I confess, me and vampire movies have never gotten along.  I’ve grown to hate the Twilight series for its fascination with emo vampires, and most other vampire movies feature overly urbane vampires mincing and emoting about and occasionally sipping blood.  It’s not every day you get the feral vampires of 30 Days of Night or the slow vampire conspiracy of Salem’s Lot or even the “vampires run things now” uniqueness of Daybreakers. But the folks out at IFC–who sent me a review copy of Southern Gothic–want to take a shot at it, and given some of their horror titles (Home Movie jumps out at me like a child’s boogeyman in the night), I have a lot of hope for this one.

Southern Gothic follows Hazel Fortune, a strip club bouncer for whom life has become something of a bother.  And Hazel’s life would be a complete waste if it weren’t for a recent friendship struck with the daughter of a new dancer at the club where Hazel works.  Things are actually looking up, until the girl is kidnapped by Enoch Pitt, a lunatic vampire preacher.  Hazel, now stripped of the last thing that gave his life any meaning at all, runs amok and wades into the vampire horde in a bid to reclaim his only friend from Pitt’s control.

Southern Gothic is actually surprisingly good, at least in parts–the other parts trend a little toward the dull side. A substantial part of the problem is they’re really cranking up the “gothic”, and it winds up doing a LOT of talking in a bid to really project that gothic mood.

However, there’s a lot of innovation here–I don’t believe I’ve ever seen even nominally Christian vampires, let alone vampires that thought they were doing the work of God.  That’s a wrinkle I never thought I’d see, and I should be more upset with them for destroying the mythos (I had the same problem with Twilight) but at the same time I can’t help but be interested by it.  I’m not sure why I’m not–on the surface, they’re the same thing–but the difference here is that this is a bit more believable.  These vampires, after all, don’t sparkle.  They don’t go out in the sun.  They can’t.  But they’re staring down crosses like no tomorrow, and this is a knock against it.

Still though, for the most part, Southern Gothic is a surprisingly entertaining and surprisingly innovative vampire film that has a lot going for it.  It’s broken canon pretty badly and it’s got a tendency to be dull and chatty, but when it gets going, man, does it ever get going.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands Southern Gothic a seven out of ten for being a powerful little horror flick, but not without its problems.