The Vampire Diaries - Thicker than Water, part 1

Indie director Phil Messerer is the new Joss Whedon. 'The Vampire Diaries' has won countless awards for matching anything the industry big boys can do. Give him a budget now... he's going to suprise you!

Buy The Vampire Diaries - Thicker than water Part 1 on Amazon. You won't find it on any cinema screens or in any shops - this is indie film at its underground finest!

We all know that Joss Whedon and Peter Jackson are cinematic gods. Any naysayers? Didn't think so. And what do they both have in common? Cinema is in their blood. They've been working the funny moving pictures in the little black box for years. They've seen films as a way to make stories, not money. They're humble. They're renaissance men, fascinated by stories, writing, directing, camera tricks - even acting and going for tiny little cameo roles. They're not put off by lack of budget. Peter Jackson's shoestring-budget 'Bad Taste' stands up today, so long as you find heroes drinking a communal bowl of zombie sick vastly amusing, which we do. And Joss Whedon dealt with the creativity freeze of the writer's strike to create his very own internet series Doctor Horrible, which is such a brilliant musical about supervillians that we wouldn't dream of calling him a dirty strike-breaking scab.

And why do we start our review with a love-letter to two directors that essentially have nothing to do with this? Because we want to hammer home a new breed of film maker, who understands that oak trees grow from little acorns. The indie film maker, who places love above budget and delivers a film of such quality that everyone is talking about it, and the film zaibatsus and monster-national TV networks are left wringing their hands.

This is the age of the internet. This is a world where everyone is downloading movies and pretending they're not, where cinema attendance numbers are vastly dropping, where megastar actors can't expect to be paid X million dollars a movie forever. This is a world where indie films are on the rise.

Indie films are DIY cinematic jewels made with love and guts, not money. They start off with a person with a dream who isn't afraid to write, direct and produce their own movie from scratch if they have to, creating their own youTube movie trailers, spreading the love through internet word of mouth.

This is also the age of the vampire. Thanks to Buffy and Twilight and True Blood, vampires are bloody everywhere. Vampires are in the air, on the stairs, on your clothes and in your hair. You can't even go to the bleedin' supermarket without tripping over a vampire.

Combine the age of the internet, the age of the vampire and indie film makers at their best, and what do you get?

Thicker Than Water: The Vampire Diaries, Part 1

Phil Messerer is a writer/director after my own heart: Character-led story comes first, cinematic beauty is considered a vital part of telling the story, and the dialogue is a seamless succession of sparkling, elegant one-liners and big thoughts on deep issues cleverly wrapped up in little chicken mcNugget bite-size pieces.

'The Vampire Diaries' tells the tale of the Baxters, a classic dysfunctional family coming to terms with the fact that their daughter is turning into a vampire. You have the goth girl, Lara who has a shrine to Anne Rice in her bedroom (Eilis Cahill), the gay toker brother who prefers to live in his weird little scientific basement ((Michael Strelow), the immigrant mother who's bitter about never having achieved glory as an ice skater (Jo Jo Hristova) and the absent dad. Oh, and you have gothy Lara's preppy twin sister Helen Baxter(Devon Dionne). And, as director Phil Messerer points out, 'Helen Baxter' was chosen as a name because it has 'Hell and back' in it...

Any myth stands the test of time better if it's given an M.O.T. and an update, and Messerer turns the elegant decadence of Anne Rice's vampire myth on its head. In a ritual born of sibling rivalry that goes horribly wrong, preppy Helen has all the blood sucked out of her body by Mayan magic and slowly becomes a vampire. It's all very difficult for goth-girl Lara, of course - she's the one who's the Anne Rice fangirl, after all. But Lara is a good girl at heart. Just because she has teenage spats with her sister, she never actually meant to turn her into the living undead.

The character-driven plot of Vampire Diaries takes the premise that whenever a bad thing happens to us, we always seek to normalise it - to make it part of the tapestry of our lives. And this indie film looks at a typical family's attempts to take the horrific unknown of a preppy vampire daughter and turn it into something manageable and everyday.

Okay, so you have a vampire in your family. What do you do? Stake her through the heart? Kick her out in the street? What do you feed her? How do you hide it? Is this going to affect her popularity at school? Is this, finally, a way to deal with her unsuitable boyfriends?

'The Vampire Diaries' drags vampire myth, kicking and screaming, somewhere it's never been before. Suburbia. And the strange thing is, it seems to feel at home there.

I'd like to think that Phil Messerer has put the bite on the film industry. He's the new Joss Whedon... If he can achieve something like the Vampire Diaries with no money and nothing but talent, a good script, a fine cast of actors and a lot of indie film energy, we can't wait to see what he can achieve with a budget!

Thicker Than Water has won the Gold Kahuna Award in the 2009 Honlulu International Film Festival, Best Director & Best Music in the 2007 B-Movie Fest (9 nominations), Best Art Direction in the 2008 Action On Film International Festival and an Official Selection of the 2009 Bram Stoker Film Festival , 2008 Hell's Half Mile Film and Music Festival, 2008 Washington D.C. International Horror Film Festival, 2008 NewFilmMakers NY and a bunch of other stuff. Seriously. A bunch of indie film awards all pointing at the same film can't be wrong.

Warner Bros, HBO - see this and weep. Or give this man some money for a bigger budget. Phil Messerer is going to go a long, long way...

Buy The Vampire Diaries - Thicker than water Part 1

Sign a petition to make The Vampire Diaries: Thicker Than Water available on NetFlix

Find out more on the official website www.bloodjunky.com

More Book, Film and Comic reviews

• More: Book reviews, comic reviews, movie reviews
• Join us: Twitter | Myspace | Facebook | Messageboard
  

Mission statement

Mookychick believes that climbing trees and riding giant turtles is more fun and girly than worrying about make-up. But if you want to worry about make-up instead of turtles? Fine by us. Be you feminist, kitten, punk, emo, indie, goth, witch, vegan, horror junky, intellectual, christian goth, corset queen, geek, unicorn, sea monkey... be you into alternative style, alternative health, spirituality, comics, manga, j-pop, harajuku or jock culture... we will always love you.