri jumps him and handcuffs him. Victor sics the psi-hounds on Lissa in retaliation, but Christian uses his powers to engulf them in flames which causes them to run away. Lissa tells Rose she needs to save Christian but her powers are spent from healing Victor, so Rose offers her neck. Lissa chows down and saves her boyfriend, everyone passing out. I've never seen an action climax so boring it put all the heroes to sleep, but here we are.

Later, Olga meets with Rose in her office. She says Victor will be transferred to the “royal court prison” for trial while the Dashkov family is coming to pick up Natalie. She gives Rose another telegram from her mother and hot damn that got there in a hurry! It's been maybe a couple hours tops since the “battle” with Victor, so somehow Rose's mom heard about all this, sent a telegram that must have arrived with Moroi magic because- ah, nevermind. What's it say? I'm sure something REALLY epic and important since it defied the laws of time and space to arrive at the academy.

“Proud. Mom.”. Oh.

Rose talks to Dimitri in the hallway afterward about what happened to them, but he says it was just the necklace and he has no feelings in her. She is all smiles as she says she doesn't believe him. Olga walks up to them, saying Victor wants to speak to Rose about being shadow-kissed. I can't put into words how awful she delivers that sentence. Dimitri says no way, but Rose tells him he's not the boss of her and she's suddenly very angry at him. Character consistency, this movie has none.

Rose goes into the holding cells to see him, and immediately starts talking about Dimitri liking her because that's THE most important thing going on here. Victor makes fun of her for this, and I'm pretty sure Victor is just Daniel Waters's author avatar at this point, mocking how all these teen girls put their relationships over everything else. But Victor goes on to console her that the charm couldn't have worked if Dimitri didn't have feelings for her in the first place.

She THEN asks about shadow-kissed, Victor telling her there's no way Rose could have survived the car accident. We see a flashback of Lissa crawling over to heal Rose as Victor narrates this is what awakened her powers, as she used them to heal Rose and create their bond.

As Victor talks, we can see the prison guards behind Rose being attacked. Victor tells Rose she's been kissed by the shadows, as she crossed over to the other side before being brought back to life by Lissa. Rose finally notices the last guard dying, as we see Natalie is the killer. She is now a strigoi, revealed to have been working with her father the entire time. She killed the fox and the cat, and killed Ray after the dance to become a strigoi. This leads to this CHARMING exchange:

Natalie: Killing him was a lot more fun than losing my virginity to him would've been.

Rose: And with a lot more blood.

God. You stay classy Vampire Academy! Rose and Natalie fight as Victor escapes. Rose uses the UV light she got earlier to blind her, but finds she doesn't have the willpower to kill her former friend. Victor is about to leave via elevator when Dimitri emerges from it, knocking him out. Geez Victor is a worthless villain. Dimitri then attacks Natalie, Rose holding her captive while he stakes her to kill her.

The next night Rose meets with Lissa and Christian, where Rose FINALLY gets her best friend to high five her. WOW, WHAT AN EPIC CHARACTER ARC! This was so worth sitting through the movie for!

Tatiana holds another assembly to say how worthless Lissa is, but the princess cuts her off. She declares spirit as her magic, as well as the fact she's dating Christian. I'm shocked she didn't announce she was dating him before her declaration. She then goes on to give what I'm almost positive is the exact same speech Tina Fey gave at the end of Mean Girls about how everyone in the school needs to be nice to each other. Everyone bursts into applause, but sadly it doesn't start off with a single person clapping and then everyone joining in. Come on, Vampire Academy! Are you even trying?!

Later Rose catches up to Dimitri, who is training outside again. This movie is too hard to make a drinking game for because there's like a million things to choose from, but if you did a shot every time there was a training scene you'd be in the hospital by now getting your stomach pumped.

Rose asks why he lied about his feelings for her, and he answers because if he fell in love with Rose he wouldn't be able to do his job because he'd worry about protecting Rose instead of his Moroi. This makes Rose tear up, saying his reasons for not loving her just make her love him more. So she LOVES him now, eh? Based off what, exactly? He barely talked to her during their training sessions and when he did it was just to berate her about this or that.

Rose asks him to kiss her one last time, which he says is a bad idea. She begs him, so he goes in to kiss her and she finally slams him to the ground. I was almost going to give her a point for this clever ruse, but then she ruins it with a HORRIBLY DATED Gladiator reference.

“Are you not entertained?!”

No Vampire Academy, NO I AM NOT.

The filmmakers wisely knew NO ONE IN EXISTENCE would sit through the credits, so they put the stinger after this scene. The camera pans way out to a cave full of Ms. Karp and a legion of strigoi, the former teacher hissing “soon”. Sadly the movie doesn't end with her jumping out at the camera like it should of, instead it just ends on a shot of the hundreds of strigoi looking bored.

Cue the credits, set to a cover of “Bela Lugosi's Dead” by Chvrches. Well, the movie did have one of the better soundtracks I've heard in awhile at least.

This was a bit of a mess, wasn't it? And by that I mean the single worst movie of 2014 so far. The biggest problem it had absolutely no idea what kind of movie it wanted to be. It started off as an on-the-run movie, then turned into a straight up high school popularity drama, then shifted to the world's lamest mystery that wouldn't have been worthy of a Scooby-Doo episode, before it finally decided it should be a villain with a master plan movie.

