Vampire Sisters

Vampire Sisters is a boisterous guilty pleasure, but because that’s what its creators intended it to be, so it is actually an outrageously entertaining film; I will even heretically declare that it is the unexpected highlight of the Berlinale, or rather the European Film Market. The film is like an enthusiastically hyper-stylised Harry Potter, but with vampires instead of witches, and the target audience is girls instead of boys. Most the of the adult actors can be described as incredibly wooden, but together with the utterly self-indulgent hyper-caricature roles for adults, they form a captivating style that compliments the intentionally off-the-wall narrative and fanatically detailed production design. No one would have expected that a children’s movie about a pair of strikingly different sisters (one a rebellious emo rocker; the other longing to be ordinary) who are half-vampire would be such an admittedly bizarre trip that could elevate clichés and formulas to the level of camp, while also proudly pointing out its own primitiveness and contrivance. The sequence in which an aspect of the plot that had already been made clear long before is presented again after a series of illustrative sequences that spell everything out just so the simpletons will understand becomes a welcome joke, the all-encompassing affectation is surprisingly not annoying but oddly infectious and, when the film’s creators get themselves into a tight spot, they get out of it by tossing off a blatantly crude, Fantozzi-style joke (the farting, blood-sucking worm is somehow not the highlight in this respect). (02/09/2013)