TL;DR: The vampires are stylish, the cast is talented but wasted, and the plot makes zero sense.
The Cast Deserves Better
Let’s start with the obvious here, the actors.
Suvari as Elizabeth, the vampire leader and Countess Bathory–type, looks good doing her thing, and for a moment you almost believe she could carry the film, while India Eisley, playing her best friend Joan, shows flashes of personality, but those flashes get buried under confusing character choices.
Helena (Sarah Dumont) and Chuck (Mark Boone Jr.) mostly sit in the bar doing nothing interesting, which is worse than them being boring, because they actively make you question why they exist.
The human side of the story, or what passes for it, also introduces Cora Armstrong (Dichen Lachman), a vampire hunter with the potential to be the main character - she narrates parts of the story like she’s in a noir detective movie, complete with lozenge-chewing and deadpan voiceover - and while Lachman is good, her voice feels oddly detached, almost like it was recorded separately in a booth somewhere.
Her partner, Alexis (Rosa Salazar), spends most of the film being an afterthought, aside from a late cemetery fight that finally gives her something to do, and Tom Berenger, as her boss Albert, delivers lines like he’s under duress, staring at a cheap monitor and somehow making every instruction sound like a threat - it’s hard to watch talented actors flounder because the story refuses to support them, because these are capable people stuck in a muddle of missed opportunities and confusing plot threads.
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Vampires That Work Too Hard
Elizabeth and her crew are supposed to come across as terrifying, stylish, and alluring, but what we get is a feeling of they are playing dress up like children do, and they also waste their time swiping through dating apps instead of doing what vampires are supposed to do - hunting.
There’s also a bizarre system of rules about which victims get priority, but it makes no sense at all, because sometimes they kill for fun, sometimes for “maintenance,” and sometimes for scheduled app kills - the logic was lost on me.
We also get a thread of adolescent thrill-seeking that could have been funny - vampires acting like obnoxious teenagers - but it gets abandoned quickly for moodiness, and I actually laughed out loud the one time a vampire tried something gross or reckless, only to realize it was actually the high point of the film.
My bad.
Humans and Horror
The human characters are equally frustrating too.
Luke, played by Tyrese Gibson, is set up for a date by his well-meaning but utterly flat friends, Randall (Stephen Dorff) and Malcolm (Lochlyn Munro), where their chemistry is nonexistent, and their scenes feel like filler, more about having recognizable faces on screen than advancing the story or making them actually matter.
Cora, on the other hand, has potential, - she’s competent, capable, and could have carried the movie - but the story insists on delaying her confrontation with the vampires until the last ten minutes, and even then, the fights are weak.
Meanwhile, Alexis finally gets her moment, but it’s almost accidental, making the rest of the movie feel like a waste of both her character and your patience.
Missed Opportunities and Bad Ideas
The film is full of ideas that could have been watchable enough I think, if they had made sense, as the ideas are OK on paper, but they build any tension, humor, or intrigue - Sherman bounces from one random scene to the nextm Elizabeth and Joan’s friendship teases depth, only for it to vanish without payoff, and the masquerade night, where Cora shows up in a costume reminiscent of the Mask of Red Death, is visually fantastic but ultimately meaningless.
Even the gore and horror elements feel like they’re trying too hard, where we have one vampire who decapitates people with giant scissors, and another just sits around waiting - the story doesn’t connect these moments into anything coherent though, and the pacing is all over the place with long stretches of boredom interrupted by short bursts of absurdity.
On the technical side, the movie tries to look stylish - the lighting is moody, the vampires are visually distinct, and there’s a clear effort to make the absinthe bar look good - but no matter how good it looks, the visuals can’t compensate for the story’s failures, because the movie never commits to any single tone - serious, funny, or campy.
Final Thoughts
Watching Vampires of the Velvet Lounge was fairly exhausting, and the cast here deserved better, the vampires deserve better, and frankly, I deserved better.
I can see glimpses of ambition, but they’re scattered, disconnected, and often abandoned before anything can build - the film has style, some good concepts, and actors who can actually act - but it squanders all of it on inconsistent storytelling, random comedy beats, and characters that never reach their potential.