Ironically, the villain was straight out of a Scooby-Doo episode with all the key plot points: lots of red herrings pointing to the openly mean and/or shady person, the villain hiding out in plain sight by helping our heroes, and his plan was ultimately foiled by a bunch of meddling teenagers.

While it was painfully obvious that Victor was going to be the villain almost immediately thanks to him being super nice as well as Gabriel Byrne, I will freely admit the twist of Natalie being in cahoots with him did surprise me. It's obvious it retrospect because they go out of their way to say how she worships her father and will do anything for him, but it was a good reveal at the time. I also like how they killed her off rather than finding a way for her to stick around to be a recurring villain.

What else was good? Lucy Fry, who played Lissa, was pretty good. She definitely had some cringe worthy acting moments like when she made herself the leader of the Plastics, but overall she was likeable and I actually cared about her which is certainly a rarity in these kind of movies.

What was bad then? EVERYTHING ELSE. Take your pick: the acting, the story, the special effects, the pacing, the editing... yeah, this is the pure definition of NO ONE working on this giving a fuck. They had a contract and they were going to fulfill it, dammit. I'm guessing Mark Waters just turned on his camera and filmed while he googled if Hollywood is making a live action Teen Titans movie while Daniel Waters took the Mean Girls script and did Control + F to replace “Plastics” with “Moroi”.

I want to single out Joely Richardson for her SPECTACULARLY bad acting here, as it takes a nearly immeasurable amount of not giving a fuck to outdo Olga Kurylenko in a movie. Richardson is so good too, it's just heartbreaking.

As I mentioned before, this movie had a budget of thirty million dollars and it barely made half that back. It came out in theaters on February 7, 2014 and hit home video May 20, 2014. This is what we call A BOMB. This won't deter Hollywood though, the recently released Divergent was a massive hit and the third Hunger Games movie due out later this year is poised to shatter box office records, so get ready to see tons more of these poorly done young adult movies.

Yet another movie I can't recommend because it's too bad to be that special type of entertaining, and I'm sure if you're a fan of the books this is just going to piss you off because it butchered them. Speaking of that, let's see how this movie scored on my Twilight Meter, as previously seen on my Mortal Instruments: City of Bones review.

Step One. Start off with a completely bland boring uninteresting dark haired young woman who starts off as nothing special. She has to be a loner who only has one interest/hobby in her life.

Well, Rose certainly did have a personality when compared to the monotone heroines we usually get stuck with. Granted it was a terribly annoying one that had you screaming “Shut up shut up shut up!” every time she opened her mouth to crack a “funny” one liner, but at least it was something. No points awarded for a score of 0/7.

Step Two. She will have a single male best friend that she only thinks of “as a friend or like a brother”. He, of course, pines for her daily to love him like he secretly loves her.

Why hello there Mason! How's the Friend Zone treatin' ya? +1 point for a score of 1/7.

Step Three. Have her suddenly become the most important person in the world through a combination of the supernatural, a hidden talent she didn't know she had, or an indomitable will.

Rose wasn't the most important person in the world, hell she wasn't even the most important person in the story. This was a nice change of pace where the heroine wasn't out to save the world, but instead was trying to save her best friend. No points awarded for a score of 1/7.

Step Four. Make sure she only has one parent, usually a mother but that's flexible. The other parent is gone either through divorce, death, or mysteriously vanishing when she was young.

Whoops, hit this one dead on. Rose only has a mother, and her father is mysteriously absent. +1 point for a score of 2/7.

Step Five. Throw her into a Love Triangle with two men, one of whom is the aforementioned best friend she's known her entire life and the other an enigmatic stranger she instantly prefers. Bonus if the stranger is introduced saving her life.

They teased a love triangle for a minute, but Rose stomped on it multiple times by not having a single feeling for Mason. I really admire their restraint here, because they had all the elements in place including Dimitri saving Rose's life. No points awarded for a score of 2/7.

Step Six. Add a villain. The villain isn't important at all so we don't need any kind of development for him. In fact, the more faceless and generic he is the better because that's just taking time away from the Love Triangle.

The villain was definitely borderline non-existent in this one. We weren't even sure there WAS a villain until about 3/4ths in the movie. +1 point for a score of 3/7.

Step Seven. Make sure whatever world changing events going on in the story are minimized so they can take a backseat to the Love Triangle.

While there weren't world changing events or a Love Triangle going on in the story, the events that were going on WERE thrown on the back burner so the story could focus on Rose and Dimitri. For crying out loud, Dimitri liking her is the very first thing Rose brought up when talking to our master villain. +1 point for a final score of 4/7.

0: Congratulations! Your fictional world is so original and creative it's almost guaranteed it'll get ignored by mainstream audiences!

1 – 2: A very nice breath of fresh air, it was great to see a unique spin on well worn material.

3 – 4: I feel like I've seen this a million times already, and will see it a million more.

5 – 6: Seriously, why even bother making this when you should have just been working on new features for Twilight: The Tenth Anniversary Blu-Ray?

7: You should be expecting a call from Stephenie Meyer's lawyers ANY minute now.