Not a Scary Vampire Flick

Rating: 5/10 (13 November 2015)

To steal from a well-known line: Dying is easy; vampires are hard.
Most folks will be seeking out this movie in search of a good monster movie — unfortunately, the scariest stuff happens before the vampires even enter the picture.
There's a lot to like here: Harvey Keitel and, surprisingly, Quentin Tarantino put in good performances, and there are a lot of great scenes and good writing. But once the movie clicks into vampire mode — which, let's face it, is why we're watching this in the first place — Rodriguez seems to become a directorial zombie.
It's as if he worked so hard on the first half that he was plum too tuckered out to maintain the film's edgy excellence. More than anything, it's a problem of quality control. Everything in the second half suffers due to a steady stream of irregularities and lazy execution.
For example, everyone knows (and the movie acknowledges this) that vampire stories come with certain "rules" — holy water, stakes in the heart, that sort of thing. But here, one person will almost instantly turn into a vampire after a bite in one scene, while another character will have "about an hour" before he changes in a later scene.
The vampires even look different in terms of their makeup from one to another, both as "living" vampires and when they're killed.
All of the inconsistencies pile up on one another until the action devolves into something bordering on camp. Whereas in a truly scary picture you'll be on the edge of your seat wondering when the next attack is coming, here there were scenes where you could literally see vampires in the background sort of dancing in place, waiting for the stars to say their lines before they finally attacked.
Lazy, lazy, lazy.
It's a shame: The goodwill earned by this movie's truly eerie and suspenseful first half is effectively frittered away by the inattention to detail that follows, and not even the clever ending can redeem it.
Unlike some other viewers, I have no problem with the sort of portmanteau thriller/monster-movie construction the filmmakers attempted here. But vampires that aren't frightening? Oh, the horror.